Author sees need for more drug safety info for elderly
Writing a guest blog item for Scientific American, AHCJ member Laura Newman profiled the case of her mother to argue that health regulators and Congress should “back drug safety initiatives in the elderly,” noting that “people over age 75 are under-represented in clinical trials, leaving physicians in the dark as to safety.”
The particular case involved an often-prescribed drug to treat high cholesterol:
Even as my mother was in crisis, doctors told me that they were astounded that such a high-dose statin was given to a low-risk, frail, elderly women. By low-risk, she had no history of cardiovascular disease and she met the widely used and time-tested Framingham Risk Factor criteria. She did not smoke, had low-level, well-controlled hypertension, but a high cholesterol. I sensed deterioration months before she was diagnosed with rhabdomyolysis.
Her mother died within eight weeks after doctors diagnosed her with rhabdomyolysis, a life-threatening condition, and acute kidney failure.
Blame trucks, not just factories, for industrial pollution in Seattle
Spurred by a few recent studies, InvestigateWest’s Robert McClure and KCTS-Seattle’s Jenny Cunningham launched an investigation to figure out just what has made Puget Sound’s air some of the most toxic in the nation. Their work centered on the heavily polluted, industrial Seattle neighborhoods of Georgetown and South Park, where residents “face an onslaught of toxic airborne pollutants that according to a recent study exceed regulatory caution levels by up to 30 times.”
Where is this toxic air coming from? The answer may surprise you. The majority of the pollution, government regulators and scientists say, comes not from the large concentration of industrial facilities in South Park and Georgetown. Rather, it’s from the cars, trucks and buses whizzing by these neighborhoods – especially those with diesel engines. Fumes from ships in Elliott Bay and the Duwamish, as well as diesel-powered equipment at the Port of Seattle and elsewhere, add to the toxic mix. In the fall and winter, wood smoke from fireplaces becomes a significant contributor.
The problems here have implications in other neighborhoods, too: Anywhere people are living close to major roadways, they’re likely breathing unhealthy air, studies show. Anyone living within about 200 yards of a major roadway is thought to be at increased risk, with the first 100 yards being the hottest pollution zone.
Watch the full episode. See more KCTS 9 Connects.
Reporters looking to localize the story will probably want to scroll first to the “The Effects” section, which gets into the practical science of how this sort of pollution takes its toll. You’ll probably also enjoy Cunningham’s sidebar on what she learned in reporting the piece (it’s at the bottom of the page). If you’re also looking to understand the regional and national regulatory structure which governs diesel and related emissions, the “Solutions” subheading is also worth a pit stop.
For more on the big picture issues impacting health in South Seattle, see Carol Smith’s recent piece on the related Superfund site.
Baby’s death illustrates how health IT can introduce complexity, error to system
Filed under: Health care reform, Hospitals, Hot Health Headline, Pharmaceuticals
Chicago Tribune reporters Judith Graham and Cynthia Dizikes explore the pitfalls of health information technology through the story of an infant boy who survived despite being born months early and weighing just 1.5 pounds, only to be killed by a sodium chloride overdose when a pharmacy tech entered information into the wrong field of his electronic medical record.
Photo by Christiana Care via Flickr
The tech’s fatal clerical error was compounded by disabled alarms on a compounding machine, incorrect labeling on an IV bag and an ignored lab test. The heart of the errors, the reporters write, seems to be that all the different systems involved don’t communicate.
Almost all medication requests at Advocate are transmitted by a doctor’s keystroke to the hospital pharmacy’s drug-dispensing system. But in this case, there was no electronic connection with the automated compounding system that prepared the IV bag for baby Burkett, a specialized device that handles low-volume, highly individualized orders.
So a technician transcribed the order by hand, and an error was introduced.
Electronic communication gaps are common at large hospitals, which typically use upward of 50 to 100 different information systems at their facilities, with different technologies used in emergency rooms, labs, pharmacies and other medical departments, said Ross Koppel, a sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania who studies health information technologies.
“To some degree these systems talk to each other, but mostly they don’t, so hospitals have to design custom-made software ‘bridges’ to make this happen,” Koppel said. With each jury-rigged software solution comes the potential for new software bugs, transcription errors and other problems.
