sleuths
The watchdogs scouring scientific papers for problems
Photo illustration: Christine Kao/STAT; Photos: Francesca Jones, Brian L. Frank, Kevin Patrick
We'd like to think that findings in peer-reviewed journals are trustworthy — good-faith contributions to the ever-evolving scientific literature.
No such luck, alas. Where there's pressure to publish splashy results, there's an incentive to fake them, whether by nudging data in the direction you want or manipulating images. A loose affiliation of sleuths have devoted themselves to sniffing out these cases of misconduct.
Their discoveries have already led to the departure of a Stanford president, sparked charges from the Department of Justice, exposed paper mills that sell authorship credits to CV-padding professors, and brought about eye-popping numbers of retractions. You can read more about these DIY data detectives from STAT's Jonathan Wosen.
disability
How adults with cerebral palsy get overlooked
Cerebral palsy is often referred to as "the most common motor disability in childhood." But, as Mark Peterson, a University of Michigan professor of physical medicine and rehabilitation, points out in a new perspective for the New England Journal of Medicine, there are more adults than kids living with this group of diseases in the United States. They often face serious issues when they graduate from pediatrics into adult medical practice.
"My doctor told me that I couldn't have cerebral palsy because I am no longer a child," one patient reported. "A medical support structure carefully built over decades, gone in a minute," said another. There are also gaps in the data used to assess outcomes later on in life, Peterson writes. He proposes reframing CP as "the most common lifelong physical disability" to help bolster understanding and ultimately allow people to get better care.
infectious disease
What to know about new Marburg cases in Rwanda
The Marburg outbreak in Rwanda has reached a critical stage. The country, aggressively battling its first viral hemorrhagic fever outbreak, appears to have gained the upper hand on the virus, which causes disease similar to Ebola. But these kinds of outbreaks are often hard to extinguish; late setbacks are all too common. After nine days without new cases, the last two weeks saw four new infections, at least one of which was a person who lived near one of the earliest known cases.
In a press conference on Friday, the WHO's incident manager for the outbreak, Rob Holden, described the new cases as "quite complex," adding that following up on them to establish how they fit into the outbreak picture has been challenging. Holden said increased surveillance is critical at this phase, a message the country appears to have taken onboard. Health workers are going door to door in the area where the outbreak is believed to have started, Minister of State Yvan Butera said late last week. To date there have been 66 confirmed cases and 15 deaths. — Helen Branswell
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