âThe Cruelest Cuts,â the Charlotte Observerâs excellent series about âthe human cost of bringing poultry to your table,â has won five journalism awards for the Observer. Reporters Ames Alexander, Kerry Hall, Franco Ordoñez, Ted Mellnik, and Peter St. Onge undertook a 22-month investigation to get the story. They filed FOIA requests for hundreds of poultry-plant […]
We spend a lot of time writing about all of the things that are going wrong, so it’s nice to highlight some promising news periodically. In particular, it seems like there have been a lot of positive news stories about hospitals lately. The Washington Post’s Ceci Connolly profiles Pennsylvania’s Geisinger Health system, which is demonstrating that it’s […]
The New York Times’ R.N. Kleinfield and Steven Greenhouse offer us a glimpse of the nightmare known as the workers’ compensation system. In their article A World of Hurt: For Injured Workers, a Costly Legal Swamp,* they report from the Queens NY office of the NY State Workers’ Compensation Board and explain that injured workers: “come to the board […]
by revere, cross-posted from Effect Measure Tufts University is the latest institution to step in the Conflict of Interest mess and come out with shoes that smell. The University had organized a conference on conflict of interest in medicine and research, with Iowa’s Republican Senator Charles Grassley as the keynoter. Grassley has been an indefatigable […]
Trust For Americaâs Health and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation have released a report on improving food safety, and one of the chief problems they identify with the current system is a lack of centralized food-safety authority: The report calls for the immediate consolidation of food safety leadership within the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) […]
by revere, cross-posted from Effect Measure A little over a week ago the Environmental Protection Agency sent the White House its finding that global warming endangers public health and welfare. This doesn’t sound like news, and except for a minority of scientists out there it is very, very old news. But in the context of […]
Bloggers weigh in on some of the questions in US healthcare reform: Ezra Klein explains what a public insurance option is, and describes three different forms it could take. Maggie Mahar at Health Beat asks whether health insurers are really giving up much ground when they promise community ratings in exchange for an individual mandate, […]
DuPontâs Washington Works plant near Parkersburg, West Virginia used a chemical called perfulorooctampic acid â abbreviated as PFOA or C8 â to manufacture Teflon. A group of Parkersburg-area residents sued DuPont over PFOA contamination in their drinking water, and they eventually reached a $107.6-million settlement with the company. The settlement required DuPont to clean up […]
Itâs Cover the Uninsured Week, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation is working to âhighlight the fact that too many Americans are living without health insurance and demand solutions from our nationâs leaders.â Concern about uninsurance is growing as more people lose jobs that provided them with health insurance. But most of the factors behind […]
By Dick Clapp A critically important verdict with far-reaching implications is soon to be rendered in an Ecuadorian Court. The court case involves the rights of 30,000 indigenous Ecuadorians to compensation from the Chevron oil company for destruction of their land and for devastating ecological and public health consequences throughout the Amazon region in Eastern […]