Resources: Contest Entries

While there is no cure for the disease, The Alzheimer's Project shows that there is reason to be optimistic. This multi-platform series looks at groundbreaking discoveries made by the country's leading scientists, as well as the effects of this debilitating and fatal disease on those with Alzheimer's and on their families.

The stories highlighted loopholes in Florida law that make it possible for convicted drug smugglers and doctors with histories of major disciplinary problems to open cash-and-carry pain clinics in Palm Beach County. The stories outlined what other states do and what Florida doesn't do to combat overdose deaths, and revealed that state regulators often are hindered in making cases against problem doctors by poor communication and heavy workloads.

Many health care stories throw out the figure that 30 percent of all medical spending is wasted. But they almost never delve into specifics. Exactly which operations, medical devices, and drugs are overused or ineffective? Robert Langreth shows how a huge percentage of the spending on knee surgery, stents, CT scans, and schizophrenia drugs is wasteful and potentially harmful.

This project, jointly produced by Kaiser Health News and NPR, profiled nine types of consumers and explored the impact Congressional health bills could have on their lives. Each example included a radio story aired on NPR, a policy "explainer" written by a KHN reporter, a video or slide show and still photos.

The recent controversy over the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force's guidelines for the use of mammography for women in their forties underscores the difficulty patients and physicians have with understanding – and accepting – the limitations of cancer screening. Six months before the USPSTF's recommendations were published, this story in Reader's Digest walked readers through the tradeoffs involved in mammography and a number of other cancer screening tests.

Las Vegas Sun reporter Marshall Allen chronicles a hospital privacy leak, doctor pay fraud, hidden obesity surgery costs, and a surgery to cure epilepsy.

In recent years a growing number of trauma surgeons and have begun to question the social value of saving the lives of gunshot victims who wind up back in the ER a year or two later with similar injuries. Yet hospital administrators in communities besieged by violence limit their concern to the problems within their four walls. Although hospitals' tax-exempt status carries a mandate to provide real benefit to their local communities, many are running programs like anti-obesity clinics while leaving the problems of urban violence to the police and courts.

Through interviews and often-confidential documents, the Tribune pieced together a series of recent cases in which violent nursing home residents assaulted, raped and even murdered their elderly and disabled housemates. Illinois is an outlier among states in its reliance on nursing homes to house younger adults with mental illness, including thousands of gang members and felons whose disabilities qualify them for Medicaid-funded nursing care.

This story follows a tumor from resection to research: when a person decides to donate tissue, how does it get from the operating room to the research laboratory? The journey of a donated tumor leads to a discussion of the obstacles – logistic and scientific – facing biospecimen science.

This series examines the growing divide between the health care "haves" and "have-nots" in racially segregated Chicago. A disproportionate number of people of color (specifically African Americans and non-white Latinos) are suffering from diabetes, breast cancer and other health problems at a much higher rate than non-Hispanic whites. Specifically, part I of this series examines the disparate levels of health between whites and people of color in the U.S., and takes a deeper look at one key factor that has been linked to this disparity: the rise of urban food deserts.

The four stories in this entry from Jim Landers, of The Dallas Morning News, look at health care delivery in the United States and France; the broken market for medical care in Dallas; a column about lessons to learn about reducing health care costs; and a column about how Dallas and Texas are models for where the U.S. health care system is headed without major reform.

Reporter Kelley Weiss reports on the economy and its impact on health and health care for this beat. The first piece looked into the dental credit cards issue because of a proposed piece of legislation to protect consumers from signing up for a credit card unknowingly or getting charged for services they did not receive. The second article examined the rise in teenage prostitution and its correlation with funding cuts for youth support programs. The third story detailed the problems California's budget cuts created for low-income families. The final piece looked at the budget cuts with more depth, and highlighted the ways which state budget cuts decrease federal funding for the state.

California's second most expensive health and human services program, Supplemental Security Income, or SSI, was designed to help the elderly and disabled afford basic necessities. It has an almost $3 billion price tag covered by taxpayers. And yet today a growing number of people in this program over the age of 55 can't afford enough food or are living on the streets.

Regulators, politicians, employers and insurers have assured Americans that generic drugs – which will soon comprise 80 percent of the medicine dispensed to us – are safe, effective, and largely identical to their more expensive brand-name counterparts. "Bad Bargain" exposes the glaring regulatory loopholes that allow substandard or un-equivalent generics to reach consumers. The article also identified patients who suffered devastating consequences after being switched from brand-name to generic drugs.

This story describes the efforts of a family to obtain an accurate diagnosis, satisfactory medical care and outpatient services for their severely mentally ill 6-year-old daughter. Following the family over nine months, the stories depict the devastating symptoms of the illness, the terrible toll on the family, the challenges for medical professionals in diagnosing and treating a rare case of psychotic illness in such a young child and the lack of outpatient services.

The Diabetes Prevention Project showed that people at risk for type 2 diabetes could slow or halt the progression to diabetes. This article showed, through stories of participants in the project, just how they pulled off the difficult work of changing their lifestyles.

Note: This entry was named an honorable mention.

The illicit trafficking of tobacco is a multibillion-dollar business, spurring addiction to a deadly product while fueling organized crime, corruption and terrorism, while robbing governments of needed tax money. So profitable is the trade that tobacco is the world's most widely smuggled legal substance.

