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LAURELS
MEDICAL COVERAGE
When the FDA announced on March 22 that it was pulling the hot new diabetes drug Rezulin off the market because of potentially fatal side effects, many if not most Americans were taken by surprise. But for those who had encountered the work of David Willman in the Los Angeles Times, the only logical response could be, What took them so long? Fifteen months before, in his two-part report (December 6-7, 1998), Willman was already on the track of the "fast-track" drug -- the thirty-three previously undisclosed Rezulin-related deaths; the agency's rejection of early warnings and its decision to remove the reviewing medical officer who had opposed quick approval of the drug; its banishment by the British counterpart of the FDA. In the weeks and months that followed, Willman stayed on track, analyzing records; interviewing scientists, patients, and officials; exposing unconscionable conflicts of interest that were known to, and dismissed by, the FDA (two members of the FDA panel weighing Rezulin's safety, for example, were recipients of grant money from Warner-Lambert, maker of the billion-dollar pill). Along the way, the Times probe prompted the FDA to undertake various internal "re-evaluations" that resulted in increasingly restricted use; finally, with the March 22 announcement, the 300,000 patients who had not been changed over to safer medicine were no longer at risk of prescripted death.
HIGH-OCTANE JOURNALISM
Oxy-Fuel News is a weekly trade publication that updates developments in the reformulated gasoline and alternative fuel industries. Last summer, in the August 16, 1999 issue, the newsletter delivered to its handful of subscribers an explosive investigative report that continues to reverberate across the country. Written by editor Carolyn Keplinger, the 3,800-word article released some foul-smelling facts about the EPA and its handling of MTBE, the oxygenate added to 70 percent of the gasoline sold in the U.S. to meet the air pollution standards required by law since 1990. Keplinger's evidence -- gathered during a year of lunch hours spent digesting documents in the EPA files in Washington and backed by interviews with agency officials, city administrators, and industry leaders -- is damning. Not only has the high-risk chemical caused widespread contamination of groundwater from leaking storage tanks in numerous cities -- Santa Monica, California, to cite one example, was forced to shut down its water supply in 1997 when drinking and bathing water began to taste and smell like turpentine -- but more disgusting still, the EPA knew about the dangers of MTBE to water from the start, even while approving its use for cleaning the air. Worse, with congressional bills currently stalled in committee and the corn lobby pushing for ethanol as a substitute (a solution, Keplinger warns, that may carry hazards of its own), no happy ending is in sight; what's left is a maddening story of governmental ignorance and stupidity visited on hapless citizens. (The exposé got national attention five months later when 60 Minutes picked it up in a double segment (January 16, 2000) that made no mention whatsoever of Keplinger or Oxy-Fuel News.)
RELIGION AND REALITY
Vows of celibacy notwithstanding, Catholic priests are dying of AIDS at a rate four times higher than that of the general U.S. population, but, significantly enough, at the November convention of U.S. bishops the subject did not come up. Such dangerous silence will be hard to preserve after Judy L. Thomas's illuminating series in The Kansas City Star. Based on a confidential nationwide survey of 3,000 priests (the text of which was reprinted in the Star); on an examination of scores of (sometimes false) death certificates and church documents; on interviews with hundreds of priests, church officials, and AIDS experts; and on visits to an AIDS hospice and a sex-education school for priests, the series took a nonsensational approach to a controversial story that, as editor Mark Zieman acknowledged in a note to the many upset readers, "strikes straight at the heart of church doctrine." The message of the series itself, wrote Zieman (noting that he himself is Catholic), is that "dying of AIDS is a preventable tragedy. Ignorance and fear and death can give way, through compassion, to knowledge and understanding and life."
LESSONS FOR EDUCATORS
Self-murder among kids is rampant. With bullets and rope, by drowning and pills, through crashing their cars and slashing their wrists, even by provoking police, an appalling number of Americans under the age of nineteen have come to choose death as a reasonable way of dealing with the difficulties of life. For schools, the implications are profound. School may, because of various pressures, be too painful for a child to face; school is where suicidal students commonly commit the act; school liability adds an economic component to the awfulness of the tragedy. In "Teen Suicide: The Silent Epidemic," Education Week confronts all those issues and more. Drawing on over a hundred interviews, assistant editor Jessica Portner's interdisciplinary two-part report (April 12, 19) weaves together statistics, research, case studies, and current theory, emphasizing the often-inadequate budgets for school psychologists as well as successful, new approaches to prevention. (One familiar point that bears repeating here: unrestrained press coverage, the experts believe, contributes to the very real phenomenon of copy-cat acts.) Alarming and informative, thoughtful and challenging, Teen Suicide brings society's darkest failure into the light.
The Darts & Laurels column is written by Gloria Cooper, CJR's managing editor, to whom nominations should be addressed.
