Journalism
Why Insurers are Winning
How the big U.S. insurers shape health reform (BusinessWeek)
Deadly Delays: Bureaucracy is Killing Us
In the air, on highways, along rails, and on school buses, death recurs as bureaucrats dawdle
Long after wreckage is examined for clues, causes determined, and solutions urged – thousands of Americans still risk death or injury in similar accidents because the causes weren’t fixed. (The Plain Dealer)
Other stories from this series:
Ice on Jets – Recurring Risk, Tolerated for Years – Despite pinpointing causes of multiple commercial airliner crashes, Washington does nothing to require simple, proven remedies advocated for years
Flight 405: The Story of Four Passengers- Strangers on a plane, going about the routine business of flying, trusted that commercial aviation had become as safe as airlines and the government could make it. They were wrong.
Killer Trucks – Why the Slaughter Won’t Stop – Trucks with self-adjusting brakes would have fewer accidents, causing less damage and saving hundreds of lives. Yet the government dawdled in requiring them.
While Grownups Squabbled, Children Died – Battles between automakers and regulators for more than a decade stalled development of safer child seats.
Feds Shrug Off a Life-Saver for Commuter Planes – Commuter airline flights crashed repeatedly into the ground for lack of a simple device urged for years by federal safety officials. The FAA declined. Planes kept crashing.
Cessnas Crash, but Agencies Do Nothing - For decades, Cessnas chocked from a carburetor flaw known to the manufacturer and the government. Yet pilots had never heard of the problem, and the government required no fix.
Yellow Coffins – Modern school buses are among the safest means of transport. Yet when accidents occur, children are often trapped. Still, the government for years allowed preventable tragedies to recur.
Safety Board Has No Teeth – The National Transportation Safety Board is widely known for investigating accidents. What many people don’t realize is that it’s powerless – a toothless tiger.
Drug Trials
Do people know the truth about experiments?
Unwitting test subjects in clinical trials often are kept in the dark.On the frontiers of medical science, researchers frequently fail to clearly disclose the experimental nature of their work. Risks, alternatives or uncertainties are obscured or incompletely explained.
(A series from The Cleveland Plain Dealer)
In the Name of Healing Doctors infused a solvent also used as a gasoline additive into Laura Michalski’s abdomen. Within hours, she died. Eight years later, her family learned it had been an experiment.
“They Used Our Kids as Guinea Pigs.” Medical research records show the U.S. government is still in the business of conducting and paying for clinical trials on unsuspecting Americans.
Foreign Tests Don’t Meet U.S. Criteria The cycle of hype, hope and heartbreak surrounding clinical trials has become a chronic condition in the global pharmaceutical industry, which now initially tests two-thirds of all products for Americans overseas. The experiments often involve fraud, concealed side effects, improvised experiments and human rights abuses.
Research Standards Overseas Vary Greatly With human lives and huge investments at stake, the global pharmaceutical industry increasingly relies on research from outside the United States, where fraud and the use of unwitting test subjects is commonplace. “It’s our little secret…frightening,” acknowledges an overseer of experiments on four continents.
Overseers Operate in the Dark Institutional Review Boards, which oversee clinical trials, were supposed to wrest the monopoly on decision-making from the scientific establishment, placing it in the hands of a group that could balance the interests of medicine, human beings and the community. Average time spent reviewing each clinical trial? Two minutes.
Secrecy in Tests Led to Trouble Doctors confront a dilemma when they experiment on people: Are they healers or scientists? Should they give a patient the best treatment possible? Or do they use their patients as a means to discover better treatment for others?
Other stories in a subsequent series that took a still closer look at medical experimentation around the world:
Living Proof: U.S.-Run Study Gave Ugandans Dummy Pills Instead of Treatment American researchers let tuberculosis worsen, unchecked by an effective drug, in a control group of 500 Ugandans with HIV, as they charted its deadly progression. Some thought “placebo” was a medication that would help them. In the U.S, the practice would have been unethical.
U.S. Medical Researchers Flout Rules Around World On nearly every continent, the U.S. government and its clinical trials partners have hidden risks and undertaken medical experiments without legally required agreements to avoid human rights abuses.
No Bush Left Behind
Presidential brother makes hay from education reform (BusinessWeek)
Home Wreckers
How bank lobbyists undermine homeowner rescue efforts
Even as foreclosures surged, banking industry lobbyists undermined attempts to keep people in their homes. Big banks and their advocates in Washington delayed, diluted and obstructed attempts to address the problem. Industry lobbyists are still at it today, working overtime to whittle down legislative remedies, buy time and thwart regulation.(BusinessWeek)
On the Quayle Trail
Articles on vice presidential candidate Dan Quayle, from the 1988 election. Deadline enterprise included disclosures involving his law school admission, enrollment in National Guard, and inaccurate resume. (The Plain Dealer)
Flight 405: The Story of Four Passengers
They were four strangers going about the routine business of flying. They trusted that commercial aviation had become as safe as the government and the airlines could make it. They were wrong. (From, “Deadly Delays,” The Cleveland Plain Dealer)
Cheerio, Mon Ami!
Among the French, it is not South Kensington but Le Quartier de South Kensington. And for bonne raison: It is their neighborhood now. In this part of London it’s easier to sample tartes aux pommes than a pint of lager. (The Washington Post)
RelationTrips
Travel is more than destinations and activities. It’s experiences, emotions and relationships. Hence RelationTrips.com and the column, RelationTrips, in The Washington Post and other newspapers. A sampling:
Passion Takes a Holiday (July 29 2001)
Honeymoonstruck (August 1, 2001)
Deadly Waters: Milwaukee One Year Later
For all the impact of a crisis, sometimes little changes. Fouled water in Milwaukee sickened thousands and drew huge media and political attention in 1993. Time passes, people forget. Yet people kept dying and the incident dimmed prospects for children like Becky Furmann – just when her life had taken a good turn. (The Plain Dealer)
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