Transcript
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
People worried about public health have been talking about drug-resistant diseases for years and trying to get news outlets to report on them. A recent study in a scientific journal has thrust the issue into the public eye, but while experts are glad the issue is finally getting attention, they're not all sure it's the right kind of attention. From WNYC, Fred Mogul reports.
FRED MOGUL:
News coverage of serious illness often works like the common cold. There are a few early symptoms, they spread, they linger; they generally just go away on their own. Sometimes it's clear what causes a wave of stories.
FEMALE CORRESPONDANT:
It's the big scare tonight. He has a highly contagious disease that two members of his family already died from, and you may have come very close to this man.
FRED MOGUL:
And sometimes it's more difficult to pinpoint. There's just something going around.
MALE CORRESPONDANT:
Avian flu in Asia. It's killed 65 there so far, but the United Nations says a flu pandemic could kill 5 million to 150 million worldwide.
FRED MOGUL:
For the past few weeks, it's been MRSA, methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus. Its origin as a news phenomenon is fairly clear. Although it's been around for years, a report in the October 17th issue of The Journal of the American Medical Association triggered a veritable outbreak of coverage.
FEMALE CORRESPONDANT:
We begin with a health alert that the CDC right now is calling a major public health problem. It’s concern over drug-resistant staph infection.
MALE CORRESPONDANT:
Because it can be a scary, indiscriminate and silent killer --
MALE CORRESPONDANT:
An Eastern Kentucky school district is being shut down on Monday to disinfect facilities following a confirmed case of that drug-resistant staph infection.
FEMALE CORRESPONDANT:
The bacteria, which is resistant to common antibiotics, is known as MRSA.
FRED MOGUL:
The medical journal was the first to detail the prevalence of MRSA nationwide. The bottom line, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: in 2005 MRSA caused more than 94,000 infections and nearly 19,000 deaths in the United States, most of them associated with health care settings, and most of them preventable.
Glen Nowack, the CDC's communications director, says they figure there'd be widespread interest, and they didn't have a hard time guessing what name might be bestowed on the bacterium.
GLEN NOWACK:
Some of the media like to characterize MRSA as a superbug, and so they wanted to make sure that people understand that the vast majority of these infections were more on the mild versus the severe end.
FRED MOGUL:
To be a bona fide superbug, MRSA would have to be a lot more fierce, with almost no drugs working on it and a higher proportion of the infected dying of it. The New York Times did call MRSA a superbug, but they did so only once out of several stories and only in a broader piece about people's drug-resistant disease anxieties.
The Times' Deputy News Editor Philip Corbett, oversees the paper's stylebook.
PHILIP CORBETT:
It's a scary word and maybe is a little over the top. What you really want to do in trying to inform people about an issue like that is to really try to take a step back and a deep breath and be very sober and thoughtful in how you do it.
FRED MOGUL:
For the sober Times, this meant stressing a couple important distinctions while reporting the story of Omar Rivera. The 12-year-old Brooklyn boy made national headlines when he died of a drug-resistant infection after being sent home by a hospital with inadequate medication to fight the disease.
It's not clear how Rivera was infected, but it wasn't in a hospital. That's unusual. Community-acquired staph infections are much less frequent and generally much less lethal than hospital-acquired ones. Many reporters glossed over this.
FEMALE CORRESPONDANT:
One mother plans to sue the city and a local hospital for 25 million dollars after a drug-resistant superbug killed her son.
MALE CORRESPONDANT:
She said Kings County Hospital gave her, gave Omar Rivera allergy medicine and sent him home two days before he died.
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MALE CORRESPONDANT:
It could have been linked to the superbug, and they say it could have been prevented.
FRED MOGUL:
The effect, says Shannon Brownlee, senior fellow at the New American Foundation, is making the world seem scarier than it is and distracting people from the real zone of scariness.
SHANNON BROWNLEE:
I can't imagine what it must be like to have your child die, of any reason, including a terrible infection. But to fail to say, look, the community-acquired kind is different from the hospital-acquired kind and, in fact, the hospital-acquired one is the big problem, I think it sort of flames parental fears without actually getting people to worry about the thing they really should worry about, which is why aren't hospitals doing something about this infection.
FRED MOGUL:
Brownlee is the author of Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine is Making Us Sicker and Poorer. She says for a while we've been going through cycles of forgetting and then rediscovering that antibiotics are not cure-alls. She recalls this magazine article back in the eighties.
SHANNON BROWNLEE:
And the story was that these superbugs were appearing, and it was the first time anybody had really said, uh-oh, you know, those great antibiotics that we have, they're not working anymore. And I think this was kind of a loss of innocence. I mean, we sort of saw medicine as being all powerful until that point.
FRED MOGUL:
Brownlee thinks the MRSA coverage could lead news audiences to miss the forest for the trees, namely that MRSA is just one of many infections you can get in a hospital, fatal and otherwise. Dr. Don Goldman agrees that some of the nuances are being missed in the coverage, but he thinks overall there's no such thing as bad publicity where drug-resistant bacteria are concerned.
DR. DON GOLDMAN:
On the one hand, I could easily argue that a lot of the media attention has been a bit over the top and has created a sense of anxiety that may be out of proportion to the magnitude of the problem, compared to all other problems. But it certainly is another force or pressure, to get folks to pay attention.
FRED MOGUL:
Goldman is a Harvard researcher and clinician and the leader of the Institute for Health Care Improvement. He has more confidence than Brownlee in the public's MRSA attention span.
DR. DON GOLDMAN:
This has been a building crest of a wave for a while now, and I don't think there's going to be a retreat from the efforts to reduce MRSA. It's too fully ingrained in the consciousness of leadership in hospitals, and, in fact, in legislative agenda, and probably eventually in national reporting requirements.
FRED MOGUL:
But Goldman and Brownlee do agree on one thing, that there is a cheap and easy remedy, fanatical hand-washing, especially in hospitals. For On the Media, I'm Fred Mogul.