Association of Health Care Journalists

Mike Allen of Politico.com reports that The Washington Post is offering off-the-record access to its reporters, for a price...

AHCJ member Kelley Weiss of Capital Public Radio in Sacramento has won a national Edward R. Murrow Award from the Radio-Television News Directors Association. The awards recognize excellence in electronic journalism...

Quitting smoking, always nerve-racking, may prove even tougher in the wake of a Food and Drug Administration decision to require its strongest warnings for some drugs popular with folks trying to kick the habit...

The august Institute of Medicine is out with academic medicine's answer to the Billboard Hot 100. A panel of experts has come up with a list of the top 100 health topics that deserve a rigorous comparison of options to determine which are best. The recommendations, part of a larger report ...

At 1:15 ET, President Obama is scheduled to answer questions about health care reform at a live, online town-hall-style meeting...

The Department of Health and Human Services' Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality has assembled data from the 2008 National Healthcare Quality Report into easy-to-interpret State Snapshots "to help State officials and their public- and private-sector partners better understand health care...

When it comes to acute liver damage, acetaminophen, the painkilling ingredient in Tylenol, is a bigger hazard than alcohol...

At 1:15 ET on Wednesday, President Barack Obama will answer questions about health care reform at a live, online town-hall meeting...

The Associated Press's Kristen Wyatt looks at one category of stimulus spending that's already making an impact: funding for clinics serving the poor and disadvantaged...

Sometimes it takes a celebrity to draw attention to something we should have noticed long ago. Though the exact cause of pop icon Michael Jackson's death remains undetermined, reports of his heavy use of prescription medicines remain at the center of attention...

Carol Smith, formerly of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, won a 2009 Casey Medals for Meritorious Journalism. The contest, presented by the Journalism Center on Children & Families, recognizes distinguished coverage of children and families, particularly the disadvantaged...

In the American Medical Association's American Medical News, Amy Lynn Sorrel reports on resolutions from the AMA's annual meeting calling for an increase in medical school funding through scholarships and loans and for the use of other "innovative" debt-reduction programs...

Clint Hendler reports in the Columbia Journalism Review that Sunshine Week's only full-time coordinator will likely lose her job soon...

Cleveland Plain Dealer reporter Sarah Jane Tribble recently announced a new feature for the paper's health and fitness blog. Every week, Plain Dealer reporters will comparison shop for a medical treatment, then post a selection of area prices on the blog...

In a review of American media coverage of the controversy of bisphenol A, researchers at STATS (a nonprofit, nonpartisan Statistical Assessment Service affiliated with George Mason University), say the media failed to properly weight different studies based on their size and research methodology...

The Dartmouth Atlas contains detailed information on regional variations in health care spending and use and therefore has the potential to play a key role in the debate over health care cost and efficiency. Nonetheless, it has come under fire in a few prominent publications lately...

Atul Gawande, M.D., who recently wrote a much-discussed article about health care costs, has responded to his critics in a New Yorker blog post...

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius announced the results of a study which found that, on average, Americans pay more than $3,700 per year for employer health coverage...

Gary Schwitzer, a professor in the University of Minnesota School of Journalism & Mass Communication and publisher of HealthNewsReview.org, calls our attention to journalism organizations that accept support from pharmaceutical companies...

Almost half of the folks killed in traffic accidents annually are cyclists, pedestrians or motorcyclists, according to the World Health Organization's first status report on global road safety...

The Des Moines Register's Perry Beeman and Chase Davis investigated air pollution in Iowa, particularly that made up of enough fine particles to come close to violating federal limits...

Richard Huff of the New York Daily News reports that Republican Party officials (and Matt Drudge) have likened ABC's planned health care reform coverage, set in the White House and featuring interviews with the President and First Lady and a presidential town hall meeting, to an "infomercial" on...

Prevention is no panacea. If the country expects to keep people well by catching and treating disease early, better health won't come cheap. Stanford med school prof Abraham Verghese explains in a critique of Obama's health plan in The Wall Street Journal. The gist: health reform won't pay ...

