Original post on KQED's Bay Area Bites blog. Spinach, alfalfa sprouts, peanut butter, beef...almost weekly, FDA and USDA alerts fill my inbox with notices about food recalls due to Salmonella or E. Coli. How does our food supply get contaminated? And what safeguards exist to ensure that the foods we eat are produced in safe and sanitary conditions?
This post is about Michael Marmot's work that looks at status as a social determinant of health outcomes.
If DesignWrite, the medical communications firm that has been ghostwriting articles on behalf of drug giant Wyeth, were an elementary school student, it would have a stack of papers heavy with gold stars.
Dr. Gloria Bachmann, the associate dean for women's health at the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in New Brunswick, N.J., told the company it had written an "an A plus article" after it wrote a review article that Bachmann agreed to sign. The article appeared with hardly a word changed in The Journal of Reproductive Medicine.
The always provocative New Scientist magazine has a fascinating, if unscientific, story asking epidemiologists and other public health officials what they're personally doing to prepare themselves and their families for swine flu. (Hat tip to the always-useful Knight Science Journalism Tracker, which is a must-read for health and science journalists.)
This story provides families with a set of tips about how to find a high-quality nursing home for their loved one.
This piece looks at the only majority-black nursing home in Illinois that earned the highest possible rating from Nursing Home Compare. The home is also noteworthy because it received that mark while having more than 85 percent of resident care paid for by Medicaid.
In December, Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, sent a letter to Mitchell A. Leon, the president of DesignWrite Inc., the company that has now become Exhibit A in the unfolding ghostwriting scandal that has medical journal editors everywhere combing through their submissions looking for fakes.
This piece discusses Donald McRae's book about the race to perform the first human heart transplant. McRae blends sciene, character description and culture in this engaging book.
