Tracking Canada’s asbestos funding
Fallout from Dangers in the Dust, the mammoth asbestos investigation by the BBC and the Center for Public Integrity/International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, continues. On the ICIJ Global Muckracker blog, Jim Morris details the Canadian Public Health Association’s ongoing effort to detail the financial relationship between a powerful Quebec asbestos lobby and Canada’s Ministry of Natural Resources.
The CPHA’s policy director, James Chauvin, told ICIJ that the institute was “polite” in its responses to inquiries and did send “a pile of technical manuals.” But the manuals shed no light on how C$20 million in federal funds has been spent over the past quarter-century, Chauvin said, and the information wasn’t available on the ministry’s website.
The lobbyists, Montreal’s Chrysotile Institute, have earned Canada the title of “primary booster” of the global asbestos trade. The institute receives both government and industry funds, though the numbers are still fuzzy for both.
If you’ve somehow missed Dangers in the Dust thus far, head over immediately. The infographics alone are worth the price of admission. At the very least, read Brenda Wilson’s summary on the NPR health blog.
List reveals drugs U.S. consumers buy from Canada
On the Los Angeles Times‘ Booster Shots blog, Jeannine Stein has located the Canadian International Pharmacy Association’s list of the top drugs purchased online by American customers in 2010.
The list swings heavily toward treatments for chronic conditions, with Plavix, Advair and Flomax topping the list. As Stein notes, international and online prescriptions are in dubious legal territory, but it’s right in Wikipedia’s wheelhouse and the site can point you to the relevant laws.
By the way, the Canadian International Pharmacy Association is an association of retail pharmacies that sell pharmaceuticals and maintenance medications in 90-day quantities to Canadian and U.S. citizens. The group might be a good source if you are writing about people in the United States buying drugs in Canada. The organization is certainly tracking news coverage of the topic.
Blog tracks Canadian health policy reports
Canadian journalist Carl Meyer has turned reportscanada.ca into a one-stop clearinghouse of policy reports from the Canadian government and non-governmental policy organizations.
The site, a model that journalists around the world could follow, is a deceptively simple site built on a modified Google Blogger platform. All health-related posts are conveniently aggregated here. In a bare-bones style that focuses on keeping things basic and easy to sort, Meyer has cataloged 388 reports since he launched the site in April of 2009.
It’s a brilliant example of how a blog can be turned into a database, and Meyer even takes advantage of the format to generate a nifty Google Map of all his entries. The maps can also be broken down on a city-by-city basis.
Open access to research recognized this week
Filed under: Health journalism, Public records, Studies, Tools
It’s Open Access week! Time to honor the principle that scientific research should be made available for free online immediately upon publication, a principle that’s served health journalists pretty well over the past few years. Universities, government organizations and other groups around the world will celebrate by opening up more information and drawing attention to the principles that drive the open access movement.
Open Access flagship reaches milestone
On Oct. 19, PLoS Medicine, 
a prominent and pioneering open-access journal published by the Public Library of Science, turned five. The Public Library of Science is a nonprofit funded by charging authors publication fees, and by private donors. In addition to PLoS Medicine, it publishes six other journals covering biology and medical science.
PubMed goes Canadian
One of the greatest triumphs of open access has been PubMed Central, in which all NIH-funded research is made available for free, usually within 12 months of publication. Both the U.S. and U.K. have their own PubMed systems, and now Canada’s getting one too. PubMed Central Canada, created by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the National Research Council’s Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information, and the U.S. National Library of Medicine, will take its first steps, launching its manuscript submission system as part of the week’s festivities.
Polls, studies used to compare U.S., Canada care
Filed under: Health care reform, Health data, Hot Health Headline
The Associated Press’ Charmaine Noronha takes another look at the Canadian health care system, focusing on the debate over its effectiveness and on Canadians’ relative satisfaction with their care. Noronha relied on a number of polls and studies to help inform the discussion, including per-capita cost numbers.
Canada’s system provides its citizens with coverage at a much lower per capita cost than the U.S. largely because its single-payer system, in which the government picks up the tab, greatly reduces administrative costs.
According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, per-capita spending for health care in the U.S. was $6,714 in 2006; in Canada, $3,678. The U.S. spent 16 percent of its GDP on health care that year; Canada spent 10 percent.
Canada takes Monsanto, Dow’s word on safety
Filed under: Conflicts of interest, Government, Hot Health Headline
Martin Mittelstaedt of the Toronto Globe and Mail looks into the Canadian government’s approval of “one of the most complicated genetically engineered plants ever designed,” a strain of feed corn stuffed with eight different sets of foreign genes.
The super-corn will resist numerous common pests as well as the popular herbicide Roundup. The problem, Mittlestaedt reports, is that Canadian health agencies never assessed the new plant’s safety and instead relied on the plant’s developers to make sure it was safe.
The health agency said in response to questions from The Globe and Mail that it didn’t have to do so, because it is relying on the two companies making the seeds, agriculture giants Monsanto Co. and Dow AgroSciences LLC, to flag any safety concerns. But the companies haven’t tested the seeds either, because they say they aren’t required to.
Monsanto and Dow have, however, tested each of the eight characteristics individually, a precaution which some experts say doesn’t go far enough and may not detect allergens or other dangerous consequences of mixing so many traits in one place. Likewise, Mittlestaedt says that UN food safety guidelines recommend that the foreign genes be tested in combination as well as independently.
(Hat tip to Andrew Schnieder on Cold Truth)
Why Canada’s system does and doesn’t work
Filed under: Health care reform, Hot Health Headline
Susan Taylor Martin of the St. Petersburg Times explored Canada’s universal health care system, seeking to dispel rumors and misconceptions and explain the good (cheap, efficient) and bad (waiting lists) of a much-debated but rarely explained system. Each Canadian province has its own system, and rates are set through negotiations between medical organizations and local physicians.
The example of Dr. Diane Normandin, in particular, showed the stark contrast in efficiency between the American system and the Canadian one.
She moved to Clearwater, Fla., in 1994 because she thought U.S. doctors had more freedom. But she spent an inordinate amount of time trying to tell whether a patient’s insurance covered visits to a particular lab or specialist.
“You had maybe five minutes with the patient but 20 minutes of paperwork and the ridiculous sorting out of where the patient could go,” said Normandin, who needed six employees to handle the workload. “It was crazy.”
She returned to Canada in 2003 and opened a family practice near Montreal. She now has one employee.
Taylor Martin also tackles the word “socialist” and explains the other factors that go into Canada’s much-maligned waiting lists, as well as attempts being made to decrease those delays.
A sidebar focuses on a Canadian cardiologist who joined a practice in Orlando, Fla., because he thought U.S. doctors had more freedom. He also eventually returned to Canada and is now critical of the U.S. system. Among his criticisms: “He found that American doctors tend to order more testing, partly for fear of being sued but also because ‘patients demand it and doctors and hospitals want to do it because it’s more money.’”
Other stories in the project:
- Part Three: Canada keeps malpractice cost in check
(Hat tip to Investigate West)
Can reader comments be harmful to public health?
Regan Ray raises an interesting question on the Town Hall blog from the Canadian Journalism Project: Should reader comments be moderated more in public health stories?
In an example from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s Web site, a reader complained that the site shouldn’t run a photo of pigs with a FAQ about swine flu. The reader asserts that exposure to pigs isn’t to blame for the current outbreak, even though the FAQ does say that contact with pigs is how the virus is spread.
Ray asks whether there is a danger in readers providing inaccurate information in comments sections and if comments should be rigorously moderated when public safety is at issue.
Canadian hospitals won’t reveal quality measures
Michael Millenson of The Health Care Blog writes that, for a report card comparing Ontario hospitals, most hospitals simply refused to participate.
Last year, the first for the report, just 43 of 136 acute-care hospitals agreed to participate. This year, though, the number of participants plunged 60 percent, to just 17 hospitals, according to a story in Healthcare IT News.
As Nadeem Esmail, director of health system performance studies at the institute and co-author of the report, pointed out, “By refusing to be identified, Ontario hospital administrators are hiding vital information from Ontario taxpayers and patients about the quality of tax-funded healthcare provided in their community.”
Millenson asks, “if it’s taxpayer money, why doesn’t your government require hospitals to report?”
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