This public radio documentary explores a health care system where more care is considered better care. But does a booming aging population in the U.S. combined with an endless array of medical interventions place too much stress on our health care budget and on our sickest patients? Medical care at the end of life accounts for one third of all Medicare spending, yet such spending and extensive treatment can easily decrease a patient's quality of life, and thus, their quality of death.

Chicago Tribune reporters examine Lupron – a testosterone inhibitor used to treat precocious puberty and to chemically castrate sex offenders – and its reputed ability to be a "miracle medicine" for a disease with few mainstream medical answers: autism.

Some small hospitals find they can no longer afford to be independent institutions. The story explores potential solutions to this situation by highlighting hospitals that joined a larger health care system or formed a partnership with another hospital and looking at the benefits of signing with a hospital management firm.

Several years ago, doctors and scientists faced a troubling fact: although black women in Chicago are less likely to get breast cancer than white women, they are much more likely to die from it. New research is starting to unravel the reasons why, and it's finding that the causes are woven deeply into the social fabric of the city. We explore those findings in this special, and show that they are likely to segregation, cultural factors and policy.

A 13,000-word chronicle of what happened when floodwaters rose, generators failed, and a New Orleans hospital was cut off from the world. Among the key findings: Several health professionals from Memorial acknowledged that they had deliberately injected severely ill patients to hasten their deaths. More patients than previously suspected had been injected before their deaths, the vast majority after a long-awaited rescue effort was at last under way.

Everyone agrees that BPA, or bisphenol A, is everywhere, from dental fillings to cell phones to baby bottles-but is it a dangerous endocrine disrupter or a useful, perfectly safe chemical? This account of warring studies-independent ones that find evidence of adverse health consequences vs. industry-funded ones that find none-is a case study of the way commercial interests can distort science, and the failure of the government to cat decisively to protect public health.

This report explored the system in which mental illness is treated in America. Where state hospitals used to supply treatment for severe mental illness, nowadays local jails and state prisons have become the main prism through which we as a society deal with this issue. Police Departments have tried to adapt to more mentally ill on the streets while those working in jails and prisons have had to deal with an influx of sick people behind bars.

Tennessean education editor Heidi Hall spent five weeks examining why Tennessee ranks 22nd for cancer diagnoses – about the middle of the pack nationally – but has one of the worst cancer death rates.

This is the story of 61-year-old Eugenia Lester, whose hoarding disorder has taken a life-threatening turn. Lester lives among piles of debris and rotting garbage that have literally pushed her out of her house and into her garden. Upon learning that Eugenia is in danger of losing her home for violating city health codes, her children step in.

This investigation, which included a review of 576 lawsuits filed in federal court in California against the seven largest disability insurers, found that insurance companies regularly deny, or terminate, benefits to people even after they are found disabled by the federal government and approved for Social Security checks. The companies hire contract doctors who routinely reject the opinion of treating physicians without ever having seen the patients. Some insurers provide incentives to employees to deny and terminate claims, tying performance evaluations to meeting money-saving goals.

Reporter David Evans noticed that big pharmaceuticals companies were paying heavier and heavier criminal fines for illegally marketing some of their best-selling drugs, and he wondered why they would keep breaking the law so blatantly. In "Big Pharma's Crime Spree," Evans reports that even when drug companies pay huge penalties they have little economic incentive to stop the illegal activity.

Today, half of all kidney donors are living donors – altruistic individuals who can give a patient a kidney almost overnight, and a kidney that is much healthier than organs from the deceased. But unlike the carefully regulated system for allocating organs from deceased donors, there is no system for allocating organs from living donors. Instead, the search for a living donor is a free-for-all – a Wild West where desperate patients rent billboards, put their pleas in church bulletins, buy space on the Internet and tell their stories on TV talk shows.

Note: This entry was named an honorable mention. 

The story described how the FDA ignored warning signs for years about contaminated drugs from overseas entering the United States. The story quoted former agency officials saying that recent cases of illnesses linked to contaminated medications shouldn't have come as a surprise. It also described internal reports that warned of contaminated drug imports, and quoted former agency commissioners explaining why they didn't act. The story held accountable a senior FDA official who told lawmakers that this year's contamination of the drug heparin was a "wake-up call."

Budget cuts in the state's Medicaid program are forcing a major shift in where Nevada's poor can seek health care. Low-income cancer patients will have nowhere else to be treated after the only public hospital closes its oncology ward. And Medicaid children with orthopedic needs will have to leave the state, because specialists no longer take their insurance coverage.

The article revealed that California hospitals had more than 100 avoidable adverse events ("never events") on average each month, including leaving instruments in patients, permitting bedsores to fester and performing the wrong surgeries on patients or the correct surgeries on either the wrong patient or body part.

There's a new breed of doctors entering the field. They are focused on Gen Y - young consumers whose assumptions about life could dramatically alter the health care field. They are technically savvy, highly social and very independent. Physicians - and hospital - have to match these demands to be more flexible and wiling to use innovative technologies.

Re-admissions pose huge financial and quality of care problems for hospitals and patients. There are mounting pressures for hospitals to prevent patients from coming back days after a procedure. Our story took a close look at the issue – its financial impact and the impact on quality of care.

