Lack of vaccination, awareness worsen UK flu season
Filed under: Europe, Government, Hot Health Headline, Public health
The Guardian’s Denis Campbell and Sarah Boseley report that a drop in vaccination rates and a lack of public awareness has made this flu season worse than it should have been, and that there is potential for the NHS to be “inundated” with flu cases. The story has spread quickly in the UK, and may be providing just the sort of public awareness campaign that the reporters found was previously lacking.
Professor Steve Field, who until last month was the chairman of the Royal College of General Practitioners, spoke out as the Department of Health revealed there are more than 300 people in critical care beds with flu and 17 people have died.
Field said the decision not to encourage the public to have a jab to protect themselves was “ill-advised” and needed to be urgently reversed.
The NHS should have acted more decisively to encourage people to have the jab because it was known that H1N1 swine flu was still circulating and that few NHS staff had the swine flu vaccine when it was offered to them late last year.
Related
For more European health news, see AHCJ’s Covering Europe initiative.
Canadian workshop examines H1N1 coverage
The H1N1 pandemic was a unique event, with developments unfolding quickly, leading to communication problems about the crisis, according to a speaker at a workshop in Montreal last week.
The Concordian, the student newspaper at Concordia University in Montreal, reports that the university’s departments of journalism and exercise science hosted a workshop on “Politics of Health Information: Reflections on a Pandemic.”
Dr. Simon Bacon, from Concordia’s department of exercise science, participated in the 2nd Annual Health Communication Workshop and said, “This was something that happens very rarely and it was going so fast that there were communication problems between each level.”
A report on how to improve communication between scientists and journalists is expected to be completed and posted online in about two months.
BMJ wants raw data for all drug trials to be shared
Filed under: Hot Health Headline, Pharmaceuticals, Public records
Under the headline “We want raw data, now,” BMJ editor Fiona Godlee recounts the story of how BMJ had to pressure a drug company into releasing full study reports verifying their claims as to the effectiveness of oseltamivir (Tamiflu).
Godlee says that researchers updating their Cochrane review of the drug “failed to verify claims, based on an analysis of 10 drug company trials, that oseltamivir reduced the risk of complications in healthy adults with influenza. These claims have formed a key part of decisions to stockpile the drug and make it widely available.”
Only after Roche was questioned by the BMJ and Channel 4 News did the manufacturer commit to making “full study reports” available. Godlee says that some questions remain, including how patients were recruited and why some neuropsychiatric adverse events were not reported.
Godlee argues that “it can’t be right that the public should have to rely on detective work by academics and journalists to patch together the evidence for such a widely prescribed drug,” saying that “Individual patient data from all trials of drugs should be readily available for scientific scrutiny.”
GAO: Flu-fighting plan needs better measures
The United States Government Accountability Office today released the catchily titled “Monitoring and Assessing the Status of the National Pandemic Implementation Plan Needs Improvement” report. See the highlights here.
It does not specifically address the response to the H1N1 pandemic but instead reviews compliance with the Homeland Security Council’s 2006 “Implementation Plan for the National Strategy for Pandemic Influenza.” The GAO analyzed 60 randomly selected action items from the 324 recommended in the report and sought to measure both how the completion of those items was monitored and how many had actually been completed.
The GAO found that while the Homeland Security Council had reported that the majority of the action items were complete in 2008, it was “difficult to determine the actual status of some of the 49 designated as complete.” To rectify this, the GAO recommended that “future progress reports would benefit from using measures of performance that are more consistent with the action items’ descriptions.”
Corporate clinics scored scarce H1N1 shots
USA Today’s Alison Young reviewed state H1N1 vaccine distribution information from Florida, Texas and Georgia, finding that “When the swine flu vaccine was most scarce, health officials gave thousands of doses to corporate clinics at Walt Disney World, Toyota, defense contractors, oil companies and cruise lines.”
Young is working on getting the same data for New York and California. The officials Young talked to stressed that they were doing their best to distribute vaccines fairly, but Young quoted legislators and activists who questioned state health department’s ability to ensure that, once vaccines were given to corporations, they were delivered to the folks who needed them most.
Fluportal.org stays on top of H1N1
While H1N1 seems to have peaked in many states – at least for now – Fluportal.org’s resources to cover the pandemic are still growing. Recent highlights include tips for using American Public Media’s Public Insight Network (which we’ve mentioned before in conjunction with a ProPublica story on health care reform), a few interesting photos with creative commons licenses (like a collection of H1N1 street art).
