Muckraking is soap for democracy.
The first investigative journalists, dismissed by Theodore Roosevelt as “muckrakers,” exposed exploitation and corruption — and from the start, how these affected public health and safety.
In the US and UK, their efforts led to clean food and safe drug laws, meat inspection laws and child labor regulations.
Leading medical journals like The Lancet (named for a 19th century surgical light) and the British Medical Journal were highly-esteemed publishers of muckraking investigations in the 1800s. They put an end to baby farming, published the first controlled clinical trials, and were among the first to confront the tobacco industry.
… All of which is offered (of course) as history, not comparison. epiNewswire has the much more modest aim of asking questions about power and influence in public health policy.
We’re journalists with biology degrees, not doctors or nurses.
We apply investigative journalism’s tools to public health policy.
We also report straight research news, covering “evidence-based medicine” — peer-reviewed meta-analyses and systematic reviews that shed new light on trends in epidemiology and toxicology. But we also check out and disclose who funded the research on which we report.
This Medical Muckraker blog is meant to offer some backstage insights into how my reporting at epi comes together: the question that leads to a story, the sources, discoveries and roadblocks along the way.
In addition to muckraking at epi, I am a staff reporter at The New Mexico Independent and have been writing special reports for The Lancet Oncology since 2005. I also review medical imaging and cancer care for several medical journals, including Radiologic Technology, Radiation Therapist and Oncology Nurse Advisor.
epi first exposed the US Army’s failure to screen combat veterans for brain injuries in 2006, and the Army’s censorship of medical research in 2008.
My reporting in The Lancet Oncology exposed the VA’s refusal to share veteran cancer data with tumor registries used to track vet cancer rates, troubling global trends in radiation therapy errors and the Army’s early “green ammo” debacle, in which an exotic tungsten alloy replacement for controversial depleted uranium weapons turned out to be aggressively carcinogenic and water soluble.
More recently, I have reported on New Mexico Medicaid officials’ interference with Medicaid fraud investigations and the state’s lax regulation of health insurance rates.
Thanks for visiting!
–Bryant Furlow