A year-long investigation revealed egregious, undeclared conflicts on interest on the part of a group of scientists who advocated for early detection of lung cancer

Recent studies show that barely a third of advanced cancer patients report having substantive conversations with their oncologists about end-of-life care. NewsHour Health Unit correspondent Betty Ann Bowser profiled an advanced lung cancer patient who found herself in this scenario. The story examined the patient-centered model of care and the physical, emotional and financial benefits to having end of life discussions.

This examination of the state of health care in America has a particular focus on rural communities. The mission was to explore how they are coping with being underinsured, or uninsured, and what those individuals were doing on a daily basis in order to cope. It looks at the issue from a ground-level perspective: the people working and living along the front lines of health care every day.

Some Polio victims who thought they had recovered are finding that their old symptoms are returning decades later in the form of Post Polio Syndrome. To make matters worse, isolated cases of polio are popping up again in American children who have failed to be immunized and in American tourists who have contracted polio during their travels. This documentary revisits the height of America's dark days of polio, and the role President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the March of Dimes played in finding a cure.

Baron's report tracks the 8,000 mile journey of a bottle of anti-retroviral pills from a factory in India to an AIDS patient in Ivory Coast. Between the plant and the patient are inefficient bureaucracies and strained government resources, dedicated bureaucrats and health care providers, bad roads and intermittent electricity, and the threat of organized crime rings waiting to strike

After California banned phthalates in childrens' products, the reporter began to investigate what companies were using as alternatives. She found that few scientists knew much about the new chemical and there were no independent studies of the chemical. She discovered that there were questions about the chemical's safety.

In California it's not uncommon for people in some Latino communities to get prescription drugs at the local swap meet. KXJZ News found while misuse of these drugs could be deadly, police and health officials around the state are largely ignorant of the problem. But in Los Angeles, an innovative team of health officers and law enforcement is having some success.

This is a series of stories about the public-health problem of suicides from a local bridge. The stories analyze the extent of the problem (more than 200 suicides over about 40 years) and examine how other cities have dealt with "suicide bridges."

The Wall Street Journal Health Blog includes important news and special reports, as well as concise news reports and analysis to enterprise reporting. The blog regularly covers consumer news, policy, business and medicine. Most weekdays the blog features seven or eight items.

The blog features posts about a variety of health-related topics that include reader engagement and an emphasis on multimedia presentation.

An analysis of Environmental Protection Agency data by the Center for Public Integrity shows that the number of reported human health problems, including severe reactions, attributed to pyrethrins and pyrethroids increased by about 300 percent over the past decade. These pesticides are marketed as the safe alternative to older pesticides, but researchers, epidemiologists, and doctors are starting to question the safety of these products.

While stigma has long been associated with mental health care, the story explores the even greater stigma faced by Hispanics in seeking out and getting mental health care. The project had a number of online components, including both English and Spanish versions.

After recall alerts about heparin began pouring in from across the country, pharmacists scoured medicine cabinets, whisked tainted heparin away from patients and sailed it back to their distributor for disposal. But a national drug supplier had not yet received the warning notices. That and other failures left the recalled drug on the shelf. In all, 94 hospitals have been fined by state regulators for failing to remove recalled heparin after warnings went out. A review of those state citations by the Daily Journal earlier this month showed that contaminated heparin, which federal officials have suspected in more than 90 deaths and traced to Chinese factories, continued to be administered to hundreds of patients at more than a dozen hospitals throughout California.

In July 2007, the Fayetteville, N.C., City Council learned about a neighborhood's 20-year fight over gasoline contamination in private drinking wells. The revelation led The Fayetteville Observer to ask: What else lies beneath? The newspaper found dozens of areas with groundwater contamination, including entire neighborhoods. Although public health officials had known about the contamination for years, little had ever been done.

The Las Vegas Sun analyzed the Drug Enforcement Administration's controlled substances consumption database and discovered that Nevadans, per capita, are the nation's number one users of hydrocodone, the narcotic in Vicodin and Lortab, and number four consumers of the narcotic painkillers methadone, morphine and oxycodone. The data showed a skyrocketing rise in narcotic consumption in Nevada and nationwide in the past decade.

Carol Smith's stories focused on different aspects of a system that led to a random killing by a severely mentally ill man with a history of violence.

The initial three-part series focused on the practice of doing liver transplants on patients who don't need them because their illnesses have not progressed to the point when they can benefit from the surgery. These patients at the bottom of waiting lists have a higher chance of dying after getting a transplant when they could have lived longer without the transplant, according to widely accepted scientific research.

For "Under the Knife," Marek visited dozens of physicians and successfully bargained down the out-of-pocket costs for several surgeries and cosmetic procedures. She also gave readers a glimpse into the world of office finance managers who authorize such discounts.

"Live Longer," a cover story, looked at what Marek referred to as "health investors," a collection of consumers who spend lavishly each year on their health, often buying everything from vitamin-infused elixirs to exhaustive analyses of their DNA. Marek asked if all this spending was actually lengthening their lives, and at what cost.

In "The Hidden Cost of Retiring Early," Marek shared the stories of Americans who retire before qualifying for Medicare and then have trouble finding health insurance on the individual market.

