In 2019, a U.S. District Court judge ruled that girls in an Illinois school district "must shower with boys" and had no right to privacy.

Explanation: Based on Alonso’s order, the lawsuit still had a substantive chance of succeeding, which could have resulted in the locker room policy being revoked, and trans students in District 211 no longer being allowed access to shared locker rooms of the sex opposite to their birth-assigned sex. Alonso actually facilitated such a potential outcome with his order.

In late 2019, we received inquiries from readers about several online articles whose headline proclaimed that a judge had ruled “high school girls must shower with boys,” and that “girls have no right to privacy.” For example, on Nov. 9 the website The Cube News published an article with the headline “Judge Rules High School Girls MUST Shower With Boys, Says Girls Have No Right to Privacy.” The webpage had a deceptive structure that cause readers who clicked on it to be redirected to several other spammy pages. The post reported that: A federal court permitted a lawsuit to proceed against an Illinois school district that allows high school boys to use girls’ locker rooms, restrooms and showers in order to accommodate transgender students. But girls who don’t want to be seen naked by boys got bad news, College Fix reports. The judge ruled that they have no right to “visual bodily privacy” if the government says so. Dozens of families sued the Chicago-area Township High School District 211 three years ago due to its policy letting students as young as 14 choose to use the locker rooms of the opposite sex. “All the students must use the restroom with the knowledge that someone of the opposite sex is present or could walk in at any time,” their lawyers at the Alliance Defending Freedom wrote in a background document on the case. It makes the stakes clear: “If our government is powerful enough to command innocent school children to disrobe in the presence of opposite-sex classmates, then there will be little it will not be powerful enough to do.” In fact, the entire text of the piece was lifted from an April 2019 article on the right-leaning website The College Fix. Several other websites posted similar articles, also copied and pasted from The College Fix, throughout 2019. The article grossly oversimplified a complicated, multi-phase legal dispute involving students in a Chicago-area high school district, which went on for six years. In December 2013, a trans female student identified only as “Student A” filed a complaint (with the help of the American Civil Liberties Union) with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights. The student claimed that Township High School District 211, just outside Chicago, had violated federal sex-discrimination law by denying her access to girls’ locker rooms, and forcing her to change clothes by herself in a separate changing room. After a two-year investigation, the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) concluded that the school had accommodated Student A’s transitioning gender identity in several other ways, allowing her to use girls’ bathrooms throughout the school, as well as consistently acknowledging and affirming her gender identity by using her preferred pronouns and her new legal name, formally registering her as a female student, and allowing her to participate in female athletics. However, the OCR found that the school had, for two years leading up to the complaint, repeatedly and consistently refused to allow Student A to use the girls’ locker rooms, and that this had indeed constituted impermissible sex discrimination on several grounds. In December 2015, the school district and the OCR signed an agreement that contained a number of terms, the most relevant of which was that, going forward, Student A would be allowed to use the girls’ locker rooms, and that the school would install “privacy curtains” in each locker room, in order to accommodate both her privacy interests and the privacy interests of other female students, as they changed clothes. In May 2016, a group of parents, students and incoming high school students in District 211 calling themselves “Students and Parents for Privacy” filed a lawsuit of their own. They claimed that the Department of Education had illegally exceeded its own authority by implementing a rule that redefined sex discrimination to encompass discrimination involving gender identity (as opposed to merely biological sex). The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, also alleged that District 211’s locker room agreement had caused several female students “embarrassment, humiliation, anxiety, fear, apprehension, stress, degradation, and loss of dignity,” due to the experience or prospect of sharing locker rooms and bathrooms with Student A, and that those “damaging effects” had been so severe as to impinge upon the quality of their access to education, physical education and athletics. Thus, the group alleged a violation of Title IX (the same federal sex discrimination law invoked by Student A), which states:  “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.” The group also alleged that the locker room policy amounted to a violation of the students’ constitutional right to bodily privacy and that, because the policy risked or involved other girls involuntarily seeing Student A in a state of undress, or involuntarily revealing themselves to Student A, while they themselves were in a state of undress, the parents’ right to determine the manner of their children’s upbringing and exposure to individuals biologically assigned to the opposite sex, in intimate surroundings, had also been violated. The lawsuit also more specifically argued that, because the locker room policy at times required girls to undress in the physical presence of a biologically assigned male, and to be physically present while a biologically assigned male undressed, the girls had been denied the ability to practice modesty, and therefore a violation of their constitutionally protected right to religious expression (and their parents’ right to raise their children in accordance with their religious faith) had taken place. In June 2016, the Illinois Safe Schools Alliance, a non-profit group that advocates for LGBTQ school students, was added to the lawsuit, along with Student A and two other trans students in District 211 (“Student B” and “Student C”) as “intervenors.” In June 2017, the “Students and Parents for Privacy” group dismissed the Departments of Education and Justice, meaning that the group was then only suing the school district as defendants, as well as the Illinois Safe Schools Alliance and Students A, B and C as intervenors. In February 2018, “Students and Parents for Privacy” and their spokesperson, Victoria Wilson, resubmitted an amended complaint, which contained updated details and dropped its allegations against the federal government, but otherwise made broadly the same requests and legal arguments as the original complaint. In April 2018, the school district filed a motion to dismiss the claims against it, essentially asking the district court to throw out the case. Almost a year later, in March 2019, Judge Jorge Alonso ruled partly in favor of the motion to dismiss, but also partly against it, as follows: It was to this March 2019 order that the The College Fix referred when it wrote: “A federal court permitted a lawsuit to proceed against an Illinois school district that allows high school boys to use girls’ locker rooms, restrooms and showers in order to accommodate transgender students. But girls who don’t want to be seen naked by boys got bad news: The judge ruled that they have no right to ‘visual bodily privacy’ if the government says so.” And it was on the basis of that analysis that The Cube News published the headline “Judge Rules High School Girls MUST Shower With Boys, Says Girls Have No Right to Privacy.” Alonso did not rule that the girls in question “have no right to privacy.” That section of his order listed and discussed the many relevant constitutional privacy protections that are available to any individual (including the plaintiffs in this case) and recognized in federal and U.S. Supreme Court jurisprudence. What he did do (as virtually all federal court rulings on constitutional questions must do) is locate the limits of those privacy rights. Alonso also did not rule or say that “high school girls must shower with boys.” There are several significant flaws with that claim. Firstly, the locker room policy does not apply only to trans females and girls’ locker rooms and bathrooms. It applies equally to the right of trans males to use boys’ locker rooms, and indeed two of the three trans student intervenors in the case (Student B and Student C) are trans males. Secondly, the “boys” in question (both notional and actual) are biologically assigned as male but are trans females — living and identifying as girls, and formally registered by the school district as female students, officially participating in female athletics, and in the case of Student A, formally recognized as female on her passport. It is therefore flagrantly reductive, incomplete, and grossly misleading to describe a trans female student such as Student A as a “boy,” based only on her birth-assigned biological sex, and in the face of all other highly relevant factual considerations. Student A, in particular, had already begun hormone therapy and was therefore very much in the process of gender reassignment, in every sense, when the original controversy first arose. Thirdly, and perhaps most significantly, Alonso’s March 2019 order very clearly and explicitly did not come to a definitive overall conclusion about the gender-affirming locker room agreement reached between the Office for Civil Rights and District 211. Alonso allowed “Students and Parents for Privacy” to proceed with its lawsuit on the basis of the Title IX sex discrimination/harassment and religious-freedom claims.


New drug ‘may turn back the clock on heart disease’

Explanation: This was an overly enthusiastic account of a study on an experimental new drug called anacetrapib that lowers bad cholesterol and raises good cholesterol. The study was designed to look primarily at the safety of the drug and not whether it prevented heart attacks. But that didn’t prevent the story from making some wildly positive statements about the likely benefits of treatment. The story stumbles out of the gate with an over-the-top prediction about how the drug “may conquer heart disease.”  It continues to lay on the hype with quotes about the “incredible” results and how the drug could be “the perfect new treatment for all people at risk of a heart attack.” We realize some of this enthusiasm came from the mouths of experts but we know there are many who would be far more cautious and we didn’t hear from them in the story. It closes with an erroneous description of how many people died in the study. Needless to say, not what we hope to see on the front page of the nation’s highest-circulating daily. By comparison, look at how NPR closed their online story: “Still there were four deaths from cardiovascular causes among the 800 patients taking Merck’s drug compared with just one among the same number in the the just-released trial results. So don’t count Merck’s drug approved just yet.” (Please note: we reviewed the first version of each story that we found – not any subsequent versions the news orgs may have published. In fact, the version we reviewed doesn’t even appear online anymore.) It would nice if preventing heart attacks was just a matter of lowering bad cholesterol and raising good cholesterol. However, research increasingly suggests that it isn’t as simple as that. Drugs that lower bad cholesterol through one mechanism do appear to be effective, but drugs that lower it another way may not offer the same protection. Similarly, people with naturally high good cholesterol seem to have a low risk of heart attacks, but not every drug that raises good cholesterol has cardiovacular benefits. (In fact, another experimental drug that raises good cholesterol was shown recently to increase the risk of heart attacks.) So far, the drug discussed in this story doesn’t appear to have the same problems as its good cholesterol-raising predecessor, but at this early stage of development we simply don’t know if it works. Larger studies might show that the drug has safety problems that haven’t shown up in this study. Or it might turn out that the drug is safe but doesn’t offer much protection. Some drugs even get approved only to later be recalled because of rare but serious adverse effects that aren’t apparent until millions of people start taking the medicine. This is all a way of saying that caution is required when a drug is this early in its development. There are any number of ways that it could get derailed prior to reaching the market, and so journalists have to take care not get too caught up in the excitement.

Even if this new drug does ultimately prove effective for preventing heart attacks, we need to know what this benefit is going to cost us. Although it may be too early to provide an exact figure, the story could at least have mentioned what treatment with other cholesterol-targeting therapies costs. An error in this story may lead readers to believe the drug is more effective for saving lives than is actually the case. The story states that there were “16 deaths in the anacetrapib group, versus 21 in patients taking a placebo.” In fact, there were 11 deaths recorded in the anacetrapib group and 8 in the placebo group during the time patients were taking the medication. The statistic referred to in the story is for a combined outcome that included cardiovascular deaths, heart attacks, hospitalization for unstable angina, or stroke. The study also used relative risk descriptions to describe the benefits attributable to statin drugs, saying they lower risk by 25-30%. We think this characterization will lead readers to overestimate the effectiveness of these drugs. The absolute reduction in heart attack risk is about 1% for statin-treated patients, and 100 patients need to be treated for 3 years to achieve a benefit. Finally, the story focuses excessively on the “unprecedented” changes in cholesterol achieved with the drug. As discussed earlier in the review (see “Why This Matters”), these are surrogate markers that may not reflect any real benefit on the outcomes that matter to patients. And the story didn’t provide data on what participants’ cholesterol levels were before and after treatment, or what levels are considered healthy. We are only told about the percentage change, which is not very useful without this additional context. Although the potential for harms was mentioned, this story didn’t provide quite enough detail to satisfy this criterion. Citing a company representative, the story states that the new drug didn’t cause the lethal side effects associated with another experimental drug that works through similar mechanisms. While this is true and important to point out, the story should also have mentioned the potential for other effects that could potentially harm patients and would limit the use of the drug. Notably, the researchers had to discontinue treatment in 17.6% of patients receiving the drug because their bad cholesterol levels dropped to a level that might be harmful. In addition, more patients died in the drug treatment group compared with the placebo group, although the story erroneously states that the opposite was the case. (See the Benefits criterion for more discussion of this). This article starts things off with a grandiose and unsubstantiated claim — that “doctors” are predicting the new drug “may conquer heart disease.” Really? Which doctors said this? And why weren’t they quoted in the story? We couldn’t find anyone in the story who said anything close to this. Based on this story’s extremely liberal paraphrasing and selection of gushing quotes, readers might come away thinking that this drug is going to help everyone avoid heart disease. But the study involved a carefully selected group of patients who were already at high risk of a heart attack because they had already had a heart attack or had various other risk factors. It’s not at all clear that this drug is going to be beneficial for patients who are at lower risk of disease, even though many of these apparently low-risk patients still get heart attacks. This study’s purpose was to test whether the new drug was safe and had the desired effect on cholesterol. It could not tell us whether the drug helps prevent heart attacks or deaths. So while we appreciate that the story had some caveats to this effect — e.g. the drug “is still experimental and must be tested in a larger trial” and  “the study wasn’t designed to test its power to prevent heart attacks” — we think there was an imbalance of cheerleading quotes and positive speculation without a more vigorous attempt to discuss the limitations of this preliminary research. Although the story raises some red flags with its emphasis on surrogate markers and overgeneralizing who might would be a candidate for treatment, these are deficiencies that we address in other sections of the review. Otherwise, there was no evidence of overt disease-mongering. The story solicits comments from multiple expert sources. We wish, however, that perspectives had been obtained from experts without ties to the drug industry. This might have turned up someone willing to put a restraining hand on this story’s excessive enthusiasm. In addition, we think the story should have mentioned the study’s source of funding (Merck, the drug’s manufacturer) and the fact that several investigators have financial relationships with the company. The story did not mention other classes of drugs that raise HDL, such as niacin and fibrates. The story states clearly that the drug is experimental and is not yet available to the public. The story makes reference to the relevant research that preceded development of the drug and mentions an “older relative” (the experimental HDL-raising drug torcetrapib) that was not approved because of an increased risk of lethal adverse effects. Although we’ll award a satisfactory, we think the story could have gone into more detail as to what happened with this “older relative” and why it failed. Some data suggest that the drug failed because it raised blood pressure — something which the new drug apparently does not do. But some researchers believe the drug may have failed because raising HDL with a drug doesn’t confer the same benefits as having naturally high HDL. Discussion of this background would have been useful. This story does not appear to be based on a news release.


Illegal immigrants were arrested for starting the October 2017 California wildfires.

Explanation: In 2015, a Malaysian state government official blamed Western tourists for an earthquake, and over the years, the LGBT community has been the target of consistent scapegoating in the United States, particularly on behalf of Christian clergy. Most recently, a number of pastors and ministers blamed Hurricane Harvey on the LGBT community.

Junk News, breitbart, california, freedum junkshun

The California wildfires of October 2017 have prompted a series of articles falsely blaming immigrants and Muslims for starting them. On 19 October 2017, the “satirical” web site Freedom Junkshun published the completely fabricated claim that police in California had arrested Muhammad Islam, a 23-year-old Iranian immigrant. The California wildfires devastated the northern part of the state. Police initially arrested one suspect but released him after an investigation was conducted because the investigation led them to the actual person responsible for the fires: a 23-year-old man named Muhammad Islam. Islam was born in Tehran, Iran and came to the United States in 2015 on a student visa, which expired when he dropped out of Dartmouth in November 2016. None of these details are based in fact, and the Fox News report mentioned in the article also does not exist. The photograph used in the article actually shows Omar El-Abed, a 19-year-old Palestinian man accused of murdering a Jewish family in the West Bank in July 2017. Another article on Freedom Junkshun falsely claims that the fictional Muhammad Islam was seen burning the American flag at a protest in Berkeley, California. On 17 October 2017, the right-wing web site Breitbart falsely linked the arrest of Jesus Fabian Gonzalez in Sonoma County, California, with the wildfires. The article, which was republished by conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’s web site Infowars, falsely described Gonzalez as having been detained in connection with the wildfires, claiming he was “arrested Sunday on suspicion of arson in Wine Country fires that have killed at least 40 residents.” Sonoma County Sheriff Rob Giordano directly refuted these claims in a press conference later that day. The relevant section of the video starts at 12.10: I want to talk about something, there’s a little rumor control issue. The Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office arrested a man on Sunday [15 October] for arson, in Maxwell Park in Sonoma. There’s a story out there that he’s the arsonist for these fires – that is not the case. There is no indication he is related to these fires at all. …Our arson case involves someone who’s known to the deputies, he frequents Maxwell Park, he’s been known to sleep there, he was walking away from…a small fire, they stopped him. He had a fire extinguisher and a lighter with him. They asked him if he started the fire [in Maxwell Park], he said he started the fire to warm himself up, something to that effect. Giordano added that he wanted to “kill that speculation right now,” referring to reports that Gonzalez’s arrest was related to the wildfires. Remarkably, something of a war of words has broken out between the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) over Gonzalez’s arrest. ICE says that Gonzalez is an undocumented immigrant. On 18 October, ICE issued a press release criticizing the sheriff’s office and claiming that it had lodged a “detainer” against Gonzalez (asked the county to detain him for up to 48 hours after his scheduled release date, in order to make a determination about a possible deportation). Once again, a non-cooperative jurisdiction has left their community vulnerable to dangerous individuals and preventable crimes. ICE lodged a detainer against Jesus Gonzalez with Sonoma County jail officials on October 16, following his arrest on felony charges for maliciously setting fire to a property. This is especially troubling in light of the massive wildfires already devastating the region. Over the past year, ICE has lodged detainers against Mr. Gonzalez after four separate arrests by Sonoma County on various felony and misdemeanor charges. ICE was never notified of Mr. Gonzalez’ various releases. Additionally, Mr. Gonzales has been returned to his home country of Mexico on two separate occasions. The residents of Sonoma County, and the state of California, deserve better than policies that expose them to avoidable dangers. Non-cooperation policies – now enshrined in California state law – ensure only one thing: criminals who would otherwise be deported will be released and left free to reoffend as they please. The following day, Sheriff Giordano hit back. In a message posted to Facebook, he said the detainer request was not signed by a judge and was unconstitutional, and said ICE’s press release had been “misleading” and caused fear during a major natural disaster. The US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) issued a press release yesterday that was inaccurate, inflammatory, and damages the relationship we have with our community…ICE sent a detainer requesting the Sheriff’s Office hold Gonzalez for 48 hours past his scheduled release time. However, this detainer is not signed by a judge so the Sheriff’s Office cannot legally honor it. Multiple Federal court cases have determined these administrative detainers are unconstitutional. …Gonzalez has been in our jail approximately 8 times for minor misdemeanor offenses. We have notified ICE about his release in several of those arrests as they took place before our recent policy change. We will continue to notify ICE if it complies with law and our policy. But as I stated earlier, they can seek a warrant and we will hold him. ICE attacked the Sheriff’s Office in the midst of the largest natural disaster this county has ever experienced. Tens of thousands of people have been evacuated, many people have lost their homes and 23 people have died from this firestorm. ICE’s misleading statement stirs fear in some of our community members who are already exhausted and scared. Earlier in the month, the Got News web site published an unsubstantiated claim that senior law enforcement officials believed that Mexican drug cartels — seeking a strategic advantage over the nascent legal marijuana industry — were responsible for the wildfires, which had destroyed a significant portion of cannabis farmland. That deeply flawed article was seized upon by web sites such as Proud Patriots, which almost gleefully reported: President Donald Trump was absolutely right once again. His predictions seem to be true and the US people have one huge reason why should they join the legal battle against DRUGS in the USA and the providers of those drugs – the illegal immigrants and the narco cartels. This trend of blaming certain societal groups (in these examples, immigrants and Muslims) for disasters and tragedies — both natural and man-made — and seeking out evidence of their culpability, however spurious, is nothing new. Throughout Europe in the 14th Century, Jews were scapegoated and blamed for causing the Black Death. They faced widespread and intensified persecution and violence as a result. The televangelist Jerry Falwell blamed the 9/11 terrorist attacks on “the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians.” He later apologized.


Donald Trump violated Palm Beach ordinances by putting up an outsized U.S. flag and pole, then donating the money he was fined to veterans' organizations.

Politics, donald trump, mar-a-lago, U.S. flag

An anecdote about Donald Trump and his outsized U.S. flag and pole neatly encapsulated what so many people found either most appealing or most distasteful about the business magnate and 2016 Republican presidential candidate: to some he was the no-nonsense take-charge type who had the power and influence to thwart those who would insist on allowing the enforcement of petty rules or “political correctness” impede the progress of business and the course of “making America great again”; to others he was a wealthy blowhard who thought the rules didn’t apply to him and habitually bullied others into submission to feed his lust for self-aggrandizement and self-enrichment:  When Trump purchased and rebuilt Mar-A-Lago the Grand mansion and estate in Palm beach, Florida he got into a dispute with the city, who are well known for being strict on zoning regulations. Trump put up a 50 foot flag pole even though 30 foot is the maximum allowed. The city imposed a 1,000 dollar fine per day. While Trump and the city argued back and forth, finally when the fine had reached 120,000 dollars Trump proposed a solution. He would donate that amount to veterans organizations, would move the flag and pole to a different location in front of the mansion and would only use a 30 foot flag pole. The city agreed. So Trump brought in the company who does Golf course construction had them build a 20 foot high grassy hill and put a 30 foot flag pole on top of it. The basic facts are these: In 1985, Donald Trump paid $10 million for Mar-A-Lago, the name of the Marjorie Merriweather Post estate in Palm Beach, Florida. On 3 October 2006, Trump had an outsized American flag (variously described as being either 15×25 feet or 20×30 feet) installed on an 80-foot-high flagpole at Mar-a-Lago, in violation of local zoning regulations that established a maximum size of 4×6 feet for flags and a maximum height of 42 feet for flagpoles. Trump put up his regulation-violating flag and pole without obtaining either a building permit permit or a variance from local authorities, and the Palm Beach town council accordingly fined him $1,250 (or, in some accounts, $250) for every day the flag remained in place (apparently citing him only for the pole but not the flag itself). Trump in turn filed a $25 million lawsuit against Palm Beach, claiming that the town was selectively enforcing its rules (by not fining other properties that were flying flags in violation of town ordinances) and infringing his constitutional right to free speech. Six months later the two sides finally reached an agreement during “secret, court-ordered negotiations,” with the town agreeing to waive all fines against Trump for his code-busting flagpole and to “review its ordinances and codes dealing with flagpoles and flags during the next zoning season,” and Trump agreeing to drop his lawsuit, lower the height of his flagpole from 80 to 70 feet, obtain a permit for the pole and move it farther inland, and donate $100,000 “to charities dealing with Iraq War Veterans, [the] American Flag, or the local VA hospital.”    So, the anecdote reproduced above is true in its broad strokes, although all of the numbers it cites (dollar amounts and dimensions) are inaccurate, the issue was resolved via court-ordered mediation (not by Trump’s “proposing a solution”), and the money Trump agreed to donate to settle the matter went to organizations selected by both sides (although Trump had previously stated that if he won his 15×25 feet or $25 million lawsuit, the proceeds would go to military members returning from Iraq). However, the New York state attorney general later sued Trump for paying the fine through his nonprofit Donald J. Trump Foundation instead of from his personal finances:  The New York state attorney general sued U.S. President Donald Trump, three of his children and his foundation, saying he illegally used the nonprofit as a personal “checkbook” for his own benefit, including his 2016 presidential campaign. Another $100,000 went to another charity in 2007 to settle a legal dispute over a flagpole erected in violation of local ordinances at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s private club and sometime residence in Palm Beach, Florida. We also haven’t been able to verify whether Trump connived to maintain (or even exceed) the height of the original pole by installing a 10-foot-shorter pole on a 20-foot-high hill — pictures of the estate show the flagpole rising from a mound, but the height of the mound is difficult to estimate from photographs:  Trump’s lawsuit maintained that he couldn’t bring his flag and pole into compliance with regulations because  “A smaller flag and pole on Mar-A-Lago’s property would be lost given its massive size, look silly instead of make a statement, and most importantly would fail to appropriately express the magnitude of Donald J. Trump’s and the Club’s members’ patriotism.” In his statements to the news media at the time he typically framed the issue as being one of his standing up to anti-American, anti-flag, anti-patriotic forces, while acknowledging that he hadn’t even bothered applying for a permit first (because he didn’t think he’d get one) and stating that he didn’t believe rules should apply to the American flag (and therefore to him in this instance):  “Well, I put up an American flag on the front of the Mar-a-Lago Club, which is a great house, probably the greatest house in America that I turned into a private club very successfully in Palm Beach, Florida. And the flag is very proudly waving, and the town wants me to take it down. Because they say I put it up without a permit and, frankly, had I gone to the town for a permit they wouldn’t have given it to me, probably. But more importantly, I say that you don’t need a permit to put up the American flag. I don’t think they know what their beef is. I’m not sure they really understand what their beef is. They don’t talk about the flag. They only talk about the flagpole because they’re afraid politically to mention the word flag and the American flag and take it down. And I’ll say it’s probably one of the most popular things I’ve ever done because we’ve had hundreds and hundreds of letters and thousands of requests for everything supporting the flag. Everybody wants it. Everybody wants it up. But the town wants me to take down the American flag, and I told them I’m not doing that. This is probably the wealthiest town — it is the wealthiest town in America, in the United States, and frankly it’s a town that wants me to take down a flag and they shouldn’t be asking for that. So it’s been a very, very problematic situation. I’ll be responding to them very shortly. And you know, I’m a big — I’m a very patriotic guy. I’m very proud of the country, and I don’t want to take down the American flag. And I don’t believe you need permits to put up the American flag.”  Long-time Palm Beach Post correspondent Frank Cerabino opined that the Palm Beach flag brouhaha had little or nothing to do with patriotism, but rather was part of a pattern of Trump’s using lawsuits to bend local authorities to his will — dredging up excuses to sue them for exorbitant amounts of money, then offering to drop the suits in exchange for agreements that provide him with significant business advantages:  Oh, he knew what he was doing. Trump, after all, had been fighting with the town poohbahs from the very moment he’d crashed into the complacent, clubby world of Palm Beach to buy Mar-a-Lago, which turned out to be one of those great deals he couldn’t afford. Trump knew from experience that Palm Beach was a stickler for adherence to its ordinances. He had once paid a $5,000 fine to the town for replacing a section of dead hedges with replacements that weren’t quite tall enough. But Trump had bigger changes in mind than merely out-flagging his neighbors. He was plainly inviting a lawsuit. The town council took the bait, citing the oversized pole and flag as violations of the town code, and fining Trump $250 a day for every day they remained on the estate. Tucked into his patriotic posturing was a completely unrelated legal matter that he made part of his multi-million lawsuit: a complaint about the town code that requires large commercial enterprises to be “town serving.” The town requires proof from local businesses that at least 50 percent of their business comes from town residents. So, for example, when Neiman Marcus opened on Worth Avenue in Palm Beach, it was allowed to do so by promising that it would only advertise in the town’s newspaper, and not in publications that circulated to shoppers who don’t live on the island. For Trump, eliminating the “town serving” requirement would mean that he could offer more memberships to his Mar-a-Lago social club to people who had no connection to Palm Beach, making it easier for him to keep his club full. Softening up the town on the flag issue to pursue some other angle was a classic Trump move. Though he has yet to get this particular exemption waived, Palm Beach has learned from experience that Trump’s lawsuits are never settled, just dormant. One of his Palm Beach lawyers said recently that the “town serving” issue is still unresolved and ripe for more litigation. Trump [initially] couldn’t afford [to maintain] Mar-a-Lago as a single family home. His proposed solution was to chop his National Historic Landmark into something he called Mansions of Mar-a-Lago, a development that would put a public road through the middle of the estate, which would lead to the 10 mini-mansions he would build on the property, including one on the front lawn. The Palm Beach Town Council shot down all of Trump’s proposed changes to the property, even when he reduced his mini-mansion plans from 10 to seven. Instead, they encouraged him to find a buyer if he couldn’t afford to keep the estate intact. When the town’s government refused to bend to his demands, Trump sued. The lawsuit against the Town of Palm Beach, which would prove to be not his last, would eventually cause his neighbors to lawyer up against him. After his Mansions of Mar-a-Lago plan was rejected, Trump found another way to salvage his stake in Mar-a-Lago. He offered to drop his lawsuit if council members allowed him to convert his estate into a new private club on the island. The Mar-a-Lago Club. While Trump was playing defense against the town’s constant attempt to rein him in, he went on the attack against the county and its airport. Airlines routinely used a flight path in and out of Palm Beach International Airport in nearby West Palm Beach that brought the planes directly over Mar-a-Lago. This didn’t sit well with Trump, who argued that the noise and fumes were ruining his investment, and that the decent thing for the county to do was to move the airport farther west. Trump had been arguing this for years, to no avail, while calling the airport director Bruce Pelly, among other things, a “moron” and “the worst airport director in the country.” It turned out to be a useful gripe for Trump, one that he could turn into a new business opportunity, because just south of the airport was 214 acres of vacant scrub land owned by Palm Beach County, land he wanted. So Trump sued the county for $75 million over the airport noise, then negotiated to drop that lawsuit in exchange for the county giving him a 75-year lease on the nearby property for $438,000 a year. That land became the Trump International Golf Club, a $40 million, 18-hole, Jim Fazio-designed course that imported nearly 2 million cubic yards of dirt to transform the flat scrub land into hilly terrain with waterfalls, rock formations, and a clubhouse four stories above sea level. This wasn’t the only instance of flagpole bickering in Trump’s past. He also reached a (non-court) settlement with local government in 2014 after having raised Old Glory on a 70-foot flagpole at the Trump National Golf Course in Rancho Palos Verdes, California, without obtaining a permit first:   Signaling a possible resolution to Donald Trump’s running flag feud, the California Coastal Commission said the mogul’s oversized Old Glory can stay — as long as Rancho Palos Verdes revises its municipal height rules. While not the victory city officials had hoped for, the decision allows for a way forward to legally allow the 70-foot-tall flagpole, which was hoisted without a permit nearly 10 years ago. Having gained the support of much of the coastal city — as well as two City Councils through the years — the flag now likely can get formal state approval provided the city amends its Local Coastal Program that currently limits structure heights to 26 feet. “I’m disappointed at the Trump Organization for putting up that flag without adhering to the rule of law,” said Coastal Commissioner Wendy Mitchell. Commission staff members had recommended that the flagpole be reduced in height to 26 feet and moved closer to the clubhouse on the 240-acre Trump National Golf Course property.


Photograph shows a KKK member being treated by an all-black emergency room staff.

Explanation: A photograph capturing a KKK member being treated by an all-black emergency room staff was part of an advertising series, not a genuine historical image.

One might think of the following image, which apparently captures a Ku Klux Klan member (presumably the victim of a trauma) being treated by an all-black emergency room staff, as the flipside of familiar accounts of blacks dying from treatable injuries during the Jim Crow era of segregation because they were refused treatment at “whites-only” hospitals. In this photograph, however, the black ER staff doesn’t turn the tables by refusing to treat a KKK member despite his membership in an organization dedicated to terrorizing them; instead, they diligently work at saving his life, the same as they would for any other patient:  Despite many viewers’ mistaking it for such, this photo was not a real historical image, nor was it a screen capture taken from an episode of the then-popular television hospital drama ER, (and the doctor shown in the center of the picture was not actor Eriq LaSalle, who portrayed surgeon Dr. Peter Benton in that TV series). The crease down the middle of the image gave it away as a picture scanned from a printed source, and indeed it was — this photograph was a staged one created for a series of advertisements in Large magazine’s “For people who think bigger than they are” ad campaign, which featured depictions of people acting nobly in the face of adverse circumstances:


Portable device detects severe stroke in seconds with 92 percent accuracy

Explanation: With a suspected stroke, speed matters. If this device described in the release, called a volumetric impedance phase shift spectroscopy (VIPS), could help emergency personnel determine where to take patients with suspected stroke for treatment (a comprehensive stroke center or a primary stroke center) then it might be very valuable. The release describes a published study on the VIPS diagnostic tool showing that it can accurately detect large-vessel occlusion (a blockage or closing of a blood vessel) in patients with suspected stroke yet it misses some of the key features you’d expect with a news release talking about a new diagnostic tool, especially its cost, and its accuracy measured against other methods, such as a mobile CT scan, to differentiate strokes. If care could be improved by a speedier, easy to use device which helps decide whether endovascular therapy (a procedure used to treat problems affecting the blood vessels) is necessary this could well improve outcomes for stroke patients. Researchers at the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC), Mount Sinai, the University of Tennessee Health Sciences Center and elsewhere published a study in the Journal of Neurointerventional Surgery suggesting that their device (a visor worn by emergency personnel) called a volumetric impedance phase shift spectroscopy (VIPS) was better at identifying patients with large-vessel occlusions than a standard physical examination. This matters because if the device passes all the other tests we expect of diagnostic tools including showing it’s sufficiently sensitive and specific and an improvement over other methods, then it could more quickly route patients to stroke centers that have endovascular capabilities and have a large impact on the outcome of patients.

Medical University of South Carolina,stroke

Even though the device is still in its testing phase, not discussing what the ultimate cost could be does a disservice to readers. It is important when discussing medical diagnosis to relate the test sensitivity (the ability of a test to correctly identify those with the disease or the true positive rate), and the test specificity (the ability of the test to correctly identify those without the disease or the true negative rate). This news release only mentions the specificity of the test, even though the actual study it was summarizing reports that “the VIPS device was able to differentiate severe stroke from minor strokes with a sensitivity of 93% (95% CI 83 to 98), specificity of 92% (95% CI 75 to 99)… and differentiate severe stroke from all other subjects with a sensitivity of 93% (95% CI 83 to 98), specificity of 87% (95% CI 81 to 92), and an AUC of 0.95 (95% CI 0.89 to 0.96).” However, we should remember that diagnostic tests need to demonstrate that they offer a benefit beyond the current standard of care and that using them would improve patient outcomes. The current study doesn’t measure that and so it is hard to know if it will be helpful in treating patients. There are no harms mentioned in this news release. One big concern with both diagnostic and screening tests is the consequence of a false negative test result which could lead to a patient receiving the wrong, unnecessary or no treatment. The study compares this device to a standard clinical diagnosis. However, the gold standard in stroke care is a CT scan which determines if a patient is a candidate for clot busting drugs like tissue plasminogen activator (tPA), which opens blocked vessels after a stroke, or endovascular therapy. The real comparison would be comparing this device to CT scans given that mobile CT scanners are increasingly being used in ambulances. The release doesn’t engage in disease-mongering. The release identifies the funding company, Cerebrotech Medical Systems, and notes that Cerebrotech “paid consultants to analyze the neuroimaging data independently.” The study compares this device to a clinical diagnosis by neurologists and the release states that the device showed “92 percent specificity” which we are told is above the “standard physical examination tools used by emergency personnel that display specificity scores between 40 and 89 percent.” But as noted above, the better comparison would be comparing this device to CT scans given that mobile CT scanners are increasingly being used in ambulances. We learn that this is very preliminary research and that the researchers will do another study to “determine if the VIPS device can use complex machine learning algorithms to teach itself how to discriminate between minor and severe stroke without the help of neurologists.” The device itself is new technology so it earns a Satisfactory for the novelty claim. However, the idea of pre-hospital diagnosis is not novel. Putting CT scanners in ambulances has been tried and seems to be (at least preliminarily) successful. This may be a low-cost alternative to that, but that still needs to be proven. There is no inappropriate language used here, but there is a simile that might be suspect: “This could potentially be something like a defibrillator,” said Turner. “You can find out if a patient is having a stroke, just like you can put a defibrillator on a patient to see if they’re having a heart attack.” That comparison is fairly flawed. Monitors diagnose arrhythmias. ECGs diagnose heart attacks. Defibrillators shock patients who are having an arrhythmia during their heart attack.


Edith Jones, who integrated southern medical schools, dies.

Explanation: Dr. Edith Irby Jones, the first black student to enroll at an all-white medical school in the South and later the first female president of the National Medical Association, has died. She was 91.

Race and ethnicity, General News, Medical schools, Arkansas, U.S. News

Jones’ daughter Myra Jones Romain said mother died Monday in Houston of natural causes. The University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, which Jones integrated in 1948, also announced her death in a post on its website Tuesday. In addition to being the first black student at UAMS, Jones also was the first black female resident at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston after receiving her medical degree from Arkansas in 1952. Jones was born on December 23, 1927 in Mayflower, Arkansas, to Robert and Mattie Jones, a sharecropper and a domestic worker. In a transcribed interview with the University of Houston Center for Public History, Jones said that after her older sister died in the 1930s from typhoid fever, Jones decided to pursue medicine. She enrolled in Knoxville College at 16 and graduated in 1948. After scoring exceptionally on aptitude tests, she was accepted to multiple medical schools. She chose University of Arkansas’ medical school, Romain said, because tuition was low and because it was close to her mother. The decision wasn’t out of a desire to integrate a previously all-white institution, her daughter said. “I was so proud. I was so proud that I was in medical school that absolutely nothing else mattered,” Jones said in the interview with the University of Houston. According to UAMS, the school’s board of trustees voted to increase the class size by one that year so no one could claim Jones had taken a spot from a white applicant. In 1950, she married Dr. James B. Jones, a psychology professor at a nearby university; they were together until his death in 1989. The couple had three children, Gary, Myra and Keith. Jones established medical practices in Hot Springs, Arkansas, and Houston and completed her residency at Baylor, where she also later taught. In 1985, Jones was elected the first female president of the National Medical Association, a medical organization representing African American doctors and their patients. She was also a founding member of the Association of Black Cardiologists. In Arkansas, Jones was also a prominent activist as a member of the “Freedom Four,” encouraging people to join the civil rights movement. Romain said her parents encouraged and often paid for students’ tuition at Knoxville College, Jones’ alma mater and a historically black liberal arts college. In the 1990s, Jones sponsored and co-founded a clinic in Haiti. When her mother would travel to the island, Romain remembered, she’d bring pharmaceutical samples and other important drugs in large suitcases, sneaking them into the country past customs. In 1988, Jones lost one of her eyes after developing glaucoma. Romain said she continued working using a prosthetic, a solution that worked until she began losing her eyesight in her remaining eye. Romain said Jones practiced and taught medicine until she reluctantly retired in 2013, telling her daughter, “All I’ve ever wanted to do was practice medicine.” A funeral will be held Saturday morning at Antioch Missionary Baptist Church in Houston


Explanation: This nugget of a story, while nicely written and easy to read, puts too much emphasis on the promise of new findings and not enough on the actual data involved in the study. Research by the University of Alberta in Canada looked at the composition of saliva from three groups of people — Alzheimer’s patients, people with mild cognitive impairment, and those whose mental skills were normal for their age. An analysis of the saliva from these three distinct groups showed specific differences in certain compounds present. The story suggests that the findings could form the basis of “a relatively easy and non-invasive way to determine which people are at higher risk of developing more serious degenerative brain conditions.” But the story offers few if any specifics about the size or design of the study, its limitations, or the actual results of the investigation. While a competing HealthDay story took pains to point out the tentative nature of the study, this Time piece gives readers a cursory and overly optimistic view of its potential. Alzheimer’s dementia is a debilitating and increasingly prevalent condition in our aging society. If the described simple, non-invasive screening test is truly effective (which will take much more testing to find out), it could have an enormous impact that is potentially positive if we develop better treatments for Alzheimer’s patients and can take action based on the results. There is also potential for negative impact resulting from false positive and false negative results, and from knowing about a frightening diagnosis without having the ability to do anything about it.

There is no mention in this short story about the potential costs of such a test, if it proved to be viable. Of course, it’s too early to say anything definitive about cost, and offering a specific number might mislead readers by implying that the test is anywhere near ready to be used. But we think the story could have offered some sense of the technology behind the test and whether it’s advanced/expensive or cheap/widely available. Other tests using saliva are in use today and could offer a general comparison point to suggest the costs of a new test. While the story outlines the potential benefits of such a test in general terms, it does not quantify the results of the study or tell readers how accurate the test was found to be. We think any story about diagnostic testing or screening should discuss the sensitivity and specificity of the test — numbers which tell us about how well the test finds people who actually have the disease and rules out people who don’t have it. Direct harms from a simple saliva test seem improbable at best, given its non-invasive nature. But the competing HealthDay story pointed out that even a saliva test could produce false positives that could cause real anxiety in patients, something that clearly could harm them. There is also the potential for false negative results, which would falsely reassure patients about their status. Even an accurate positive finding could cause harm, since it would inform people about their risk of a future condition without giving them the ability to do much about it. This story focuses on the findings of a very early study using a small number of participants. But the shortness of this offering — four paragraphs — isn’t sufficient to convey the preliminary nature of the research. A competing HealthDay story offers a lengthy paragraph outlining all the factors that might explain differences in the saliva makeup of the three groups and thereby negate the test’s use for determining Alzheimer’s. That story also emphasizes the tentative nature of the work numerous times. In cases like this, where the research is preliminary and the reporting is cursory, it’s worth questioning whether doing a story at all is worth it. The story doesn’t engage in disease mongering, but there’s really not enough context about the disease or its impact to justify a Satisfactory rating. We’ll call it Not Applicable. The story doesn’t offer independent sources and only paraphrases information from the graduate student/principal investigator. This story focuses solely on research suggesting that a simple saliva test might one day gauge the risk of developing the disease. It doesn’t discuss how Alzheimer’s is currently diagnosed or what risk factors might increase one’s likelihood of developing the disease. We give credit here for this acknowledgment: “The results aren’t conclusive enough yet for doctors to start using them to distinguish people who are more likely to develop Alzheimer’s.” However, readers overall may get the impression that the test’s clinical usage is coming soon, when that’s not likely the case. We’d be much more comfortable if the story included more information accurately portraying the tentative nature of the findings, findings that might be actually caused by other factors not studied. The research discussed here is novel in a general sense, but the story doesn’t establish this to a satisfactory degree. A number of previous studies have looked at saliva markers of Alzheimer’s, and there are probably dozens of other blood tests, scans, and other approaches currently in development to address the diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease. The story does not allude to this research. We didn’t see evidence that the story relied on this news release about the presentation. However, since it contains such limited information, it’s hard to determine how it was produced. We’ll rule it Not Applicable.


Italy's coronavirus deaths surge as Lombardy seeks tougher curbs.

Explanation: The death toll from coronavirus in Italy has jumped by 250 in the last 24 hours, the biggest daily increase ever recorded by any country, as the worst-affected Lombardy region asked for a complete shutdown of factories and offices.

The government this week imposed drastic curbs nationwide, shutting bars, restaurants and most shops, and banning non-essential travel in an effort to halt the worst outbreak of the disease outside China. The measures so far show no sign of slowing the number of deaths, which rose by 25% in a day to 1,266, the head of the Civil Protection Agency said on Friday. The total number of cases rose to 17,660 from 15,113 the day before, an increase of some 17%. Lombardy’s health chief Giulio Gallera said the government’s restrictions were not enough for the region which surrounds the financial capital Milan and accounts for three quarters of all the country’s fatalities. “We are asking for an exception to be made for Lombardy,” he told RAI 3 television, calling for the closure of factories, offices and public transport in the region. “If we can resist for at least eight days, maybe we will see things turn around.”  There was no indication of whether Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte would agree to further curbs in Italy’s business heartlands, with the government increasingly concerned about the long-term scars the virus will leave on the fragile economy. Some companies, such as car maker Fiat Chrysler, have decided to shut down part of their operations, while premium brakes maker Brembo announced on Friday it would temporarily stop work at all its four Italian plants. “Today we have two objectives: Taking care of the sick and preventing infections, and taking care of our economy,” Foreign Minister Luigi Di Maio said on Friday. He was speaking at an event to thank China for sending 31 tonnes of medical supplies, including masks and respirators, to Italy, as well as a team of doctors. “Italy is not alone,” Di Maio said. “China is getting back on its feet and soon we too will be back on our feet.”  Italy’s fatality rate, at 7% of all those who test positive from the highly contagious virus, is much higher than that of most other countries. Italian health authorities attribute this mainly to an elderly population, with the majority of victims more than 80 years old with underlying health problems. However, other explanations have also been suggested. Ilaria Capua, a virologist at Florida University, said this week that many patients may be dying due to separate infections from antibiotic-resistent bacteria in Italian hospitals. Another factor may be that Lombardy is having mounting problems treating the number of patients needing intensive care. The health ministry has said it can quickly increase intensive care units by 50% nationwide, but a ministry source told Reuters on Friday that this “may not be enough in regions like Lombardy if we cannot halt the contagion.”  Giuseppe Remuzzi, head of the Mario Negri pharmacological institute, told daily Corriere della Sera that people are increasingly “terrified” of going to hospital, and are not calling emergency services until they can barely breathe. Italy has been dismayed by the response of some of its closest European allies to the crisis, with EU states refusing earlier this month requests for help as they stockpiled face masks and other medical equipment for their own citizens. Austria and Slovenia have also drawn diplomatic displeasure by drastically limiting cross-border road traffic, leading to lengthy tailbacks and widespread confusion. Four buses carrying Ukrainian nationals trying to get home from Italy were turned back at the Slovenian frontier overnight. “We can’t continue our journey. We have children on board, we are tired and we can’t continue,” said an upset woman, who did not give her name. “If something happens, we want to die in our homes, in our country,” said a Ukrainian man next to her. In Rome, Pope Francis rebelled against a decision by his Roman Catholic Church to close all the 750 churches in the Italian capital - an unprecedented move in modern history. “Drastic measures are not always good,” the pope said on Friday in improvised remarks at the start of his morning Mass, streamed on the Internet. Within hours, the Church in Rome rowed back on the order and said all parish churches and those run by religious communities could remain open.


Mike Pence supported "gay conversion" therapy, including the use of electroshock therapy.

Explanation: What's true: Mike Pence once supported the use of federal funding to treat people "seeking to change their sexual behavior." What's false: Pence never stated that he supported the use of electric shocks or "gay conversion" therapy.

In October 2016, an image appeared on social media accusing Indiana’s governor (and Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s running mate) Mike Pence of supporting “gay conversion” therapy, particularly the use of electric shocks as part of the practice:  The allegation dates back to 2000, when Pence was running for Congress. His campaign web site at the time touted his call to add a stipulation to the Ryan White Comprehensive AIDS Resources Emergency (CARE) Act, a 1990 law providing funding for HIV/AIDS treatment for patients living with the disease lacking either the income or the necessary insurance to pay for it on their own: Congress should support the reauthorization of the Ryan White Care Act only after completion of an audit to ensure that federal dollars were no longer being given to organizations that celebrate and encourage the types of behaviors that facilitate the spreading of the HIV virus. Resources should be directed toward those institutions which provide assistance to those seeking to change their sexual behavior. Although he didn’t say so outright, the position has been widely interpreted as signaling Pence’s support for “gay conversion” therapy, which seeks to “cure” patients of being attracted to members of the same sex. According to the American Psychological Association, electric shocks were one of the techniques used to address homosexuality through “aversion therapy” prior to the group’s decision in 1973 to stop classifying it as a mental disorder. By the time Pence made his statement regarding the Ryan White CARE Act, that group and several others, including the American Psychiatric Association, had rejected the practice: Psychotherapeutic modalities to convert or “repair” homosexuality are based on developmental theories whose scientific validity is questionable. Furthermore, anecdotal reports of “cures” are counterbalanced by anecdotal claims of psychological harm. In the last four decades, “reparative” therapists have not produced any rigorous scientific research to substantiate their claims of cure. Until there is such research available, [the American Psychiatric Association] recommends that ethical practitioners refrain from attempts to changeindividuals’ sexual orientation, keeping in mind the medical dictum to first, do no harm. The potential risks of reparative therapy are great, including depression, anxiety and self-destructive behavior, since therapist alignment with societal prejudices against homosexuality may reinforce self-hatred already experienced by the patient.Many patients who have undergone reparative therapy relate that they were inaccurately told that homosexuals are lonely, unhappy individuals who never achieve acceptance or satisfaction. The possibility that the person might achieve happiness and satisfying interpersonal relationships as a gay man or lesbian is not presented, nor are alternative approaches to dealing with the effects of societal stigmatization discussed. “Conversion therapy” has been banned by law in five states (California, Illinois, New Jersey, Oregon, and Vermont) as well as in Washington, D.C. We contacted Pence’s office seeking comment on his stance regarding the issue but did not receive a response. Republicans were hit with a similar accusation in July 2016, when their national platform included the phrase “We support the right of parents to determine the proper medical treatment and therapy for their minor children.” When asked whether that statement represented support for “conversion therapy,” Republican National Committee chair Reince Priebus replied that “It’s not in the platform.”


A coronavirus-related health advisory graphic issued by the World Health Organization warned against unprotected sex with farm animals.

Explanation: You can take the virus out of the farm, but you can't ...

In January 2020, as a newly discovered flu virus known as the Wuhan coronavirus began sickening people across China and then spreading outside that country, health officials around the world began issuing advisories offering basic steps people could take to help reduce the risks of coronavirus infection. Many of the suggested protective steps were common sense health approaches best followed at all times, such as washing your hands with soap and water, covering your mouth when you cough or sneeze, avoiding close contact with persons exhibiting symptoms, and cooking animal-based food products thoroughly. One tip offered in a purported coronavirus advisory put together by the World Health Organization (WHO) raised some eyebrows, however:


Anti-Gravity Treadmill helps injured get moving again

Explanation: The story doesn’t compare the new gee-whiz technology to alternatives, such as exercising in a swimming pool – leading oneline news reader to comment, “You can do the same thing in any swimming pool and get a better workout.” The story misrepresents the available research evidence. It is vague about benefits and silent about potential harms. It mentions cost, but not in a way that is useful to readers. The story invokes the NASA-linked origins of the concept underlying the Alter-G device, but it is like a report that extols the wonders of Tang without acknowledging the existence of orange juice. At some point, almost everyone has had or will have physical therapy or athletic training. Stories about these topics have a responsibility to tell readers about the evidence underpinning claims of health benefits and about alternative techniques for achieving health outcomes.

Although the story does report that this special treadmill costs $25,000, that information is not very helpful to readers who aren’t likely to be shopping to buy a unit. The story should have reported the typical cost of a therapy session and a typical number of sessions that patients require; as well as whether the cost of using this device is generally covered by health care insurance plans. The story quotes one user calling the device “miraculous.” A trainer says the device “lets people walk with a normal gait so they don’t develop bad habits that lead to other orthopedic problems,” but without offering any evidence that users of the device far any better than those who rely on other rehabilitation techniques. The thrust of the story is that this weight-supporting treadmill speeds recovery, but nowhere does the story actually say what special benefit users get from this device. How much faster do they recover compared to alternatives? Do they walk or run better than if they had used a different device or technique? Readers are fed glowing, but anecdotal, praise for the device, while these and other important questions are left unanswered. The story does not address potential harms, including the potential harm of diverting patients from rehabilitation programs that have a more extensive base of supporting evidence and experience. The premise of the story is that this weight-supporting treadmill helps people recover from injuries, surgery and other walking and running problems. Although the story reports that “it’s rooted in science,” the research touted by the company does not actually address the question of whether this device works any better than (or even as well as) alternative rehabilitation techniques. A few anecdotal reports are offered, but no trials comparing this device to exercising in a swimming pool or using other methods to reduce weight load or impact during recovery. The company includes a long list of clinical reports on its web site, but almost all of them merely measure the biomechanical forces on users, not whether the device offers any advantages in terms of healing or function. While people quoted in the story said they felt better during the sessions, there is nothing to indicate they derived lasting health benefits. Also, some of the summaries of the research offered by the device maker appear to overstate the results. For example, the company describes review articles that “validate the AlterG as a highly effective rehabilitative modality in a wide variety of clinical settings,” but the review article cited just includes a picture of the AlterG treadmill as one example of available rehabilitation devices. Swimming pool exercise is the first option highlighted in this article, which does not refer to the AlterG device in the text. References:  AlterG Clinical Research Update: http://www.alter-g.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/AlterG_Clincal-Research.Oct2010.pdf Rehabilitation review cited by AlterG: Wilk, Kevin E., Macrina, Leonard C., and Reinold, Michael M.; Rehabilitation Following Microfracture of the Knee. Cartilage 1(2): 96-107, 2010. http://car.sagepub.com/content/1/2/96.abstract  The story fails to tell readers about ties between the people quoted in the story and the company that sells the device. For example, trainer Valerie Gluth has coordinated her physical therapy company’s marketing with Alter-G. Elite distance runner Shannon Rowbury appears in Alter-G marketing materials and has received free use of the device. References: Joint news release from Alter-G and Valerie Gluth: http://www.corestrengthforlife.com/_assets/_pdf/MVPT_Alter-GpressRelease_Nov_19_2009.pdf Alter-G marketing brochure featuring Shannon Rowbury: http://www.alter-g.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/AlterG-Athletic-Conditioning-Treadmill1.pdf Shannon Rowbury blog post citing free access to Alter-G device: http://www.shannonrowbury.com/blog/2010/04/my-entry.html The story fails to tell readers about any of the alternative ways to partially support body weight during rehabilitation, such as exercising in a swimming pool or running on treadmills or other devices that use harnesses or other methods to partially support a person’s weight. The story notes that this weight-supporting treadmill is available at a limited number of rehabilitation and physical therapy centers. But the story did allow one true believer to end the piece saying, “I think they’re going to be everywhere…” There is nothing new about partial weight support during rehabilitation. This story fails to put this particular treadmill device in context with other methods of reducing weight load and impact, such as treadmills that use harnesses or other methods to carry some of a person’s weight. Not applicable, for the following reasons. There is no independent source, so it’s plausible that the story was spoonfed by a news release. But since we don’t have any direct evidence of a news release influencing the story, we can’t rule it unsatisfactory.


London bans junk food ads on public transport to fight child obesity.

Explanation: London plans to ban junk food advertising on its entire public transport network to tackle child obesity, which is among the highest in Europe, Mayor Sadiq Kahn said on Friday.

Almost 40 percent of children aged 10 and 11 in London are overweight or obese, according to research compiled for Britain’s parliament. “Child obesity in London is a ticking timebomb and I am determined to act. If we don’t take bold steps against it we are not doing right by our young people as well as placing a huge strain on our already pressurized health service,” Kahn said in a statement. The ban will target food retailers with products deemed high in fat, salt or sugar such as McDonald’s. McDonald's here has long been fighting perceptions that it encourages children to eat unhealthily. In 2011, it won a U.S. lawsuit allowing it to continue including toys in Happy Meals. Coca Cola and Pepsi here - as part of the American Beverage Association - faced scrutiny during the same year following a U.S. campaign to bring awareness to the potential health concerns associated with sugar sweetened drinks. Food and drink advertising contributed around 20 million pounds ($27 million) to Transport for London’s revenue during the 2016-17 financial year. A spokesperson from the mayor’s office said :”About two thirds of this comes from high fat, salt and sugar, food and drink.”  The National Centre for Social Research and Cancer Research UK found advertising of unhealthy foods – particularly when aimed at children – creates extra pressure on children and families when it comes to choosing what to eat and drink. “I want to reduce the influence and pressure that can be put on children and families to make unhealthy choices,” Kahn said. “I’m determined to do all I can to tackle this issue with the powers I have and help Londoners make healthy food choices for themselves and their children.”  The plans are a key part of the mayor’s draft London Food Strategy and echo initiatives that have been introduced in Amsterdam this year. Khan said: “The government needs to step up and join this fight against child obesity.”


Explanation: Story about a small study whose results were not put into context comparing with other nonsurgical alternatives for knee osteoarthritis. It is helpful for people with knee osteoarthritis to know about the range of non-surgical options available to help them manage their condition. However by merely transmitting a media event without context, the story failed to provide necessary helpful perspective.

There was no mention of costs which can be signficant. The story reported on what the company media briefing wanted to report:  less pain, stiffness, disability and decreased use of pain medications in the braced group. But the story didn’t say if there was a control group and how results compared. There was no discussion of potential harms that might be associated with the use of the devices reported on. Are there any short term or potentially longer term implications resulting from the use of a knee brace? First, it’s not best practice to use a company-hosted media briefing on a device the company makes as the sole source of information. Second, this was a small study. The resuls might not be generalizable to typical individuals with knee osteoarthritis. Perhaps most importantly, there was no information about the study design and whether there was a control group to which the participants were compared No overt disease mongering of knee arthritis. The story included quotes from three clinicians and one patient – of which at least three appeared at the media briefing. There was no disclosure of any financial conflicts of interest among the three clinicians. Maybe there was none, but given the setting – a company-hosted media briefing – this issue should have been discussed. The story mentioned knee replacement in the body of the piece and listed non-surgical approaches to the management of knee osteoarthritis at the end. But there was no meaningful comparison of outcomes. There was no discussion of how widespread is the use/availability of knee braces in general or of the studied knee brace specifically. The braces studied were appropriately not portrayed as a new treatment approach. Reporting from a company-hosted media briefing isn’t much different than relying solely on a news release.


FDA approves expanded indications for Ilaris for three rare diseases

Explanation: This news release issued by the U.S. FDA extends indications for a drug called Ilaris (canakinumab). The new indications are Tumor Necrosis Factor Receptor Associated Periodic Syndrome (TRAPS), Hyperimmunoglobulin D Syndrome (HIDS)/Mevalonate Kinase Deficiency (MKD) and Familial Mediterranean Fever (FMF). TRAPS and HIDS/MKD are both rare but serious autoimmune diseases for which there are currently no approved therapies. Unfortunately, lacking any information about the quality of the evidence, cost or benefits, this release is notably lacking in key details that any person suffering from these conditions would need to make an informed decision about the treatment. If there are additional useful indications for Ilaris (canakinumab), in this case to treat Tumor Necrosis Factor Receptor Associated Periodic Syndrome (TRAPS) and Hyperimmunoglobulin D Syndrome (HIDS)/Mevalonate Kinase Deficiency (MKD), then this could be a good thing for patients suffering from these conditions. Unfortunately, we don’t learn from this news release what is currently used to treat patients suffering these conditions, or anything else about these rare-sounding conditions. It is impossible to assess the impact of the treatment without more details of the prevalence of the diseases in question.

FDA releases don’t typically assess cost, but seeing as this treatment is already on the market, it would not have been much of an effort to include that information in the news release. One might assume that the costs of treating these rare diseases are substantial but the release gives no indication on cost, or whether the drug might be covered by insurance. According to one trusted source on average retail drug prices, llaris prescriptions cannot be filled at a typical pharmacy. Instead, the medicine is administered and distributed at a hospital or clinic. This suggests the drug may be very expensive. All we learn about the benefits for patients is that the treatment “may help improve their quality of life.”  It would be hard to give less information about the benefits of the treatment. The statement that “approvals for the new indications were based on clinical studies, including safety, efficacy and pharmacokinetic data” is inadequate. The release includes a discussion of harms warranting a borderline satisfactory rating. But the side effects information is similar to that found on product labeling — it follows the regulatory requirements concerning product labels — but provides no data on harms from the trials behind the drug’s approval. It could have been more informative with a few more details. In addition, the information on harms appeared to be contradictory. One paragraph says common responses to the drug were minor reactions and susceptibility to colds; the next paragraph lists serious side effects. We would have welcomed the faintest of details of the clinical studies, and the “safety, efficacy and pharmacokinetic data” used to approve Ilaris for these new indications. This was a lost opportunity to inform. The release doesn’t engage in fear-mongering, but neither does it tell us how prevalent and disabling these diseases are. It would have been nice to get more information about the new indications, the numbers who suffer from them and the way they may be currently treated even if there are no approved drugs. There’s no mention of funding or conflict of interest, but these don’t (or shouldn’t) apply to regulatory approvals. It’s presumed that the studies will have been conducted by the company seeking approval. Even if there are no approved drugs for these indications, surely there is some sort of therapy that patients suffering from them are prescribed, even if it’s limited to palliative care. To leave out details on how patients with these rare disorders are currently treated does a disservice to the readers. Since the drug has already been approved for two other conditions, it’s safe to assume that the drug is already on the market and generally available. The release claims novelty with the following statement: “For the first time, patients with TRAPS and HIDS/MKD, two painful and life altering diseases, have access to a treatment that may help improve their quality of life,” according to an FDA official. But is novelty demonstrated? All we learn is there are “new” indications for the drug, two of which have no previously approved treatments. This is presented as a “take our word for it” kind of way which seems unacceptable. The release doesn’t engage in unjustifiable or sensational language.


Ohio Democratic Party Says proposed anti-abortion legislation "would force women facing the most personal of health decisions to endure a transvaginal ultrasound.

Explanation: The Ohio Democratic Party says an Ohio House bill would require women seeking abortions to undergo transvaginal ultrasounds

Abortion, Ohio, Health Care, Ohio Democratic Party,

The anti-abortion provisions slipped into Ohio’s budget have been ratified, but the Republican-controlled legislature is still considering other efforts to restrict abortions. House Bill 200, introduced by Rep. Ron Hood and supported by 34 of his Republican colleagues, would double the state’s 24-hour waiting period for abortions, compel doctors to tell patients that having an abortion will increase risk of breast cancer and require women seeking abortions to undergo what some doctors say are medically unnecessary ultrasounds. Democrats and abortion-rights advocates have publicly denounced the measure. The Ohio Democratic Party sent out a statement blasting Hood’s bill, saying House Republicans are "legislating shame on Ohio’s women." "They introduced a bill that would force women facing the most personal of health decisions to endure a transvaginal ultrasound," said a statement by Liz Brown, deputy executive director of the Ohio Democratic Party. PolitiFact Ohio determined that Hood set his pants on fire when he used the bill to link an increased risk of breast cancer to abortions, but we wanted to find out if the Ohio Democratic Party is also guilty of propagating medical misinformation. Hood’s bill would require doctors to perform ultrasounds on women who request an abortion and to give patients a verbal description of the ultrasound, including an audible heartbeat, if available. The legislation does not specify what type of ultrasound must be performed beyond saying an "obstetric" ultrasound. The legislation says a doctor must perform an ultrasound that "portrays the entire body of the embryo or fetus" under threat of a first-degree felony charge and a fine of up to $1 million. Hood calls the measure the "Ultrasound Access Act." The legislation aims to "give every Ohio mother the opportunity to see an ultrasound photo of her baby before making an abortion decision," Hood said. So, would this "opportunity" force women to undergo a transvaginal, or internal, ultrasound? That depends, experts say. The Ohio Democratic Party told PolitiFact that the group got its information on transvaginal ultrasounds from a handful of sources, including "Prenatal Tests and Ultrasounds: The Facts" written by two ultrasound experts from a New Jersey-based OB/GYN medical practice. It also provided a study published in the journal "Seminars in Reproductive Medicine." The sources say that transvaginal ultrasounds are more accurate and are often used over external transabdominal ultrasounds during early pregnancy. "Not surprisingly, transvaginal ultrasound has been shown to be better at visualizing early pregnancy than is transabdominal ultrasound," according to the study. Some doctors say a transvaginal procedure, under certain circumstances, may be the only method that would provide the necessary image. Dr. Anita Somani, a physician at Comprehensive Women's Care in Columbus, said earlier this month during a press conference held by Democrats to decry HB 200 that in some cases an external transabdominal ultrasound could reveal an embryo or fetus in its entirety. But, depending on the age of the embryo or fetus and the patient’s body type, a transvaginal ultrasound may be needed to comply with the legislation, Somani said. "You may not see anything on a transabdominal ultrasound until a woman is further along in her pregnancy," Somani said, adding that a transabdominal ultrasound is not likely to produce an accurate image of a fetus or embryo during the first trimester. Like a judicious patient, PolitiFact wanted a second opinion. Dr. Daniel Grossman, a San Francisco-area physician and vice president of research for the sexual and reproductive rights group Ibis Reproductive Health, concurred with Somani’s assessment. In most cases, the only way to get a clear and detailed image of the embryo or fetus during the first 10 weeks of pregnancy is to perform an "invasive, uncomfortable" transvaginal ultrasound, Grossman said. "It’s a medical procedure that is not always required to perform an abortion," Grossman said. "Like any medical test or procedure, it should be performed at the physician’s discretion." And why not seek a third opinion, just for good measure? Dr. Donna Harrison, executive director of the American Association of Pro-life Obstetricians and Gynecologists, said a transvaginal ultrasound gives a very close-up picture of the ovaries and inside the uterus, whereas a transabdominal ultrasound gives a wider view. "If it is very early in the pregnancy, to see if there is a living embryo, you would need a transvaginal ultrasound," Harrison said, adding that the internal procedure would be needed to accurately date a pregnancy in the first nine weeks. The statement by the Ohio Democratic Party implies that all women seeking abortions would be forced to undergo a transvaginal ultrasound. Women seeking abortions would have to undergo some form of ultrasound, and many women seeking early-term abortions could face the internal procedure. But the Ohio Democratic Party did not clarify the circumstances. We rate its claim .


Tokyo hospital trainees test positive for coronavirus after party.

Explanation: One of Japan’s most prestigious hospitals apologised for an “unforgivable blunder” after 40 trainee doctors attended a drinking party and 18 subsequently tested positive for the coronavirus.

Keio University Hospital said one trainee doctor tested positive for the virus last week and that tests on another 98 found 17 more were also positive. The hospital confirmed that 40 trainees had attended the party after work, and 14 of those present had tested positive for the virus. “What happened was an unforgivable blunder on part of our trainee doctors,” hospital director Yuko Kitagawa said in a statement. “They sorely lacked the self-awareness necessary for being a doctor.”    Despite calls from Tokyo governor Yuriko Koike for people to stay home on weekends and refrain from evening gatherings, life in the Japanese capital has continued largely as usual during the coronavirus outbreak. People still go out to eat and gather with their children in parks, and although trains are less crowded than normal many still travel to work on them. The hospital told Reuters that the party took place on March 26, a day after Koike’s first call for restraint. Japan on Tuesday imposed a state of emergency on Tokyo and six other prefectures. The country has confirmed over 4,000 cases of the virus and more than 90 deaths.


Spooked by Modi's plastics ban, India Inc seeks clarity, exemptions.

Explanation: Companies in India will seek exemptions from the government’s planned ban on certain plastic items, fearing the move will disrupt supply chains and raise costs ahead of a festive season, according to sources and an industry document seen by Reuters.

India is likely to impose a nationwide ban on plastic bags, cups, small bottles, straws and some types of sachets next month as part of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s efforts to reduce use of pollution-causing, single-use plastic. But the plans have stoked fears among consumer firms, which, use plastic in packaging for everything from sodas and biscuits to ketchup and shampoo. “This has created an existential issue for multiple sectors,” said the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), a lobby group, in a two-page draft note, seen by Reuters, which is likely to be finalised and sent to the government in the coming days. The CII will ask the government to consult industry executives and define what will be categorized as single-use plastics, while also pitching for some exemptions, according to the note. It says small-sized plastic bottles used for pharmaceutical or health products should be exempted as there is no alternate available. Sachets made from so-called multi-layered packaging should also not be banned, as that could disrupt supplies of key products such as biscuits, salt and milk, the CII draft says. A senior Indian government official said several industry representations were being reviewed, but the aim was to “get rid of the menace of plastic pollution” without causing disruption. In an Independence Day speech on Aug. 15, Modi urged people and government agencies to “take the first big step” on Oct. 2 towards freeing India of single-use plastic. India lacks a system for management of plastic waste, but environmentalists have hailed Modi’s move, saying it will help combat plastic waste that chokes rivers and drains. A ban on certain plastics from Oct. 2, however, will come just weeks ahead of big Hindu festivals for which business plans are laid out far in advance because they typically see a sharp rise in consumer purchases. Two industry sources said Amazon.com Inc, which uses plastics in its packaging, has been concerned that a possible ban could disrupt its operations ahead of festivities, and during its mega annual discount sale that starts Sept. 29. In recent weeks, executives from Coca-Cola Co, PepsiCo and consumer goods seller Hindustan Unilever have been part of industry delegations that met government officials to express concerns and discuss alternate packaging solutions, according to a person with direct knowledge. Coca-Cola said in a statement that all its primary packaging does not consist of single-use plastic. Pepsi said its target was to make 100 percent of its packaging recyclable, compostable, or biodegradable by 2025. Hindustan Unilever did not respond to a request for comment. Amazon did not respond, but has previously said that it plans to replace single-use plastic in its packaging by June 2020. “The ban has ramifications for all sectors like food processing, dairy, garments, toys,” said Jayesh Rambhia of All India Plastic Manufacturers Association, which has 22,000 companies as members. “People, and companies, are pulling their hair today.”


While the smoking rate nationally has fallen, more than 18 percent of Georgians still light up.

Georgia, Public Health, Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed's Office,

Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed and more than two dozen health professionals launched a statewide campaign last week to help Georgia smokers kick the habit. The "Nobody Quits Like Georgia" campaign emphasized connecting smokers with the counseling and other support they need to quit successfully. "Atlanta and state-level health care leaders are taking action because while the national smoking rate has fallen, more than 18 percent of adults in Georgia are still smoking," Reed’s office said in a press release on Nov. 17. The health hazards of cigarette smoking have been publicly recognized at least since the mid1960s, so could almost one in five Georgia adults still be lighting up? PolitiFact decided to check. First, a little background. Health advocates have been pushing to reduce the national smoking rate among adults 18 and over to 12 percent by 2020. About 20.6 percent of American adults were smoking in 2009, but the percentage has dropped every year since. In 2013, 19 percent of adults, nationally, and 18.8 percent in Georgia, were smoking, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. The CDC says smoking leads to disease and disability and harms nearly every organ of the body. More than 16 million Americans are estimated to be living with a smoking-related disease. These include cancer, heart disease, stroke, lung disease, diabetes and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), according to the CDC. The financial toll of smoking is tremendous -- more than $300 billion a year in the United States alone. This includes about $170 billion in direct medical care for adults and more than $156 billion in lost productivity due to premature death and exposure to secondhand smoke, the federal agency estimates. So what about the city’s statement about the habit in Georgia? We started our fact-check by contacting Reed press secretary Jenna Garland. She told us the American Lung Association, lead sponsor of the campaign, provided the statistic that appeared in the press release. Searches of CDC statistics last week also verified that 18.8 percent of Georgia adults were identified as smokers in 2013, Garland said. "At the time of our press conference and release, this data was absolutely correct. And it is still the primary data presented by the CDC," she said. Garland is right -- for 2013. The picture is peachier for Georgia, however, based on newer data for 2014. That was available in a press release put out by the Georgia Department of Public Health on the same day that Reed’s office issued its statement. In 2014, Georgia’s adult smoking rate had fallen to 17.4 percent, down 1.4 percentage points from 2013 as measured on the Behavior Risk Factor Surveillance System.(BRFSS). Particularly significant, the rate of smoking fell to 16.4 percent in young adults, ages 18 to 24, state officials said. National data from BRFSS for 2014 has not made public. We examined data gathered in the last 10 years on smoking rates in Georgia and the nation. You’ll see that smoking rates have been heading downward both in the state and nation throughout most, but not all of the decade. This is based on data collected by states through the Behavior Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) and submitted by the CDC. Percentage of Adults 18 and over who smoke Year Georgia U.S. 2005 22.1 20.8 2006 19.9 20.5 2007 19.4 20 2008 19.5 19.7 2009 17.7 18.3 2010 17.6 17.9 2011 21.2 21.2 2012 20.4 19.6 2013 18.8 19 2014 17.4 Not available Source: Behavior Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) reports and Georgia Department of Public Health. --------------------- CDC spokeswoman Brittany Behm said that although the prevalence of smoking in Georgia has steadily declined in the past several years, the progress has not been as robust as it could have been. She said that’s largely because "interventions we know work have not been fully implemented." She said these include higher tobacco product prices, comprehensive smoke-free laws, hard-hitting mass media campaigns, and full and sustained funding for comprehensive tobacco control programs. "Statistically, Georgia ranks 24th among the states and DC—almost exactly at the median," Behm said. Jean O’Connor, director of chronic disease prevention for the Georgia Department of Public Health, said state officials believe they’ve made serious headway, particularly with the tobacco-free schools program that’s now in 105 of the state’s 181 school districts. Enabling 1.3 million students to spend their school day free from exposure to tobacco appears to be showing up in the numbers, O’Connor said. With the smoking rate falling to 16.4 percent in the 18-24 age group, "that tells us kids are aging up and not using tobacco products," she said. "If you can get to 25 without using, odds of being addicted are very very low." That’s reinforced in Georgia’s University System, one of the first in the nation to be smoke-free at its college and universities, O’Connor said. Our ruling A press release from Mayor Kasim Reed’s Office said: "Atlanta and state-level health care leaders are taking action because while the national smoking rate has fallen, more than 18 percent of adults in Georgia are still smoking." The first part of the statement is misleading. Smoking rates have generally been falling nationally and in Georgia. The state’s rate was lower than the national rate in 2013. Reed’s office is correct that, in 2013, 18.8 percent of Georgia adults over 18 were smoking. But newer figures paint a peachier picture for the state. It doesn’t change the mayor’s overarching point that the state still has a way to go. We rate Reed’s statement .