NPR's April Fulton recently blogged about a phenomenon familiar to anyone with a subscription to the FDA's recall e-mail list, or their RSS feed, or their Twitter account: a late rush of random recall messages that would require a prohibitive amount of time to sort and research. For example, in ...

Former Seattle Post-Intelligencer investigative reporter Andrew Schneider has moved from andrewschneiderinvestigates.com to the easier-to-type www.coldtruth.com . Schneider appears to have moved his archives from his old site and continues to have links to his old P-I blog...

It's put up or shut up time for Bayer Healthcare. The Center for Science in the Public Interest is threatening to sue the maker of One-A-Day multivitamins if the company doesn't cease claiming that selenium, a mineral in the pills, may cut men’s risk of prostate cancer...

The Veterans Affairs health system may be a model for electronic medical records and savvy drug purchasing, but all bets are off when it comes to the disinfection of equipment for colonoscopies...

The American Medical Student Association released a 2009 version of their PharmFreeScorecard, evaluating 149 U.S. medical schools based on their stated conflict-of-interest policies...

Do No Harm, a documentary that focuses on questionable billing practices at a nonprofit hospital in Georgia, premiered last month and will soon be screened in several more cities around the country...

If there ever was a time to remind health journalists to follow the money, it's now. President Obama is back in campaign mode, barnstorming the country to win support for health-care reform...

In January, 2007, AHCJ member and Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter Alison Young asked the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for 4,000 pages of documents, all discussing the threats to the agency's reputation posed by her work and that of her co-workers...

AHCJ members Bryan Thompson of Kansas Public Radio, Sharon Salyer of The (Everett, Wash.) Herald and Elizabeth Bernstein of The Wall Street Journal are among winners of the Mental Health America 2009 Media Awards...

In a recent story for The Arizona Republic, Ginger Rough paints a clear picture of the advantages and disadvantages of medical tourism from a patient's point of view...

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention can use as much Latin as it wants to put a fancy face on the bugs wreaking havoc on our food supply, but Campylobacter, Bacillus cereus and Listeria monocytogenes are nothing but nasty in our book. Just take a look at the CDC's first ...

Los Angeles Times reporter Alan Zarembo found unusually high executive pay and a tangle of additional compensation (ranging from rent to legal fees) that make executives at Tarzana Treatment Center some of the best-paid nonprofit leaders around...

Margaret Chan, director-general of the World Health Organization announced today that the influenza pandemic alert has been raised from from phase 5 to phase 6, meaning that "the world is now at the start of the 2009 influenza pandemic." Covering flu, pandemics and preparedness In a measured...

Next week President Obama will become the first commander in chief to speak directly to the doctors of the American Medical Association since Ronald Reagan in 1983...

A new Pew Internet report examines the role of Internet usage and social networking in the search for health-care information (72-page PDF). The report builds a profile of those who search for health information online and evaluates the type and content of the sources they're using...

Blogging on open.salon.com, Dr...

Let's just say right from the start that Atul Gawande's recent story in The New Yorker about runaway health costs in McAllen, Texas, is a tour de force of explanatory journalism. There is, thankfully, still a lot of good journalism being committed in this country...

According to a report by Christina Jewett of ProPublica and Deborah L. Shelton of the Chicago Tribune, the U.S...

Questions continue to mount about when it's appropriate to use catheters and stents to clear blockages of heart arteries. More and more data show the approach isn't better than drugs alone in prolonging life and preventing heart attacks...

Doctors are in such a position legally, economically and socially that it is difficult to fight patients' demands for excessive, well-advertised tests and treatments, Dr. Scott Haig writes in Newsweek...

A report from the health reform-focused Commonwealth Fund compares costs over the next decade for numerous reform options, using estimates from the Office of Management and Budget (for the president's reform proposal and stimulus), the Congressional Budget Office and a Commonwealth-commissioned...

A 90-minute public television documentary that first aired on May 21 (transcripts and video are available online here) dives headfirst into the lives of depression sufferers and seeks to explain and destigmatize a set of disorders the National Institute of Mental Health says affects about 18.8...

Harlan Krumholz, M.D., writes in The Washington Post that, while better quantitative monitoring would greatly improve the experiences of both patients and doctors, such monitoring has yet to happen because of a lack of will and incentives...

Of all the potential reforms to the health-care system, one of the most profound might turn out to be a government-funded effort to independently vet the effectiveness of competing treatments. You can easily compare various TVs, laundry soaps and cell phones to learn which are best...

John Dickerson, a 26-year-old reporter for the Phoenix New Times, won the Livingston Award for Young Journalists in the local reporting category for stories about the Arizona Medical Board's lax rules regarding physicians' drug abuse...

Clark Kauffman of the Des Moines Register reports on the allegations of abuse and regulatory failures at "a network of labor camps staffed by mentally retarded men." Henry's Turkey Service was run by a Texas family who "deployed at least 600 mentally disabled men to nine bunkhouses in six states."...

Medical bills and gaps in health coverage are wreaking havoc on the finances of the middle class, say researchers who analyzed the bankruptcies of thousands of Americans...

Sarah Kliff, writing for Newsweek, takes a look at the efforts of two Indiana University pediatricians to use well-established research to debunk popular medical myths and the popular outrage generated by their scholarly assault on cherished principles like the need for eight glasses of water a day...

A chance to reform health care is also a chance for some folks to make a case for a bigger share of the money sloshing around in the system. Photo by JasonTromm via Flickr The Chicago Tribune's Bruce Japsen reports on Walgreen CEO Greg Wasson's idea to turn his drugstore ...

Monday is the deadline to apply for this fellowship, which includes travel expenses, lodging and stipend for a week at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md. AHCJ has teamed up with the National Library of Medicine to present the first AHCJ-NLM Fellowships...

David Tuller, a graduate professor of health care journalism at the University of California, uses the National Sleep Foundation's pharmaceutical industry ties and the lack of mention of them in stories about sleep foundation studies to question the current structure of health care journalism and...

A New York Times article that looks at newspaper refugees who have started their own news Web sites cites AHCJ member Carol Ann Campbell as an example of someone who is doing health reporting for a Web site. Campbell, who took a buyout from The (Newark, N.J.) Star-Ledger, has contributed pieces .....

AP Medical Writer Carla K. Johnson takes a look at health care reform in Massachusetts and Tennessee and how the coverage plans in those states can inform Congress' approach to a nationwide expansion of health coverage...

Chris King, Rong Xiaoqing, and Sunita Sohrabji are among the winners of the 2009 National Ethnic Media Awards, sponsored by New America Media. Chris King directs a question to a panelist at Health Journalism 2008 in Washington, D.C. King, of the St...

A story by Boston Globe reporters Scott Allen and Marcella Bombardieri questions the provision of nonprofit status for hospitals and the tax breaks that come with it, vestiges of a time when hospitals needed financial incentives to treat the nation's poor...

The Philadelphia Daily News has released "Deadly Aftershocks," an in-depth look at the effect of the day-to-day bumps and knocks of a football career on players' brains...

In The New Yorker, Atul Gawande, M.D., looks at how the United States can contain the rising cost of health care by examining the experiences of towns on both ends of the spending spectrum. He first looks at McAllen, Texas, which he describes as "the most expensive town in the most ...

AHCJ members Guy Boulton, a business reporter covering health care and health insurance for The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, and David Wahlberg, a health and medicine reporter at the Wisconsin State Journal in Madison, Wis., are among nine journalists selected as 2009 Kaiser Media Fellows...

For health journalists, the annual meeting of the American Association of Clinical Oncology poses a double-barreled challenge: How to cope with the sheer number of presentations and how to figure out which experimental cancer treatments might be the real deal...

When it comes to vaccine safety, findings that scientists regard as proven facts haven't been strong enough to shake public suspicion about a link between childhood immunizations and autism...