Carol Smith explores the complexities of a failing mental health system, a dental death investigation and a story about the link between PTSD and brain damage.

Clark Kauffman's work included:

1. State pays bonuses to worst of homes
2. Glenwood medical chiefs were unlicensed
   
3. Privacy law fails to stop snooping
4. Gangrene, death follow stay at facility

This series focuses on an out-of balance health care finance system that rewards a few big hospitals, paying them far more for work even when there is no evidence that the higher-priced care produces healthier patients. The stories detail how New England's biggest health care network, Partners HealthCare, is increasingly using its marketplace clout to export its expensive brand of medicine to the suburbs, imperiling community hospitals, and how its cozy relationship with the state's largest insurer has helped to trigger a health care cost crisis.

"At the Edge of Life" explores palliative care's transformative effect for hospital patients and families and clinicians facing life-threatening illness. In narrative stories, photos and videos and online multimedia offerings, the project examines end-of-life decision-making, pain and symptom management, spiritual and psychological challenges for everyone around a hospital bed when cure isn't possible.

A team of science and business reporters was asked to find out how and why the United States spends so much on health care with such disappointing results. They discovered a gaping chasm between scientific evidence and the practice of medicine: in innumerable instances, no solid evidence can be found to justify the standard treatment.

In the early 1970s, Maryland officials devised a system – now the only one in the nation – in which the state sets hospital rates. The goal was to guarantee hospital care whether patients could afford it or not. The state allowed hospitals to mark up their charges to recover the cost of providing free or reduced-price care and debts they wrote off. An eight-month investigation by The (Baltimore) Sun found that over the past five years, some of Maryland's 46 nonprofit hospitals have received millions of dollars from the payment system even as they sued tens of thousands of patients over unpaid bills.

Plain Dealer reporter Diane Suchetka looks at the problems that beset the survivor of a horrendous accident and its toll on his family as they strive to adjust to their new roles.

Over the past decade, an increasingly visible and highly networked community of autistics is trying to kick-start something akin to a civil rights movement. The message: Stop underestimating us. Their efforts, although controversial, are supported by a small but growing cadre of neuro-psychological researchers who are taking a fresh look at the nature of autism itself.

The story of baby Alyssa's death started with a tip from a state regulator: A preemie who was born at just 1.4 pounds and was 12 inches long but was, against all odds, thriving and going to survive, was killed when the pharmacy of a Las Vegas hospital mistakenly gave her 1,000 times the prescribed dosage of zinc sulfate.

The story showed that cholesterol-lowering drugs are far less effective than the most people think. For people without existing heart disease, more than one hundred (and perhaps as many as 250) people have to take the drugs for years for just one person to benefit. Yet that tiny benefit comes at the cost of a number of side effects.

Gynecologic cancers are among the top three killers of women. Yet, except in the case of cervical cancer, there are no good early detection tools. Moreover, some 600,000 hysterectomies are performed annually in the United States and 90 oercent are medically unnecessary.

Abuse of prescription drugs by American adolescents is on the rise. Nearly one in five teens admitted to using medications not prescribed to them. Too often, parents don't recognize the signs their kids are abusing prescription pills, and kids underestimate the dangers. This article provides parents with essential information and advice. After encouraging readers to support a key bill, the bill became a law on October 30.

The murder of marijuana caregiver Ken Gorman and what the circumstances of his death say about the state of the medical marijuana movement in the United States. The article agrees that marijuana has some, albeit limited, medical utility, but debunks the notion that marijuana is a cure-all and takes to task lawmakers for allowing pot dealers with no medical training to act as surrogate doctors dispensing bogus medical advice to sick people.

This story focused on a child, Max Blake, now 10, who was diagnosed with bipolar disorder at age 2, and followed his struggles - and his parents' - up to the present day.

Marshall Allen's stories range from in-depth coverage of a health insurance merger and a criminal investigation at a public hospital, to heartfelt stories of patients getting caught up in a system that's often dictated by money and politics instead of quality patient care.

Thousands of families who were left homeless in Mississippi after Hurricane Katrina are living in temporary travel trailers provided by FEMA. Dan Rather Reports discovered many of these trailers are emitting toxic levels of formaldehyde, and broke the news that FEMA was actually well aware of the problem before delivering a single trailer. The residents' heads ache and eyes itch, their children wake with nosebleeds and suffer from respiratory problems that don't go away. Many have been afraid to come forward from fear of losing the only home they have left. Others have appealed to FEMA, time and again, for trailers that would not make their children sick.

For decades, tens of thousands of American children were locked in institutions - labeled as 'defective' and 'erased' from their family trees. Family secrets are now coming out in the open as siblings of these "erased children" go on a desperate search - but in most states, the law is standing in the way. We join a man who defied legal hurdles and his family's wishes to keep his sister a secret - and searched to finally bring his sister's existence out in the open.

In an effort to maximize revenue, hospitals and doctors are increasingly transforming medical bills Into consumer debts, which are easier to collect and often carry high interest rates and fees. The hospitals and doctors get their cash faster; finance companies, including giants like General Electric and Citigroup, obtain high-interest, high-fee accounts; and patients with little or no insurance end up paying much more for medical care. This new form of medical finance is quietly sweeping through the health care Industry, especially among non-profit hospitals that have had difficulty collecting bills from working poor patients.

