It’s a TV sweeps ratings period, and it’s also breast cancer awareness month, so any boob could see this coming.

The Washington Post makes a big deal of the fact that DC station WJLA is making an even bigger deal about:

“…breaking TV’s unspoken taboo by showing two women fully exposed on its late-afternoon and evening newscasts.”

…

WJLA acknowledges, however, that the timing of its stories may raise some eyebrows: The reports will air on the first two days of TV’s traditional “sweeps” month, a period in which stations air their most eye-catching stories to boost ratings that are used to set advertising rates.

WJLA general manager Bill Lord said he had no qualms about the timing of the reports, or in promoting them beforehand. “People will say we’re doing it just for ratings,” he said. “But we’re a commercial television station — we’re trying to get people to watch us. Yes, this is an attention-getting story, but it’s also an important story.”

Tell me that even this dramatic viewer warning about their online video isn’t meant to titillate:

But the Post story buries the real story, only deep in the story getting to the question of how newsworthy this really is:

“The effectiveness of self-exams as an early cancer-detection method, however, has been questioned in recent years. The National Breast Cancer Coalition says medical studies suggest that the exams are not useful and can lead to “elevated anxiety, more frequent physician visits and unnecessary biopsies of benign lumps.”

The American Cancer Society says self-exams play only “a small role” in finding breast cancer. On its Web site, the society says “it’s okay not to do [a self examination] or not to do it on a fixed schedule.”

At least the Post touched on these issues. The WJLA report never did.

But good luck telling that to a TV news director in the middle of a ratings period.

And good luck trying to talk about evidence (or lack thereof) when a naked breast can give you the bump in the ratings you need so badly.

Now, will they do the same thing for testicular cancer?

In the circles I run in, there’s been a buzz about an announcement first made last December about a “partnership” between the FDA and WebMD. Yesterday the two entities announced an expansion of that partnership “to provide increased access to FDA’s consumer health information.”

I can appreciate the FDA’s interest in reaching the public more directly with its messages.

But WebMD has turned over its “channel” – some of it marked “news” – to a government agency. Should journalists “partner” with a government agency for news and information?

And they boast that “Since the launch, over 150,000 consumers have accessed the FDA destination on WebMD … The FDA’s consumer information is also available through WebMD the Magazine, distributed ten times a year and reaching an additional 11 million consumers with each issue.”

And I would remind the FDA that, while there may not be any ads on the FDA pages of the WebMD site, users are just a link away from ads on WebMD material. I just visited and quickly found myself viewing ads for drugs for fibromyalgia, depression, coronary artery disease and others. Is that appropriate for the FDA?

Something doesn’t feel right about this – for either party – or for the public.

Sandy Szwarc of the Junkfood Science blog looked at this in greater detail when the partnership was first announced in December.

Dr. Roger Rosenberg, director of the Alzheimer’s Disease Center at UT Southwestern Medical Center, has been awarded the first Medal for Scientific Achievement by the World Federation of Neurology. The federation is made up of more than 100 neurology associations internationally. It established the award, and another for service to international neurology, in 2008. The prizes are the first ever given by the federation……..

A scientist at the La Jolla Institute for Allergy and Immunology has received one of the National Institutes of Health (NIH)’s top awards — the 2009 NIH Director’s Pioneer Award. The prestigious prize carries with it funding for total costs of up to $4.7 million over five years, and is designed to support the work of exceptionally creative scientists, whose novel proposals offer the potential to make extraordinary contributions to human health……..

Where do you buy your steroids? That’s a question I’m frequently asked when working out. I’m an amateur bodybuilder and I have no intention of entering competition. I also play hockey and football in our rec leagues and again, no intention of going pro. So I’m not particularly concerned about [...]

If you are looking for an auto insurance coverage, it is very important for you to research on various insurance specialists available on the internet. You could also compare the policies and their features in the available insurancespecialists websites. You will actually become an expert of some sort if you are willing to put in a bit of time and efforts……..

About 2 million Americans currently use cocaine for its temporary side-effects of euphoria, which have contributed to making it one of the most dangerous and addictive drugs in the country. Cocaine addiction, which can cause severe biological and behavioral problems, is very difficult to overcome. Now, University of Missouri scientists Ashwin Mohan and Sandeep Pendyam, doctoral students in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, are utilizing computational models to study how the brain’s chemicals and synaptic mechanisms, or connections between neurons, react to cocaine addiction and what this could mean for future therapies……..

New media writer Jeff Jarvis, recently diagnosed and treated for prostate cancer, is writing about screening again:

“I say, thank god science for screening.”