Apply to lead AHCJ’s resources for covering aging
The Association of Health Care Journalists seeks freelance assistance in building helpful and dynamic web pages for fellow journalists covering issues surrounding aging.
This year-to-year commitment would include writing tip sheets for journalists, summarizing key issues, webcasting short interviews with top experts, and identifying good story examples and important dates for journalists. This writer would work with AHCJ’s Web editor to encourage reader interaction and should be willing to share knowledge at AHCJ events. Experience in covering aging a must. Multimedia experience a plus. Read more …
Journal Sentinel details public health investigation into tainted alcohol wipes
Last week we shared the story of how MSNBC.com reporter JoNel Aleccia uncovered the FDA’s failure to take action on contaminated products manufactured by a Wisconsin company.
Shanoop and Sandra Kothari of Houston claim tainted alcohol prep wipes led to the death of their son, Harrison Kothari, 2. (Photo courtesy of MSNBC.com)
One couple believes alcohol prep pads used on their son were tainted with a bacterium, leading to his death. Aleccia shared with AHCJ members how she covered each step of the story, including what documents were useful and how she got them, to find that the FDA had known about problems in the manufacturer’s plant as early as 2009.
Now, Raquel Rutledge and Rick Barrett of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel have written a detailed narrative about the FDA’s oversight of the Triad Group and H&P Industries, as well as the death of 2-year-old Harry Kothari and illnesses at the Children’s Hospital in Aurora, Colo.
Their narrative tells of the public health investigation, with FDA investigators visiting the factory day after day for weeks, children in Colorado getting sick and epidemiologists trying to find the source, the role of purchasing groups, Kothari’s death and the FDA’s heavily redacted inspection reports.
Two new resources for covering health reform
Filed under: Health care reform, Health journalism, Tools
There are two more resources to share with you from two of health journalisms’ ever-helpful friends, the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Alliance for Health Reform.
What questions do you have about health reform and how to cover it?
Joanne Kenen is AHCJ’s health reform topic leader. She is writing blog posts, tip sheets, articles and gathering resources to help our members cover the complex implementation of health reform. If you have questions or suggestions for future resources on the topic, please send them to joanne@healthjournalism.org.
Kaiser has started posting on its site a series called “Notes on Health Insurance and Reform. Written by Larry Levitt, senior vice president for special initiatives and senior adviser to the president at the Foundation, and Gary Claxton, vice president and director of the health care marketplace project.
They are both very good at tackling all those complicated regulatory and insurance issues that some of us may have just a few itsy bitsy questions about. The posts are short, and clear, very helpful. Two of the initial posts cover topics we’ve addressed here too on Covering Health (the high risk pool program and aspects of the exchanges). Here’s a link to the RSS feed, too.
The Alliance is adding another layer to its online sourcebook, updating the reference book pages with relevant local news stories from around the country. You can click on the sourcebook pages in the table of contents, choose a chapter (here’s the one on health reform) and you’ll see the local news stories on the right hand side of the website. Or you can sign up in the email alerts section of www.allhealth.org (which is how I get them) or naturally, there’s a Twitter feed. We’ll take a look from time to time at some of those local stories and see what lessons they hold for health care reporters elsewhere.
Battle against childhood obesity is complicated
Maureen O’Hagan and her colleagues at The Seattle Times have put together a sprawling package of stories on the fight against childhood obesity in their new series, “Feeling the Weight.” We’ll break it down story-by-story.
Kids battle the lure of junk food
Local agencies are spending millions to provide healthy alternatives to Seattle-area youth, but they — to say nothing of the youth themselves — are faced with a seemingly insurmountable deluge of tasty treats that tempt teens at every turn.
State still seeks winning strategy against childhood obesity
For a decade, Washington’s anti-obesity strategy has focused on providing kids with access to health alternatives.
So far, the results are discouraging. A push to put more fresh produce in poor neighborhoods’ corner stores, for instance, is struggling. And recent studies suggest the proliferation of farmers markets has done little to change diets or behavior. The number of overweight and obese kids continues to climb.
In other words, we might be spending a whole lot of money on efforts that miss the mark.
How to help your kids lose weight healthfully
The trick, she writes, is to focus on healthy behavior rather than on weight loss.
Parents stand between kids and junk food
O’Hagan’s profiles of parents of obese children shatter a few stereotypes and illustrate just how complex the issue is.
What readers had to say about childhood-obesity topic
Readers weighed in with advice, criticism, observations and more.
Related
Covering Obesity: A Guide for Reporters
The prospect of covering such a broad, engaging and important topic as obesity can be overwhelming. This guide, supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, is designed to help journalists cover a wide range of stories, whether writing on deadline or researching a multipart series. It offers assistance on calculating body mass index, finding obesity statistics on the state level, gauging the quality of school district wellness policies, finding innovative school nutrition policies and much more.
Beat reporter uncovers FDA’s failure to take action on contaminated products
Filed under: Government, Public health, Public records
What happens when health care products that are supposed to protect against infection and illness turn out to be contaminated with potentially deadly bacteria?
Shanoop and Sandra Kothari of Houston claim tainted alcohol prep wipes led to the death of their son, Harrison Kothari, 2. (Photo courtesy of MSNBC.com)
Even worse, what happens when the federal agency that’s supposed to oversee the safety of the products concludes that shoddy sterilization and known contamination don’t pose “an imminent health hazard?”
JoNel Aleccia, an MSNBC.com health reporter, unraveled the dual threads of human harm and regulatory mistakes.
In this article, she shares with AHCJ members how she covered each step of the story as it unfolded, including what documents were useful and how she got them.
Series, inquest illuminate Canada’s pill problem
Filed under: Hot Health Headline, Pharmaceuticals
Writing for the reader-funded site rabble.ca with the help of a Canadian Institutes for Health journalism award, Ann Silversides is devoting a four-part series to Canada’s prescription drug problem, declaring the country to be a “world leader in prescription drug abuse.” Canada’s pill problem hasn’t hit the headlines with the vehemence it has in the states, but Silversides says evidence points to Canadian drug abuse that’s every bit as damaging as what’s happening south of their border.
Photo by jypsygen via Flickr.In the U.S., prescription opioids have been the leading cause of unintentional overdose deaths — far surpassing cocaine and heroin — since about 2001. The same is true in Canada, if the statistics from Ontario hold true for the rest of the country. (There is a striking lack of research in the area of prescription drug misuse in Canada, especially about the progression from use to abuse of these drugs.)
Yet in 2008, Canada had the highest rate per capita consumption of oxycodone in the world, surpassing even the United States, according figures from the International Narcotics Control Board.
The second installment in the series zeroes in on a specific Ontario inquest into two opiate overdose deaths, one which promises to shine a bright light on the nation’s broader struggle with the prescription drug abuse epidemic. Other articles in the series:
- Prescription opiate abuse now a public health crisis in Ontario
- Fractured health-care system sets scene for drug deaths
Stark reflects on health journalism in U.S., Europe
The standards of health reporting in the United States are higher than ever before, according to AHCJ Vice President Karl Stark.
Karl Stark
Stark, the health and science editor at The Philadelphia Inquirer, is in England for “Health in the Headlines,” a European conference on health journalism co-sponsored by AHCJ and Coventry University.
While there, he was a guest on “FT Science with Clive Cookson,” a Financial Times podcast.
Stark said this is a time of great opportunity and great foment in U.S. health journalism. When asked about covering pharmaceutical companies, Stark acknowledged that is a challenge and requires training to penetrate and learn the language.
Stark used an analogy about sports preferences in the United States (high scoring) and Europe (low scoring) to explain the differences in how people in the two places view health care.
It’s worth listening to Stark’s segment; it’s about six and half minutes long at the beginning of the podcast.
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Awards for Excellence in Health Care JournalismDeadline: Feb. 3
- How I did it: Falsified charts in nursing homes linked to patient care
- Access Denied: Looking at a lack of health care availability
- Transparency & medical errors: Public reporting of patient harm is a potent force
- Focus on freelancing: Tips for buying liability insurance
- Why do some patients get stuck in hospitals for weeks, months?
- Investigate health professionals and the boards that regulate them
- Presidents of AHCJ, SPJ call for more openness from Obama administration
