One does not know whether one has actually captured something if it is promptly let go. But the Journal Sentinel’s Thomas Content blog-reports today that a chilled ammonia system for grabbing CO2 from a coal plant’s flue gas has proven 90 percent effective. Nobody, apparently, is sequestering it but this seems to be part of the start.

Of some interest to this site’s readers, he reports that the results of the test were unveiled at a meeting of the Society of Environmental Journalists in Madison. He says it “were unveiled..Friday” which is tomorrow, but the agenda indicates members of the journo group toured the plant in question today.

Grist for the Mill: Carbon Capture News Conference ; Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit

A threat to civilization, or a good part of it, that had already become tiny just got reduced even further in likelihood. A NASA Jet Propulsion Lab team of celestial mechanics declared that  Apophis, a lightweight asteroid but a big rock at several hundred meters across, has only a shred of a chance of hitting Earth on its next close approach in 2036. After that, with its orbit deflected by a presently uncalculable amount, a new round of odds making must occur. The team is presenting its findings today in Puerto Rico at the annual meeting of the Amer. Astronomical Soc’y’s Division of Planetary Sciences.

Stories, most with the sentiment “whew” in them in one form or another, include:

• Los Angeles Times – John Johnson Jr: 2036 asteroid strike on Earth ‘all but ruled out’ ;
• Christian Science Monitor – Pete Spotts: Asteroid ‘Apophis’ will miss us this time; but 2068? Stay tuned.
• BBC: Asteroid collision ‘less likely’ ;
• ANI via Times of India: Asteroid to miss Earth in 2036, but could be on collision course in 2068 ; Hmmm – we don’t really know if that second and ominous “could” is more or less likely than the preceding “to miss Earth” declaration.
• AFP: NASA downgrades threat of catastrophic asteroid collision;
• New Scientist – Rachel Courtland: Fresh impact risks for asteroid ‘poster child’ ;
• Washington Post – Joel Achenbach (blog): Asteroid of doom ;
• Space.com: Big Asteroid Less Likely to Hit Earth ;
• MSNBC: NASA downgrades asteroid threat … again ; This site provides the good orbital diagram.

Grist for the Mill: JPL/NASA Press Release ;

PIc source (Indonesia Islamic news site).

- Charlie Petit

A great deal of the more rational sounding – to me more rational anyway – hoo-ha over limitations on carbon emissions has touted a straight tax as greatly more efficient and honest than any complex brokerage house for selling credits and buying offsets and all the rest of the cap and trade idea. The latter just looks to these eyes like an invitation to clever gaming, outright fraud, or other erosion of its effect.  But a report issued yesterday in Washington by a purportedly non-partisan committee with high-powered members extols forest sponsorship as a cheaper and surer way for US industries to reduce the pollution of our air by their excess CO2.

The Los Angeles Times’s Margot Roosevelt writes it under the hed U.S. companies may look abroad to fight global warming. She gives the report needed coverage, and does give space to some arguments against such offsets. Those arguments include the sentiment that polluters should not be able to buy their way out of replacing filthy old equipment with greener hardware (wind turbines, solar panels, maybe gas instead of coal plants, etc). But the worry that cap and trade will generate reductions on paper that may in fact have happened anyway, did not happen at all, are being credited to multiple parties simultaneously, or are elsewise odoriferous is not addressed. (That said, Ms. Roosevelt hardly had limitless time and space to explore for today every cranny of the concept).

The Tracker finds no other coverage in major conventional media, but it gets a good ride at Politico by Lisa Lerer. The more activist site Mongabay.com also pays it attention this morning.

Grist for the Mill: Commission on Climate and Tropical Forests ;The membership of the commission is rather impressive, assuming they all sat down and really did some work and studying.

For a more caustic point of view, at The Guardian in the UK its environment editor, John Vidal, ran this week a sharply critical report on the general philosophy, known at the UN as REDD (for Reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation). His conclusion is that such systems open the door to organized crime and massive fraud. His piece elicited a reaction today from Norway’s environment minister, who says yep it’s risky, it will need tight oversight, but there’s no choice but to try it.

One can expect to hear a lot more on REDD in Copenhagen in December.

Pic Henry Rousseau, 1910.  National Gallery of Art.

