Insights

<p>On Sunday, a four-part series a year in the making runs in the Bay Area News Group. As the science reporter for the chain, I teamed with health reporter Sandy Kleffman to report and write this series.</p>

<p>Bay Area News Group will begin a four part series on health inequities Sunday that will feature ZIP code maps revealing wide disparities in life expectancy, asthma hospitalizations, heart diease and cancer rates.</p><p>The project, by reporters Sandy Kleffman and Suzanne Bohan, found striking health differences among ZIP codes just a few miles apart.</p><p>Even middle-class neighborhoods are affected, the analysis reveals. Middle-class areas have longer life expectancies than the poorest neighborhoods, but fall years short of life expectancies in the wealthiest areas.</p>

<p>It’s not as seductive as a candlelit bedroom.</p> <p>But a dinner with medical colleagues after a board meeting can exert a powerful a pull on talented scientists flirting with the drug industry. Rarely one-on-ones, these dinners are usually threesomes:</p><p>1. The seducer: a representative for a medical communications company that has been hired by a drug company to help market a particular product or disease in need of new cures being cooked up by the company.</p><p>2. The object of seduction: a researcher with known expertise in the company’s target area.</p>

<p>In 2008, Henry Schuster was "the new guy" at <em>60 Minutes</em>. Everyone else at the show had already taken the big interviews, the politicians and bigwigs who would be at the center of many reports. So Schuster took a different approach: "I would rather set the table for our viewers by addressing the issue, not the candidates," Schuster told the 2009 <a href="http://www.reportingonhealth.org/fellowships/seminars/california-health… Health Journalism Fellows</a> at this evening's keynote address. "We wanted to do a health care story."<br />

<p>Most unaccompanied refugee minors arrive in the U.S. with basic health issues that need to be addressed. Many are malnourished, having nearly starved on their journey to the States - and many have untreated and/or undiagnosed illnesses. These children also come with severe psychological scars that need addressing. A minority of the refugee minors arriving in Northern California are formally diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.<br />

<p>We have a guest post today from <a href="http://www.healthjournalism.org/secondarypage-details.php?id=377">Felice Freyer</a>, veteran medical writer for the Providence Journal, member of the <a href="http://www.healthjournalism.org/">Association of Health Care Journalists</a> Board of Directors and chair of AHCJ's Right to Know Committee.

<p>For Mark Campano’s entire career as an anesthesiologist, other doctors worried that he was a bomb waiting to go off. They saw him showing up for work drowsy and agitated from weeks of caffeinated days and alcohol-soaked nights. They counseled him about his drug abuse and urged him to stop.</p>

<p>Putting together a scientific research paper should be a different process than building a <a href="http://www.fordvehicles.com/cars/taurus/?searchid=426441%7C28115800%7C2… Taurus</a> or <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xedkk1xvgeo">making a Big Mac</a>.</p> <p>For the drug companies and their ghostwriting partners, it isn’t.</p>

<p>A loophole in California law means that insurers could require you to take a genetic test to qualify for long-term care insurance – and potentially deny coverage based on the results.</p>

<p>Do you know how many hours there are in a week?</p> <p>For doctors, the answer is on the tips of their tongues: 168 hours. As one medical resident recently put it to me, “When you are in residency, you start with the hours in the week and then subtract the few hours that you are <em>not</em> at the hospital. It’s not uncommon to work 120 hours a week. It’s the reverse human schedule.”</p>