If all goes well, a vaccine against the H1N1 flu virus could be available for widespread use by October. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shipped samples of the swine flu virus to companies working on the vaccine a few days ago, Reuters reports...

The nonprofit group Public Citizen has released a report showing that hospitals nationwide are taking advantage of loopholes to avoid reporting disciplined physicians to a national database. The full report is available here...

Gary Schwitzer of the University of Minnesota writes about what he calls a "troubling trend:" Reporters are writing articles based upon abstracts for a meeting that hasn't been held yet...

Six journalists explored "The Future of Science Journalism" during a panel at the Cambridge Science Festival at the MIT Museum...

An apparent "misinterpretation" of Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services led to the federal agency warning Idaho to stop posting reports of inspections of nursing homes and hospitals last month...

Writing for STATS, a research organization affiliated with George Mason University, Robert Lichter reports on a study of "how experts view the risks of common chemicals" that says "the media are overstating risk," according to toxicologists...

Margaret Hamburg, the new FDA sheriff, and her deputy, Joshua Sharfstein, have laid out a public health manifesto for the agency in the Obama era. No big shocker, given their previous jobs as activist health officials in New York and Baltimore, respectively...

MinnPost.com's Dr...

In the Columbia Journalism Review, Trudy Lieberman, president of AHCJ’s board of directors, sought to shed light on the nebulous promise of health information technology by interviewing Jonathan Oberlander, a health policy expert and professor of social medicine and health policy & management at...

The evidence keeps piling up to show that kids who don't get vaccinated carry real risks of catching diseases once thought to have been vanquished...

AHCJ board member Ivan Oransky, M.D., has been named executive editor of Reuters Health. He assumes RH's top editorial job from Bob Saunders, who is retiring. Oransky leaves the position of managing editor for online at Scientific American...

On the blog Social Media Strategery,Michael Dumlao writes about how the rapid viral spread of disinformation about H1N1 showed the need for government agencies to engage the public directly via social media and to provide steady streams of accessible, accurate information in order to control rumors...

Joey Holleman at The State reviewed South Carolina's reaction to H1N1 and what it revealed about the state's pandemic preparedness...

The Chicago Tribune's Trine Tsouderos reports on the growing use of Lupron, a drug sometimes used to chemically castrate sex offenders, to treat autism in children...

John Gramlich of the state policy-focused nonprofit news organization Stateline.org reports that more states are using videoconferencing for inmate health consultations to avoid the cost and danger involved in transporting a prisoner outside prison grounds...

Vermont is about to toughen its already stringent rules on the relationships between doctors and drugmakers. A law expected to take effect in July would bar almost all gifts to doctors, nurses and other health professionals, and would even eliminate free meals, a mainstay of medical offices...

The Hill's Jeffrey Young reports that Montana democrat and Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus declared over breakfast that there was a 75 percent to 80 percent chance he would win support from both parties to pass a health reform bill in his committee next month...

According to a report released by the Department of Veterans Affairs Office of Inspector General, an audit of representative VA hospitals found that about 31 percent of informed consent documentation for human studies was incomplete...

The BIO International Convention, described on its Web site as the largest global event for the biotechnology industry, will bring together Sen. Tom Daschle; Sen. William H. Frist, M.D.; Gov. Howard Dean and Karl Rove, former adviser to President George W...

In the wake of news of a falsified study published in a British bone and joint medicine journal by former Walter Reed Medical Center surgeon Timothy Kuklo, reported by The New York Times' Duff Wilson and Barry Meier, the Center for Public Integrity's M.B. Pell, Aaron Mehta and Nick Schwellenbach .....

Peter Dykstra, a former executive producer of CNN's science, tech and weather unit, offers his take on media coverage of the H1N1 virus in a column for Mother Nature News...

Susanne Rust and Meg Kissinger of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel used the federal Freedom of Information Act to obtain and review dozens of government e-mails and more than 100 attached files to find that the U.S...

Big pharma continues to dabble, tentatively,with social media. The latest example is GlaxoSmithKline, which this week launched its very own corporate blog, called More Than Medicine...