Recent studies have reported alarming rates of physical and verbal abuse against nurses in the workplace, one finding that 64% were abused in a 4-week period. Patients are usually the aggressors. Most victims don't file formal reports; fewer than half discuss the incident with a colleague. Eight studies findings showing the incidents in various settings are presented in a sidebar and potential solutions are discussed.

Mounting evidence shows that even moderate drinking of alcoholic beverages may increase the risk of breast and colon cancer.

David Amsden shed a light on the fastest-growing segment of America's uninsured population, the group named the "young invincibles" by the insurance industry - young people who choose to go without health insurance, hoping they can make it through their twenties without catastrophe. Through moving personal acounts from a somewhat unexpected group, Amsden crafted a resonant feature.

This story chronicles the journey of a 9-year-old boy who was born with a rare syndrome and is forced to make a difficult decision regarding his body.

"The Mercury Connection" revealed for the first time that some South Carolinians who frequently eat freshwater fish have unusually high levels of mercury in their bodies. The newspaper analyzed a massive database on contaminated fish and identified certain mercury hotspots in the state. Bartelme and Pardue then collected hair samples from people who live near these hotspots and sent the samples to a certified lab. The results showed some people ranked among the most mercury-contaminated people in the nation. The series also highlighted how state health officials are doing little to measure levels of mercury in people.

This body of work shows America's health care system as it affects citizens. The entry includes stories about a middle-class family that surprisingly and suddenly found themselves priced out of the individual health insurance market, a single mother whose child is on SCHIP, a family with employer-sponsored health insurance and how they decide which plan to choose and how much to set aside in an HSA.

The series explores the reality of living with a cancer diagnosis, as experienced by a health care reporter in the midst of dealing with her own breast cancer and a family ­issues reporter helping her husband cope with pancreatic cancer. The issue-oriented stories weave deeply personal accounts with reporting on other patients and families, as well as perspectives from doctors, social workers and other experts in the field.

At a time when organ donation is universally embraced, the story detailed how a change in the definition of death in Pittsburgh, Penn., in the early 1990s helped increase recovery of some organs by more than 700 percent nationwide during an eight-year period and why the policies that fueled this growth trouble some ethicists and doctors.

The story also described variations in how death is defined around the country and even at different hospitals within Pittsburgh and the pressures to increase organ donation still further, including hospitals' financial incentives for performing transplant operations.

The mission of CIDRAP News is to provide infectious-disease coverage that speaks to readers in everyday language but is backed by science; every story must have at least one link to the appropriate scientific literature. CIDRAP felt that mainstream coverage of the search for a vaccine against pandemic flu was increasingly based on press releases and so decided to delve deeply into extant scientific research and government regulation. Result: Strong evidence a pandemic vaccine will be delayed for years beyond what authorities have admitted.

The Wall Street Journal set out to explore some of the more complex dynamics of living donation, and some of its controversial potential. We spend eight months with one family to see how a 25-year-old son dealt with the toughest decision of his life: whether to give half his liver to a father who, he felt, might not deserve it. We looked at the potential of kidney swaps, a new solution for people who have willing but medically incompatible donors. We profiled a surgeon with a radical idea: paying people to give a kidney. And we explored the world of the Jesus Christians, a small religious group whose members are committed to live kidney donation but who may be acting under the influence of a dangerous cult.

As the Human Genome Project and subsequent research generate DNA tests for predispositions to all kinds of conditions, little is known about what it is like to live with such knowledge. These stories are aimed at illuminating the dilemmas of some of the first Americans to reach this genetic frontier. If there is a unifying "finding," it is that the information is invariably double-edged. It can bring huge benefits but they come with burdens that we may not fully contemplate as we rush to embrace it.

Based on rigorous reporting, extensive data research and more than 160 Freedom of Information Act requests, the Center for Public Integrity's year-long investigation of the EPA's Superfund program made public an exhaustively researched and confirmed list of the top 100 companies linked to the most polluted toxic waste sites in this country. This extensive project also charted the network of corporate, congressional and agency connections whose influence has shaped the state of the Superfund program today. Twenty-seven years after this landmark legislation's passage, the Center's "Wasting Away" investigation revealed an environmental program effectively crippled due to insufficient funding, lax enforcement and political and industry influence.

The stories examined, in depth, the six leading causes of death in the United States, and pointed out areas in which care can be improved considerably by making better use of preventive methods, screening tests and treatments that are already available. For instance, lives can be saved if heart attacks and strokes are treated faster and more appropriately, if diabetics lower their cholesterol as well as their blood sugar and if people get tested for colon cancer and pay more attention to its early warning signs. People with chronic lung disease can significantly improve their quality of life with the appropriate therapy, but the disease is often ignored, misdiagnosed, poorly treated and stigmatized. As for Alzheimer's disease, there is no treatment that can alter the course of the illness; desperate families spend more than a $1 billion a year on drugs that are minimally effective at treating just the symptoms.

This New York Times series examined how businesses and investors are reaping enormous profits by exploiting the soaring number of older Americans.

The Times' major findings regarding health care issues included:

● Private investment groups have bought thousands of nursing homes in recent years, and then cut costs to increase profits. In the past, residents have responded to declines in care by suing, and regulators have levied heavy fines. But private owners have made it difficult for plaintiffs to succeed in court and for regulators to levy chain-wide fines.

● Some long-term-care insurance companies have developed procedures that make it difficult, if not impossible, for policyholders to get paid.

● Companies that manufacture everything from walking canes to oxygen equipment are charging Medicare billions of dollars more than they charge individual customers for the exact same products and services.

Alan Judd and Andy Miller of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution found that at least 115 patients had died under suspicious circumstances in Georgia's mental hospitals from 2002 to 2006, and that more than 190 patients over that time were victims of employee abuse. They also report that state investigations into deaths in the hospitals are conducted by the same agency that runs the facilities. The state often absolves its employees of responsibility even before crucial information, such as autopsy findings, is available. In addition, the hospitals have failed to correct persistent problems, resulting in additional patient deaths.

Children's use of drugs to treat Type II diabetes – once known simply as adult-onset diabetes because it occurred in old age – is surging as obesity rates rise. More disturbingly, many of these children are also taking pharmaceuticals for other related chronic problems typically seen in older adults, such as high-blood pressure, cholesterol, respiratory and pain medications.

"Care-less Denials" began with a series of concerned e-mails and calls from Anthem patients and their families unable to find a mental health professional to help them. It took dozens of calls to find professionals who could explain what had happened. Anthem had cut the reimbursement rates mid-year so severely that many psychiatrists, psychologists, and counselors either dropped off the panel or wouldn't accept new patients. Patients were stuck with insurance they couldn't use. The I-Team pursued this all the way up to the Governor's office, leading to three investigations, by two state departments and one local county commission.

This is a special series of reports about the impact of diabetes in eastern North Carolina, a poor, rural part of the state. It explores how the rise of type 2 diabetes is affecting doctors, patients, communities and the health care system; and in turn, how lifestyle changes and the structure of the health care system pose challenges to confronting and reducing diabetes, perhaps especially in poor, rural communities.

This was a three-part series concerning allegations that Pfizer sales reps were encouraged to use inappropriate business practices to boost sales of an older AIDS medication. The posts discussed how sales reps used unapproved materials to attempt to convince doctors that Pfizer's Viracept was superior to rival medications. Reps were also urged to skirt rules governing the appropriate use of professional speakers for continuing medical education programs.

With ever louder and frequent calls for consumer-driven health care, three reporters from the Indianapolis Business Journal tried to obtain, before seeking care, the basic price information necessary to make rational buying decisions in today's health care market. Our success rate was just 12 percent. The story discusses whether the health care system is able to or ever will adapt to allow consumers truly to shop for health care.

Pam Kazmaier and her 12-year-old son, Zack, tried to commit suicide together by overdosing on their psychiatric medication. Both recovered, but she was convicted of felony. Still, the suicide attempt may have saved their lives and their family. The six-chapter narrative takes readers from the dark depths of mental illness, through hospitals, jail and courts, and ultimately to recovery.

“A Deadly Twist” exposed for the first time in a national magazine the life-threatening risks of chiropractic neck adjustment, a procedure performed more than 100 million times a year in the United States.

They are supposed to be grassroots organizations representing the interests of people with serious diseases. But some health specialists think some patient groups are perilously close to becoming extensions of pharmaceutical companies' marketing departments.

The anti-aging industry is offering a dizzying array of hormones and supplements. Business is booming. But some remedies are risky, and the benefits are unproven.

An investigation of five "diseases" to show how the drug industry influences what is considered a disease and who has it. Among the key findings: 1)Drug companies have cammandeered the process by which diseases are defined and treated. By creting new diseases and expanding the coundaries for existing ones, drug companies have exponentially expanded markets for their drugs often without scientific evidence for doing so. 2) Some of the most commonly diagnosed diseases are based on arbitrary criteria chosen by experts with wide-ranging ties to pharmaceutical companies. 3) The drug industry systematically cultivates medical experts, some of whom first help develop and market the drug, and then write the definitions and guidelines for treatment. 4) Drug treatments for the newly expanded diseases may be worse than the conditions they're treating. 

These stories expose how the manufacturers of heart devices, especially teh Guidant Corporation, and regulators failed to disclose serious malfunctions of their devices to doctors and patients. These malfunctions, such as short circuiting in defibrillators can lead to the breakdown of the device and can ultimately cause death.

Guido Osso was insured when he entered the hospital for treatment of a stroke, but it turned out he was one of millions of "under-insured" individuals whose policies are inadequate for their needs. When his coverage ran out, the hospital charged him nearly 4 times the discounted rate it would have charged his insurance carrier - and went back and billed him the difference for the period the insurance had covered. Then, when he couldn't pay (he had been completely disabled by his illness), the hospital took him to court, to put a lien on his house. The story highlighted the problem of under insurance, hospital billing practices that charge the most to those who can't afford it, and hte crushing burden of medical debt. 