One of the creative commons licensed shots of H1N1 street art spotlighted by fluportal.org. Photo by Brazilian artist guitavares via Flickr.
Fluportal also has tackled some media ethics issues related to the outbreak, notably in a post where staff from PRI’s The World had to consider how to frame the German medical establishment’s reluctance to recommend the H1N1 vaccine. After all, they did not want to confuse listeners or have a negative impact on public health, but they also weren’t going to “censor” the sincere opinions of German doctors, even if they conflicted with CDC advice.
Related
Public broadcasters have H1N1 site for journalists
Hoban reports on uneven H1N1 death disclosure
Filed under: Health data, Health journalism, Hot Health Headline, Public health
WUNC reporter and AHCJ member Rose Hoban put together a story about uneven disclosure of H1N1 deaths by public health officials and the possible benefits and risks of providing more information. In the end, Hoban reported, it comes down to balancing individual privacy and the public interest.
On the official side, Hoban spoke to Megan Davies, M.D., North Carolina’s epidemiologist, who referred to the lack of a “compelling public health need” to provide H1N1 death data on a county-by-county level, pointing out that in many areas it would be easy for locals to take that information, match it with recent death records and come up with the name of the infected person. Davies said that, in cases like that, she fears the infected person’s family would be stigmatized.
“The fear of contagion’s a really primitive thing that comes up in people,” Davies said.
Additionally, Hoban says, officials are bound by medical ethics, state laws and federal health privacy regulations (which, she notes, generally don’t cover people who are already dead).
For another perspective, Hoban spoke with AHCJ board member Felice Freyer of The Providence Journal. Freyer discussed AHCJ’s report that disclosure had been uneven across the country, and said that officials should share information unless there’s a compelling reason not to.
“Public health officials can’t do their job if they don’t have the trust of the public and no-ones going to trust them if they hide information for no reason,” Freyer said.
Former CDC lead legal counsel Gene Matthews agreed, noting that “Too little information can be a bigger headache than too much.” According to Matthews, this problem has been exacerbated by the Internet where, “If the public health officials don’t provide enough information, the outsiders will simply make it up.”
Rounding up some of the latest health coverage
Filed under: Government, Health care reform, Health journalism, Hot Health Headline, Public health
With good topics for the blog flooding in and a short holiday week to get them all posted, I’m taking a shortcut to point you toward some interesting stories:
ProPublica: What Health Care Reform Means for the underinsured
Rapidly rising premiums have forced them to increase their deductible every year, and now they have a policy with a $5,000 deductible per illness per year.
Steve Lopez in the Los Angeles Times: A doctor is flummoxed by the costs when he becomes the patient
As a physician, he’s well aware that emergency room treatment is very expensive. But knowing the true cost of the limited supplies and labor required to treat such a minor wound, he found the experience more than a little disturbing.
Trevor Butterworth in Forbes.com: Why mall Santas do need the H1N1 vaccine, featuring AHCJ board member Maryn McKenna’s take on how well the media has covered H1N1.
McKenna gives the media a “gentleman’s C” for its coverage of swine flu, but believes it has been getting better in the past few months.
AHCJ member Elaine Schattner, M.D., in the Huffington Post: Mammography: A Not-So-Fatalistic View
I’m a medical oncologist and breast cancer survivor who holds a highly informed and intensely personal perspective on the subject. In my view, the press is getting and giving the wrong message on mammography. There are significant flaws in recent analyses that have escaped most headlines.
Tech company aggregates, digitizes H1N1 info
Ebrary, a Silicon Valley outfit that specializes in digitizing and aggregating documents, then making them searchable, has put together a robust collection of H1N1-related documents.
Ebrary says it put the free database together because of employees’ personal frustrations over the unavailability of solid H1N1 information online. The database eases that frustration by making resources as varied as public health posters, FAQs and academic studies easy to browse and search.
While the documents are available elsewhere on the Web, journalists might find it helpful to browse this well-organized collection.
Ebrary’s H1N1 sources include Occupational Safety and Health Administration, CDC, the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, HHS, National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, Department of Homeland Security, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the World Health Organization and more.
Public broadcasters have H1N1 site for journalists
Public Radio Exchange’s FluPortal.org, funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and done in collaboration with NPR, aims to provide public media with resources for reporting on H1N1.
Led by a regularly updated and authoritative blog, the site also impresses with a selection of Web tools, including widgets and embeddable multimedia, for media outlets to use on their own sites, up-to-date reference materials and examples of what others have done. The portal’s handling of new media and both official and unofficial online sources alone makes it worth a visit, especially given its current update frequency and timeliness.
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