Insights

Could this year get any worse for Johnson & Johnson? The company recalls 12 million bottles of the Mylanta acid, and more from our Daily Briefing.

<p>California regulators stop monitoring PCBs in the&nbsp;air at the Kettleman Hills Facility, then birth defects increase in Kettleman City, then regulators start monitoring, and birth defects go down.</p>

<p>Here’s what we’re checking out today:</p>

<p>This is part of my ongoing effort to highlight great investigative work being done outside Big Media.</p> <p>Blythe Bernhard and Jeremy Kohler have been writing a series of stories in the <em>St. Louis Post-Dispatch</em> that should be carefully studied by anyone wanting to examine physician discipline in a state, region or nationally. Their latest installment, <a href="http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/metro/article_81910db9-a314-5e0e-839… felon, fit to practice? Disgraced doctor gets a second chance</a>, started with straightforward top:</p>

<p>Jordan Rau of Kaiser Health News and Sarah Varney of KQED Public Radio recently collaborated on a project examining what some hospitals’ newfound market power means for health insurance costs – and your pocketbook. You can find Varney’s piece <a href="http://www.npr.org/2010/11/18/131410569/big-hospital-chains-use-clout-t…; and Rau’s story <a href="http://www.kaiserhealthnews.org/Stories/2010/November/19/sutter-hospita…;

This is one in a series of articles examining the relationship between housing loss and death in San Francisco. Check out the previous articles in the series, Looking for death,Gunpowder on the streets, and Will losing your home kill you?

<p>Kettleman City has a <del>toxic</del> PCB dump problem, or at least so says the U.S. Enivornmental Protection Agency. From the release:</p>

<p>Here’s what we’re checking out today:</p> <p><strong>Quote of the Day:</strong> “To ghostwrite an entire textbook is a new level of chutzpah,” former FDA Commissioner David Kessler tells the New York Times’ Duff Wilson in a story about <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/30/business/30drug.html?_r=2&amp;scp=1&a… drug-maker’s heavy influence on a medical textbook</a>.</p>

<p>But the only way doctors and patients and their families will get a really accurate handle on prognosis with current therapies is if a huge prospective study is undertaken or at least a national registry that includes tens of thousands of patients seen at many academic centers and those seen in the community by both cardiologists and general practitioners.</p>