Unsealed papers prove Wyeth was behind articles
Filed under: Conflicts of interest, Health journalism, Pharmaceuticals
Court documents show that Wyeth, maker of Premarin and Prempro, was involved in the writing of 26 scientific papers that supported the use of hormone replacement therapy in women, reports Natasha Singer of The New York Times.
The documents linking the pharmaceutical giant to the articles were found by lawyers suing Wyeth and became public at the request of The Times and PLoS Medicine, an open-source medical journal.
The court documents provide a detailed paper trail showing how Wyeth contracted with a medical communications company to outline articles, draft them and then solicit top physicians to sign their names, even though many of the doctors contributed little or no writing. The documents suggest the practice went well beyond the case of Wyeth and hormone therapy, involving numerous drugs from other pharmaceutical companies.
The discovery suggests “the level of hidden industry influence on medical literature is broader than previously known.” A Times graphic shows the process used by Wyeth to get the papers written.
The articles appeared in a range of journals, including The American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, The International Journal of Cardiology and several journals published by Elsevier. The papers, most of them review articles, did not disclose Wyeth’s involvement.
Adriane Fugh-Berman writes about the situation on Speaking of Medicine, the PLoS Medicine community blog and an earlier post details the court request to have the documents unsealed.
Morning shows’ health news called dangerous
HealthNewsReview.org publisher and University of Minnesota Professor Gary Schwitzer writes that, through their ratings, his team has found an unfortunate trend of poor reporting on network morning shows such as ABC’s Good Morning America, NBC’s Today show and the CBS Early Show. In his post, Schwitzer looked at reviews for four popular topics: weight loss, paralysis and spinal injury, cardiovascular disease and new medical technologies. Of the 18 reviewed stories that fit into those four categories, none of them earned a rating of better than two out of five and and more than a quarter of them received no rating points at all.
In his post, Schwitzer catalogs the shows’ worst recurring offenses, writing that they:
- Unquestioningly promote new drugs and new technologies
- Feed the “worried well” by raising unrealistic expectations of unproven technologies that may produce more harm than good
- Fail to ask tough questions
- Make any discussion of health care reform that much more difficult
IOM report details H1N1 resources
Like many organizations, the Institutes of Medicine had an eye on pandemic influenza (and related pandemic diseases) well before H1N1 started making some such fears a reality.
Now, the IOM has assembled relevant flu pandemic research from the past few years in one handy guide (PDF) that focuses on issues that would be particularly useful when preparing for a fast approaching pandemic, including public communication, physical and medical prevention measures, school closings and other ‘outbreak mitigation’ measures, and monitoring.
Pew: Health care again tops week’s media coverage
Filed under: Health care reform, Health journalism, Health policy, Studies
The Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, which monitors 55 news outlets and about 1,300 stories across all media, found that health care coverage again predominated last week, filling 19 percent of the available news space between July 27 and August 2 (5-page pdf). Health care coverage — and more specifically, pontificating and polemicizing about reform issues — was most popular on radio (32 percent) and cable news (30 percent), and those numbers were significantly higher for talk shows. Newspapers, network TV and online outlets devoted less space to health; all three devoted between 11 and 12 percent of their available space or airtime to the subject. The political discussion over reform was, by far, the most popular health topic across all media.
Related
Health care news coverage on the rise
NPR: Reform arguments confuse folks
Filed under: Health care reform, Hot Health Headline
NPR’s Liz Halloran reports that while many understand that the nation’s health system may need to be changed, and that such change won’t be cheap, Americans are a bit bamboozled by the “remote, technical discussion” over the specifics of health care reform. Halloran talks to pollsters and public relations professionals who agree that more transparency and better communication is necessary.
One PR consultant said the problem appeared to lie in the administration’s all-or-nothing approach. Polls indicate that, while a slight majority opposes revamping the health care system, each specific reform issue enjoys majority support. As Halloran found, that would seem to indicate that the president’s reform push may have been more successful had he broken it down into smaller, easy-to-understand issues like cost containment and insurance portability.
Kaiser tool compares health reform proposals
The Kaiser Family Foundation has put together a thorough, handy tool for comparing various health care reform proposals, one which can sort by 11 different plans and 17 topics.
Want to know how the plan advanced by Sen. Bernie Sanders stacks up to President Barack Obama’s plan in terms of cost containment, long-term care and subsidies to individuals? Just click the requisite boxes, click “generate comparison” and your questions will be answered with a neat little table explaining the salient features of each plan side-by-side in the health care version of plain English.
Decline in science journalism hurts health reporting
Filed under: Health journalism, Hot Health Headline
In The Nation, Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum assess the state of science journalism and seek to answer “how did it come to this?” and “what happens next?” Their sober and engaging account takes readers from the glory days of moon landings and Carl Sagan’s wildly popular Cosmos series to today, when science journalism has become a niche market served by specialized outlets and polemic-driven blogs. While The Nation as a whole embraces a certain political position, the report comes across as forceful but even-handed.
Their evidence includes observations like “From 1989 to 2005, the number of US papers featuring weekly science-related sections shrank from ninety-five to thirty-four” and “Just one minute out of every 300 on cable news is devoted to science and technology, or one-third of 1 percent.”
Part of the problem, Mooney and Kirshenbaum say, is that today’s relatively inexperienced journalists (the experienced ones were too expensive for the tastes of profit-driven media conglomerates) chase from one hot new story to the next without contextualizing anything, leaving readers rudderless, confused and exasperated. Likewise, the writers say, in an attempt to be impartial (and perhaps as a result of a lack of prior knowledge in the field), reporters inject balance where it may not be necessary, giving equal time to contradictory and widely discredited opinions.
FDA opposes antibiotics overuse in animal feeding
Citing the dangers of drug-resistant microbes, newly appointed Food and Drug Administration chief Joshua Sharfstein testified against the over-use of antibiotics by animal feeding operations (12-page PDF). Sharfstein said drug-resistant bacteria make up 70 percent of the approximately 2 million infections caught annually in American hospitals, leading to a high cost, both financially and in terms of human life.
In particular, Sharfstein spoke against the use of antibiotics in small, constant doses for growth promotion. Instead, he said the FDA wants them to be administered only for treatment purposes and with a veterinarians supervision.
Reform coverage that raises important questions
Filed under: Government, Health care reform, Health journalism, Hot Health Headline
AHCJ president Trudy Lieberman, writing for CJR.org, points to several stories about health care reform that raise important questions about whether health care reform will mean anything to most people.
She cites a Kaiser News Service story that looks at who will be able to use the public plan option, a column at Huffington Post about “age rating” and a New York Times story about what health insurance is going to cost consumers.
DoD campaigns against stigma of depression, PTSD
The Defense Centers of Excellence for Psychological Health and Traumatic Brain Injury’s new Real Warriors campaign is designed to aid soldiers with what they seem to see as the three r’s of military mental health: resilience, recovery and re-integration.
The RealWarriors.net site not only directs soldiers to additional resources, but also shares anecdotes from their peers and provides them with guidelines for good mental health, both in combat and out of it.
The effort, launched in May, even has a Twitter account.
(Hat tip to Arline Kaplan of the Psychiatric Times)
Related:
Bay Area panel on veterans’ health highlights untold stories
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Spend a week at the CDC studying public health, meeting sources. Apply for the AHCJ-CDC Health Journalism Fellowships today!
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