- Charlie Petit

Much has been made in recent months of the costly battle that UK science writer Simon Singh has been waging against a libel suit brought by the nation’s chiropractic organization. It seems he thinks much of what they claim to be able to do is hokum. And he said so in print. This site has had posts on him too (use Singh in the search box).

Should any of the clan be able to be in London Oct 15, all should consider attending a debate that the Association of British Science Writers and City University London are staging. The issue, with advocates of both sides, is whether the existing libel law that puts all the onus on defendants, not plaintiffs, is fine as is or ought be amended to permit honest and well-founded opinions to be shared about even if somebody feels wronged.

- Charlie Petit

Just over a year ago, Congress passed a landmark measure that requires insurance companies to cover mental illnesses the same way they cover other physical ailments. The jargon is “mental health parity,” and it’s been a goal of the mental health community, patients, and doctors for at least a decade.

“Words like ‘rejoice,’ ‘historic,’ ‘kudos,’ ‘new era,’ peppered the email blitz” in the wake of the law’s passage, wrote Phyllis Vine on her blog, MIWatch.org.

In a one year anniversary piece in September, however, she wrote a rather different story: “Thought parity was a done deal? Think again.” According to Vine, the legislation allows companies to cover only what they feel are medical necessities, opening the door once again to discrimination against people with mental illnesses. A company might comply with the law–agreeing to cover depression, for example–but limit the number of therapists visits to 10 or 20, because it has determined that that is all that is medically necessary.

I’m catching up with this important story a few weeks late only because I saw a mention on Covering Health, the blog of the Association of Health Care Journalists. (I’m a member of AHCJ, but other than that I have no connection to the blog.)

The blog’s “about” page says its aim is to keep journalists informed about the latest news on health and health care, flag noteworthy stories, and keep health care writers connected. And it seems to be doing an excellent job.

The contributions come from a small corps of editors and from the AHCJ’s members. The most recent post this morning calls attention to–and links to–an AP story by Carla Johnson on how health reform will affect people currently covered by Medicare. With all the political braying we’ve heard about that in recent weeks, it’s good to see the AP giving us the straight story.

Below that is a post linking to a Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel story by John Fauber on exceptions to University of Wisconsin conflict-of-interest rules intended to limit the money its doctors can accept from pharmaceutical makers and others.

The blog includes news about members who have won awards, and pieces on journalism issues, such as embargo policy, which was addressed in a post on Tuesday. You will find something new almost every weekday, often more than one post.

With its reach and timeliness, Covering Health seems to me to be a valuable tool to help health reporters stay on top of important stories, particularly under-covered stories that they might have missed.

I’ll be watching it myself.

- Paul Raeburn

Tomorrow morning, as anybody who pays the slightest attention to the days space and astronomy news knows, a used-up rocket stage about the weight of a 1978 Oldsmobile 98 (a crash for clunker?)  will smash into the Moon’s south pole and be followed to its own doom by a little NASA instrumented probe. It’s the LCROSS mission, piggy backing on the hardware used to get the agency’s lunar reconnaissance orbiter on station. The trailing LCROSS package will take a moment before its demise to see if water ice gets blown into the black lunar sky by the initial impact. Maybe astronomers, pro and amateur alike, will be able to see the ruckus.

The world’s science press has done a good job alerting folks to the news and why the agency wants to do this at all. NASA’s Ames Research Center in California will have it live and up close for a public gathering, and across a large part of the world including the US southwest this will happen with the moon in easy view overhead.

Stories:

• USA Today – Dan Vergano: Water-seeking spacecraft to crash into the moon ;
• AP: Seth Borenstein: You can watch NASA give the moon a one-two punch ;
• AP – Bruce Smith: SC prof helped develop moon crash concept ; A regional account, nicely localized.
• Los Angeles Times – John Johnson Jr.: Awaiting a puff of moon dust ; One of the longer, more complete,and nicely illustrated versions.
• SF Chronicle – David Perlman: NASA rocket on crash course with moon ; Perlman reports this will we watched by the largest array of spacecraft and telescopes ever assembled. Dunno how he knows that but it’s plausible – and I have heard that the crash is timed to be viewed best from Hawaii and the lineup of big and bigger telescopes on Mauna Kea.
• Guardian (UK) – Bobbie Johnson: From giant leap to big bang: NASA prepares moon smashing satellite ;
• Telegraph (UK) Alastair Jamieson: NASA ‘bombs’ to reveal water on moon ;
• Columbus Dispatch – