Insights

<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>

<p>Given the seemingly never-ending national news blitz about health reform town halls, it's easy to forget that California's dramatic health care budget cuts still are moving forward.</p>

<p><em><strong>&nbsp;</strong></em><strong></strong></p><p><strong> <p>In a <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/05/health/research/05ghost.html?pagewant… piece</a> in the <em>New York Times</em>, Natasha Singer detailed how <a href="http://www.nlm.nih.gov/locallegends/Biographies/Bachmann_Gloria.html">Dr. Gloria Bachmann</a> leapt at the chance to sign her name to an article she had not written.</p>

<p>ReportingonHealth's <a href="/blogs/131">TalkBack blog</a> recently highlighted media coverage of a new <a href="http://cancerpreventionresearch.aacrjournals.org/cgi/rapidpdf/1940-6207…

<p><i>The New York Times</i> and the medical journal <a href="http://www.plosmedicine.org/home.action"><i>PloS Medicine</i></a> won an incredible victory for patients and for health writers last week. They persuaded a judge in a lawsuit against drug makers to release 1,500 previously sealed documents that tell the story of how drug companies like Wyeth have been acting as ghost writers in medical journals. </p>