He’s entitled to his opinion.

He is not entitled to his own personal version of the facts. He writes:

“There is a growing rumble about curtailing screening.”

No. That is simply wrong. There is no move for “curtailing” screening. There are many, however, who are calling for better and more balanced presentation of the potential harms – not just the potential benefits – of such screening.

That is not curtailing. It is not rationing. Nothing would be taken away from anyone.

This kind of talk is classic fear-mongering. When Dr. Otis Brawley of the Cancer Society spoke up about the limitations of screening last week, I read where one pro-screening crusader commented that this is “another sign of Obama health care.”

Wow. But I’ve often thought that the screening camps are as polarized as political camps. It’s just that the screening camps tend to be these:

1. Those who think that EVERYONE should be screened.
2. Those who wouldn’t promote screening nor deny it to anyone, but, rather, would better inform men.

Jarvis concludes his recent column:

“As a matter of statistics and odds, I know screening results in treatment that adds to costs. But it also saves lives – no matter whether we know precisely how many. I believe screening saved my life and I chose not to have been proven right by waiting.

So get your screenings, folks, get ‘em while they last.”

No one is taking anything away. It’s not a matter of “get ‘em while they last.” That’s absurd.

I’m pleased to see that my op-ed piece in the Buffalo News may, at least in some small way, have more people there and elsewhere talking about a more complete picture of the not-so-simple prostate cancer screening decision.

First, it led the Roswell Park cancer center to post an “important message” on its website. In it, Dr. James Mohler, chairman of urology at Roswell Park wrote,

Talking to one’s doctor about screening is not the same as being treated, and we believe that Mr. Schwitzer muddies those issues. Is his takeaway message to men: Don’t talk to your physician? Is it: What you know can hurt you?

I don’t believe my message was muddled at all. And there was nothing in my message that even indirectly hinted at discouraging men from talking with their doctors. What I wrote about was the uneven, imbalanced, incomplete promotion of prostate cancer screening. Whether the information comes from a news story, an ad, from your doctor, or from a website promotion, it should be balanced and as complete as possible. There is no reason why the Roswell Park prostate club promotion had to be so simplistic and incomplete.

Finally, after the op-ed section of the Buffalo News published my editorial, the news department published a news story on the recent public screening discussions. In it, Roswell Park’s Dr. Mohler was again quoted:

“What we’re seeing is the unintelligent use of the PSA test. We need to be screening everyone at risk of death and not everyone,” said Dr. Mohler.

“The PSA has overshot its goal,” he said. “It often finds prostate cancer when it is so low-risk that it doesn’t need to be treated,” he said. “But you also can’t deny that the death rate for prostate cancer has fallen 40 percent since the PSA.”

Actually, anyone in epidemiology or biostatistics would remind you that one of the explanations for a falling death rate could be that the pool of prostate cancer has become so expanded after the introduction of the PSA blood test. So if you’re finding many more abnormalities very early – what some would even call pseudo-cancers – but still calling them cancers – and saw no improvement in treatment, you could still see a dramatic fall in the death rate because the pool of “cancers” – the denominator – would be so much larger.

This, too, is part of the education of the American public that needs to take place.

The White House residently declared the H1N1 swine flu pandemic a national emergency and a USA Today article explains why. The article describes a few hospitals that are already being overwhelmed by patients.

Connie Price, chief of infectious diseases at Denver Health, the city’s public hospital, says, “I’ve been living this” since Aug. 28, when the hospital’s lab reported 12 positive tests for swine flu.



“Since then we’ve been inundated,” she says. “In a typical flu season, we may hospitalize 15 patients. With H1N1, we’ve hospitalized 10 times that many. We’re not even in flu season yet.”



In Rio Grande County, a rural community in the Rockies about 200 miles south of Denver near the New Mexico border, clinics were so overwhelmed with patients that they began turning away those who didn’t have flu. With absentee rates of 40%, schools closed. Many of those children turned up in local clinics and emergency rooms.

Some local hospitals probably could have managed if the 120 million doses of swine flu vaccine had arrived by the end of October as the U.S. government promised back in June. The actual number is far short of the June estimate. We will now be lucky to get 50 million doses by the end of November. In fact, it will be a huge surprise if we get anywhere near that amount. As the New York Times reports, “federal projections have been consistently and wildly overoptimistic and have had to be ratcheted down several times.”



If the vaccine projections had been met the vaccine might have been able to prevent some of these cases that are now likely to inundate hospitals in November, December and on into 2010.



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