A simple solution to a lethal problem could come with the stroke of a pen — and save lives.  It remains out of reach because the Food and Drug Administration’s unwieldy review process.  Gardiner Harris of the New York Times investigates something  basic and alarming — the misconnection of plastic tubes that are used to deliver medicine, anaesthetic, and other vital substances to patients in America’s hospitals.  The tubes are often very similar, and can easily be fitted into many different devices.  The result can be painful and sudden death when medical workers make errors and connect the wrong tubes — liquid food can be inserted into a vein, and air bubbles can end up in people’s blood streams. (more…)

Jacques Leslie has put together a fascinating piece of preventive journalism for Mother Jones (it’s not online yet, so if you don’t subscribe to their magazine, you have to go here to read it).  As with his past work looking at environmental degradation in China, Leslie manages to weave together real life stories and the hard realities of science to describe a challenged community. In this case, the community is Kettleman City, California, where toxic chemicals and public health problems are coming together with frightening cumulative impact. (more…)

One of the challenges preventive journalism faces is that it combines so many specialties:  writing, reporting, historical analysis, and evidence-based forecasting.  Skeptics we’ve talked to about this approach say you can’t report on something that’s going to happen in the future.   But as NPR’s Deborah Amis makes clear in her recent interview with Prof. Tad Patzek of the University of Texas, expertise in predicting the future (and avoiding tragedies like the Deepwater Horizon oil spill) is a field we can’t afford not to develop.  (more…)

7th Circuit Appeals Court Judge Richard Posner offers his own appeal in the Washington Post — calling for a more rational approach to predicting and preparing for natural and man-made disasters.  He says that we seldom are prepared for major disasters because

• we’re used to fixing problems after the fact
• people in responsible positions aren’t thinking beyond their own tenure
• risks of major calamities are hard to predict so we don’t even try

Posner says we “must brace for future crises” because of population increase (meaning more victims) and

the relentless march of technology, whether in oil extraction or financial speculation.

But there is more we can do, and journalists should be at the center of this effort.  (more…)

If you’re not a big fan of oil spills, consider the potential impact of a major release of radioactive material somewhere in the U.S.  Rebecca Smith reports in the Wall Street Journal on a situation that needs urgent attention from concerned citizens, from politicians, and from government agencies.  Thousands of tons of spent nuclear fuel is stored in more than thirty states and there is still no national plan for dealing with it.  They have a plan in Finland, and now that Yucca Mountain is out, there may be an eligible storage area in New Mexico.  Are we really going to wait around for this disaster to happen?

It might kill you if you don’t.  One of the nation’s oldest publications, Harper’s has seen its share of wars and corporate misdeeds come and go, and it’s still on the lookout.  Here David Gargill relates why the Hudson River will never be clean of industrial poisons generated by General Electric and others throughout the 20th century.  So many PCBs have been released, stored, or forgotten about that it’s basically hopeless to try to remove them, though the EPA is overseeing a half-billion-dollar cleanup effort to try and get rid of some of them.  Since many people believe the river dredging will end up causing more damage than it mitigates,  the point of this depressing article is that we have to keep a sharp eye on present environmental threats from other megaprojects such as the Marcellus Shale gas exploration effort.  Abrahm Lustgarten of ProPublica explains why, if we don’t take a very hard look right now, the Marcellus Shale could be the next big problem that it’s already too late to do anything about.

A great example of the connection between solid reporting and improvements in government can be found in the Washington Post‘s initial reporting on the alleged effort by Umar Abdulmutallab to incinerate himself aboard AA 253 in an attempt to kill hundreds, if not thousands, of people.  Three top Post reporters — Dan Eggen, Karen DeYoung, and Spencer Hsu — look at how Abdulmutallab got on the plane and begin tracking the policy and political implications for the Obama administration.  They report that the suspected terrorist was already on a federal watch list — but not on a no-fly list.  Joby Warrick and Ellen Nakashima manage in the space of 24 hours to get Abdulmutallab’s biography and compare his alleged crime to similar tactics used by Al Qaeda in the recent past.   Peter Slevin gets us inside the plane and talks with the man who first tackled the suspect and helped put out the fire.  But these reporters weren’t alone:  the print edition lists how many other reporters and researchers contributed to these stories — fifteen at least — including journalists in Yemen and London.

If the Post makes a profit this year, it won’t be because of stories like these.  And yet the Post‘s and other papers’ detailed and up-to-the minute reporting will have profound long term effects.  This kind of journalism drives the Sunday talk show narratives, shapes first comments from every congressperson who gets in front of a microphone, and forms initial public opinion.  More important, this kind of reporting shapes the trajectory of government actions from day one — and in an organization the size of the U.S. government, first steps really count. Officials from TSA, the FAA, and from FBI, CIA, and many other agencies will be influenced by reporting from the Post and other national news sources even as they work with information the public may never know.

Approaching the end of a tumultuous year, we can be thankful for the contribution to national security made by professional journalists who, consistently and accurately, help us understand the way world works — and help citizens judge how well our government reacts to threats like the one on American Airlines 253.

Ned Hodgman

To understand what is going on with public pension funds across the country, you have to be a determined number cruncher and master an array of investing strategies, state-level rules and regulations.  You also have to be ready to read a lot of bad news.  David Cho of the Washington Post has taken his charge at the problem and come up with a very depressing picture that can only be solved by concerted action, including at the national level.

Cho writes that state pension funds and OPEBs (Other Post-Employment Benefits) have lost “about $1 trillion” in the worth of their investments, which means that “within 15 years, public systems on average will have less than half the money they need to pay pension benefits.”  Whoops!  This means that police, paramedics, firefighters, teachers, health workers, and a host of other government employees may face major reductions in their pensions, especially as the elderly population grows.  (more…)

As Americans continue to ponder the question of whether “there is such a thing as clean coal,” the New York Times’ Charles Duhigg looks into whether you can clean the air without dirtying the water.  When coal-fired power plants scrub the smoke from their smokestacks, they dump wastewater from the scrubbing process into nearby waterways.

Duhigg visits Hatfield’s Ferry, PA, where residents were overjoyed to have their air finally clean — until they found out that coal plant wastewater can contain “high concentrations of dissolved arsenic, barium, boron, iron, manganese, cadmium, magnesium and other heavy metals that have been shown to contribute to cancer, organ failures, and other diseases.”  And even when landfills are used, the chemicals can leach into groundwater.  Duhigg writes that “EPA officials [have] said that toughening pollution rules for power plants was among their top priorities.”

The people in Hatfield’s Ferry may not have long to wait, but then again, time is working against them.

Dan Berry of the New York Times has it right when he says that $6 million in federal stimulus funds fighting something called “cogongrass” in Alabama could invite derision from anti-big government critics. But if these critics look a little closer (including at the barebones office set aside for the commanders of this effort) they’ll see that this might be money well spent. One expert from the contractor the state of Alabama has hired to eradicate the plant says “cogongrass can replace an entire ecosystem.” This will be no easy battle, but if the folks in Alabama don’t succeed, the grass could easily move north . . . and invasive species don’t care if your state is red or blue.