Insights

<p>In December of 2005, an elementary school in Addyston, Ohio was closed permanently after officials at Ohio's Environmental Protection Agency found enough chemicals in the air to pose a risk of cancer 50 times higher than the regulators considered acceptable. </p>

<p>Matt Goldberg says that he has "hands-down" the best job in the world. He works without times constraints and chases whatever stories he wants. He loves his boss, he loves his team.</p><p>"The only requirement I have is that I have to show up with big stories," he says.</p><p>Which begs two questions: What is this mythical job? And how does he consistently find big stories?</p>

<p>Awareness of the afterschool programs and early intervention -- stories about their importance and effectiveness -- is very important to help combat prejudice, especially on television. But "for some reason, these stories don't sell," says Bennie Ford of LA's BEST, an afterschool program that offers education opportunities and programs to elementary schools in the City of Los Angeles.</p>

<p><a href="http://fugh-berman.com/">Dr. Adriane Fugh-Berman</a> has become the go-to source for comments on how drug companies have been using ghostwriters to inject marketing messages into the medical literature, a controversy that prompted powerful Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, to send <a href="http://www.npr.org/assets/blogs/health/images/2009/08/nihletter.pdf">a letter</a> on Aug. 11 to the National Institutes of Health asking, among other things, "What is the current NIH policy on ghostwriting with regards to NIH researchers?"</p>

<p>Sandra Tsing Loh is a Caltech grad (Physics, '83) -- "truly a B.S. degree," so she "truly knows what is means to be confused by science."</p><p>She brought her one-woman show to open the second seminar of the California Broadcast Fellowship as the keynote speaker. Loh is the creative mind behind <a href="http://lohdown.caltech.edu/">The Loh-Down on Science</a>, a radio show that airs on over 100 radio stations, including KPCC 89.3 in Southern California.</p>

<p>Original post on KQED's <a href="http://blogs.kqed.org/bayareabites/2009/08/20/food-safety-with-health-d… Area Bites</a> 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? </p>

<p>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.</p> <p><a href="http://bit.ly/info/PnKoC">Dr. Gloria Bachmann</a>, 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 <em>The Journal of Reproductive Medicine</em>.</p>

<p>The always provocative <a href="http://www.newscientist.com/">New Scientist</a> magazine has a fascinating, if unscientific, <a href="http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20327213.200-swine-flu-how-expert…; 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 <a href="http://ksjtracker.mit.edu/">Knight Science Journalism Tracker</a>, which is a must-read for health and science journalists.)</p>

<p>In December, Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, sent <a href="http://www.drugs.com/news/senator-grassley-8217-s-letter-designwrite-in… letter</a> to Mitchell A. Leon, the president of DesignWrite Inc., the company that has now become Exhibit A in the unfolding <a href="/blogs/exorcise-ghosts-have-been-haunting-research-journals">ghostwriting scandal</a> that has medical journal editors everywhere combing through their submissions looking for fakes. </p>

<p><a href="http://fugh-berman.com/">Dr. Adriane Fugh-Berman</a> is the principal investigator of <a href="http://pharmedout.org/">PharmedOut</a&gt;, an educational campaign aimed at showing physicians how marketing influences their prescribing decisions. Originally funded by the <a href="http://www.consumerprescribergrantprogram.org/index.htm">Attorney General Consumer and Prescriber Education Grant</a>, PharmedOut, among other things, offers continuing medical education to doctors, allowing them to earn credits without taking courses funded by drug or device companies.</p>