In his weekly “Stories I’d Like to See” column, journalist and entrepreneur Steven Brill spotlights topics that, in his opinion, have received insufficient media attention. This article was originally published on Reuters.com.
1. Who gives out hearts?
In exploring whether former vice-president Cheney might have received preferential treatment when he got a heart transplant recently, many of the reporters covering the story referred to what The New York Times called “a national system that tracks donors and recipients by medical criteria.” Two doctors were then quoted as saying, as one put it: “It is not possible to game the system.”
Fair enough, but who runs the system? Who sets the criteria, and who signs off on who has met the criteria? Who decides close calls? Is there a form that gets signed by a majority of some committee, or is there one king of hearts? And are actual names attached to the patients, so that whoever was making the decision could have seen that Vice-President Cheney was an applicant for the heart in question?
Because transplants are done urgently once a donor becomes available—often after his or her sudden death in an accident, when apparently there are only hours to spare before the heart is no longer viable—is there some kind of operations center, where these decisions are signed off on and coordinated? Can’t some reporter take us there and have us meet the people playing God?
A few days after the Cheney operation, The New York Times shed some light on how transplants of another type of organ—kidneys—are decided. The Times reported on a controversy brewing over whether to establish a single registry to oversee matching kidney donors with recipients. But I’d still like to see a story on who’s making these life-and-death decisions and how. Ditto liver transplants. And, again, not just the processes but the people in charge as well as those on the front lines.
As the science around these transplants continues to advance, and as more patients continue to live longer and seek new hearts, livers or kidneys because they have survived other maladies, the rules and the people involved in these decisions are only going to get that much more important.
2. CVS and privacy:
Often you can get a good story idea just by being in the right place at the right time.
Last Saturday morning, I picked up the phone at home only to hear the beginning of one of those annoying robocall pitches. But this one was a shocker. It wasn’t a pollster or a reminder of an auto maintenance appointment. It was the local CVS drugstore (at least I think it was the local outlet) asking me to press “1” if I was actually “John Smith” so that I could get information about a prescription that was scheduled for a refill. (The robo-voice used another name, which I’m not repeating here, but it was not my name or that of anyone in my family.) I assume that if I had then pressed “1”, the voice would have told me what drug I was scheduled to get more of. I am guessing Mr. Smith would rather that outsiders not know the medication he’s taking.
There are multiple paths for a reporter to pursue here, starting with the privacy issue. Something obviously went awry, since I am not John Smith but got his phone call and presumably could have then gotten the information related to his use of some drug just by pressing “1.” Is this true? What safeguards does CVS have in place, if any, to protect against that. Why did they apparently fail, and how often do they fail? How many complaints have they gotten? Have any regulatory authorities received any complaints? Does anything about CVS’s robo-calling violate the provisions of HIPAA, the federal law that is meant to ensure the privacy of healthcare records?
I'm not sure if all CVS Caremark automated calls use this, but I know that at least some refill calls use three levels of authentication -- the name is only the first level.
#1 Posted by AVA, CJR on Wed 18 Apr 2012 at 11:22 AM
A story I'd like to see (as in see on the news outside of Al Jazerra) is this
EYELESS SHRIMP.
"“The fishermen have never seen anything like this,” Dr Jim Cowan told Al Jazeera. “And in my 20 years working on red snapper, looking at somewhere between 20 and 30,000 fish, I’ve never seen anything like this either.”
Dr Cowan, with Louisiana State University’s Department of Oceanography and Coastal Sciences started hearing about fish with sores and lesions from fishermen in November 2010.
Cowan’s findings replicate those of others living along vast areas of the Gulf Coast that have been impacted by BP’s oil and dispersants.
Gulf of Mexico fishermen, scientists and seafood processors have told Al Jazeera they are finding disturbing numbers of mutated shrimp, crab and fish that they believe are deformed by chemicals released during BP’s 2010 oil disaster.
Along with collapsing fisheries, signs of malignant impact on the regional ecosystem are ominous: horribly mutated shrimp, fish with oozing sores, underdeveloped blue crabs lacking claws, eyeless crabs and shrimp – and interviewees’ fingers point towards BP’s oil pollution disaster as being the cause.
Eyeless shrimp
Tracy Kuhns and her husband Mike Roberts, commercial fishers from Barataria, Louisiana, are finding eyeless shrimp.
“At the height of the last white shrimp season, in September, one of our friends caught 400 pounds of these,” Kuhns told Al Jazeera while showing a sample of the eyeless shrimp.
According to Kuhns, at least 50 per cent of the shrimp caught in that period in Barataria Bay, a popular shrimping area that was heavily impacted by BP’s oil and dispersants, were eyeless. Kuhns added: “Disturbingly, not only do the shrimp lack eyes, they even lack eye sockets.”"
People are eating this and they are exposed to the chemical soup doing this. That ain't good.
#2 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Thu 19 Apr 2012 at 03:11 AM