Crystal methamphetamine, which has replaced cocaine as the most abused stimulant in Long Beach, is also fueling the spread of HIV and AIDS. The series of the stories explores how the drug, by boosting libido and curbing inhibition, has presented a new front in the war on AIDS. Stories looked at the scope of the porblem, the psychology behind the drug's appeal, the role of Internet dating and sex sites, law enforcement, treatment and finally, potential solutions, The series also includes a narrative profile of an HIV-positive individual struggling with his addiction to crystal meth. 

The News Sentinel tried to paint a complete picture of whom the HIV virus affects - directly and indirectly - in the east Tennessee region through various profiles. These included people infected with the virus through a variety of sources; family, friends and partner/spouses of those infected; public health professionals involved in prevention and education; and caregivers and providers of health care and social services for people with HIV and AIDS.

Douglas Fischer tested a typical family's blood, hair and urine for the presence of everyday chemical contaminants such as flame retardants, plastics, metals, PCBs, even the chemical precursors of Teflon and Gore-Tex. He found everything he looked for, except arsenic, and has the first data anywhere of such compounds in the very young. The story also explores how chemicals are (or rather, are not) regulated and what this chemical "body burden" means for our health. 

Of particular significance were the levels of flame retardants known as PBDEs (polybrominated diphenyl ethers) in the two children: Two to six times higher than the parents, and above levels though to cause neurodevelopment and thyroid problems in laboratory animals.  

In a series of artivles in 2005, the Daily Business review exposed the growing problem of medical malpractice victims being unable to college malpractice judgments because the defendant doctors have no liability insurance and refuse to pay.

The review also reported that state enforcement of rules requiring doctors to report and pay claims has been lax. A 2003 state law requires the Florida Department of Health to suspend the medical license of any doctor who fails to satisfy an adverse judgment. But the Review found a number of cases of nonpayment in which the department had taken no license action and the doctors were still practicing with no adverse consequences.

Reporter Tim Christie wrote about the life and death of a terminally ill woman named Lucille Adamson, who ended her life under the auspices of Oregon's one-of-a-kind doctor-assisted suicide law. She agreed to let Christie attend her death, providing a rare first-hand report on what happens when someone takes a lethal dose of barbiturates to hasten death.

California and Mexico share a 140-mile border. But the geopolitical barrier means nothing to viruses, addictions, pollution and other health problems which freely cross the border each day. Our goal was to examine five such health issues and examine how people on both sides of hte border were being affected by the problem and what, if anything was being done to address the health consequences of that problem. 

In June 2005, under pressure from the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen, the FDA was weighing whether to withdraw from the market the lung cancer drug Iressa. Conditionally approved in 2003, the drug has so far failed to prove in clinical trials that it extends the livesof lung cancer patients. Studies continue, with results expected in 2006.

A pioneer in its drug class, Iressa has been eclipsed by a similar drug, Tarceva, which has a proven survival benefit. Still, thousands of patients continue to take Iressa. A small fraction of these patients have had dramatic responses. We wondered what it would mean for them if Iressa were taken off the market. Even if the drug remained available to them under compassionate use rules, what would such a decision mean for doctors who treat lung cancer patients? Even ore broadly, we felt the story of Iressa raised important questions about risk and benefit for patients with terminal diagnoses while providing a window into the complicated measures by which drugs are deemed successful.  

Second Opinion brings together nationally known physicians, patients and lay people to discuss disease and treatment in a case-based format. The doctors on the panel must discuss a real-life case from diagnosis to treatment. The have no knowledge of the case before they come to the discussion and in many cases, they don't even know each other very well. This is a 13-part series with this part dealing with depression. 

Shortly after producer Kate Long began reporting a story on end-of-life forms - advanceddirectives - she realized that she, at age 59, could not adise others to fill out the forms when she herself had not done so. She ditched her original story plan and began exploring the fact that she, at age 59, was resisting the idea that she should fill out those forms. She turned for help to a friend who had died. She turned to a living friends who agreed to be named her power-of-attorney. She took listeners along as she explored. 

In January, Tennessee's Governor Phil Bredesen announced he would cut 300,000 people from the state's health care program for the poor and uninsured in an effort to balance the budget. Out I-Team investigation found the state had failed to properly manage the program; for example, enrollees openly sold their medicine, and pharmacy oversights that were common in other states had never been implemented. We revealed confidential state documents that showed political motives for the timing of the cuts. We revealed that the administration withheld crucial information on how sick the people were who were being cut. The administration promised a "Safety Net" of services for those cut off, but we found many Tennesseans with serious illnesses such as Parkinson's disease were unable to access any health care services. 

"Bad Medicine," an excerpt from Katherine Eban's Dangerous Doses, revealed how counterfeit, adulterated, mishandled, stolen and expired medicine routinely lands on the nation's pharmacy and hospital shelves. While the risks of getting counterfeit medicine through Internet and cross-border sales have been widely documents, Eban's book focused exclusively on the adulteration of the medicine that Americans trust implicitly: that dispensed by our pharmacies and hospitals. 

The article and five sidebars document how people in the U.S. are injured and killed during clinical trials of experimental drugs. The story shows that in the past 15 years, drug tests have moved from being conducted predominantly in universities and hospitals to private, for-profit test centers. At the same time, much of the oversight of clinical trials has been farmed out by the FDA to private, for-profit companies. The test facilities and the monitors are paid by pharmeceutical companies that stand to make billions if they develop blockbuster drugs. There is little protection for the safety of the participants in drug trials, the story shows. The poorest U.S. citizens and immigrants are usually the subjects of the most dangerous experiments on healthy people, the article shows. The story offers an in-depth look at the largest private test center in the U.S., SFBC in Miami, where unemployed immigrants are paid for participating in tests for which they are inadequately warned of risks or injury or death. The reporting cites examples across the U.S. in which healthy people were killed in clinical trials after receiving inadequate warnings and little or no medical care. 

A growing and serious gap separates doctors and patients, driven by insurance limits and bureaucratic hassles. It is changing the face of American health care -- your future physician might not be an M.D. So who will take care of you? U.S. News found a variety of new healers are stepping in to fill the void, with psychologists, nurse practitioners, optometrists and oral surgeons doing things that were once the sole province of M.D.s. And despite the claims from physicians organizations that such practices are putting patients in danger, there is solid scientific evidence that these new healers are safe, competent and may even forge better relationships with patients than the doctors who went before them. Yet as their practices expand, they may reach the limits of their expertise and patient safety may soon become a real worry.  

Doctor-owned specialty hospitals are fighting traditional community hospitals over patients and income. Congress has become the referee in a fight that represents a growing dissatisfaction among physicians about their current financial state of affairs. While many specialty hospitals offer high quality care, community hospitals and important services that only they offer are at risk of financial ruin. 

This story documents the phenomena of people who travel to India for medical treatment. Thier reasons are manifold. Patients from the U.S. cite the high cost of care especially for those who don't have insurance. In the U.K. and canada, the issue is the wait at public health facilities. In the Middle East, interviewees note the lack of quality medical services in their countries and the difficulty in traveling to the West after the terrorist attacks on September 11. Top Indian hospitals, with their internationally trained doctors and prices that can be one-third Western fees for complex procedures are positioning themselves as the answer for this growing tribe of so called medical tourists. India's medical prowess isn't limited to treating patients. Doctors analyze and read x-rays from U.S. hospitals. Pathology labs collect samples from the U.K. and the Middle East much like software companies have become back-offices and developmental centers for Western clients. We found Indian hospitals must do much more to publicize their abilities and soothe patients' uneasiness about safety and cultural differences. Indian hospitals also would benefit from certification from global standards organizations. After the story was published, Apollo Hospitals in Chennai received certification from Join Commission International, which rates U.S. hospitals. 

When her husband fell suddenly ill, Julie Krampitz did everything she could to get him a liver transplant - even if that meant undermining the country's system for distributing donated organs. Using email blasts, a website, TV appearances, even a bilboard posted high above a Houston freeway, the couple was able to obtain a private liver donationin only four wekks. Meanwhile, across the country in Jacksonville, Florida, 26-year-old Devin Boots was near the top of the list for a liver; she waited patiently for more than four years for the system to work.

Like Todd Krampitz, patients in recent years have found a way to skip to the front of the line by securing their own donors, some of the using classifieds, online bulletin boards and hte new MatchingDonors.com, which for $295 a month posts personal ads for people seeking organs. By circumventing the official system, needy patients may be saving their own lives. But transplant experts worry that private solicitations will to an organ-procurement cottage industry, one that fvors the savvy over the sick, the rich over the poor. This feature examines the issue through the eyes of both Krampitz and Boots and asks an increasingly urgent question: Which of the more than 87,000 Americans waiting for an organ most deserves to live? And what can be done to increase the number of organs available to all so that desperate patients aren't forced to compete for a chance at life?

Each year in the U.S., thousands of desperate infertile couples spend more than $12,000 for just one in vitro fertilization attempt. In countries like India, however, IVF is roughly one-quarter of the price. Increasingly, young people are doing the math, booking vacations and coming back pregnant. Writer Brian Alexander explores this "fertility tourism" trend and how fertility treatments - much like prescription drugs - have become such a hot commodity in the global marketplace. 

"No School Nurses Left Behind" investigates in great detail the consequences of not having a school nurse or a medically-trained staff person in many of our nation's schools. Although government reports suggest that school districts have complete school nurse coverage, a closer examination  revealed that in fact many schools have only part-time coverage or none at all. Instead of nurses, school secretaries and other medically untrained staff must respond to emergencies and dispense medications to a growing number of children with chronic and severe physical or mental illnesses, sometimes with severe or tragic results. 

The series offers readers of the publication (hospital executives) relatively easy to implement and inexpensive ways to reduce medical errors. During the course of reporting, a variety of these low-cost solutions that can be duplicated in hospitals, regardless of their size, location and financial wherewithal were found.

This entry consists of three health journalism analysis/criticism pieces. They appeared in three online publication read by many journalists (Poynter Online, CJRDaily.com and BMJ.com). The common theme is the questionable quality of local television coverage of health and medical news. 

The first pieces looks at the apparent breakdown in the firewall between editorial and advertising in some Tv newsrooms in the coverage of health topics.

The second article is an examination of past and current calls for voluntary certification of television health reporters because of rampant quality and ethical concerns in that industry.

The third article documents an almost total disregard for the coverage of health policy or health care reform issue on the prime time newscast of three leading U.S. television stations during the entire 2004 election year.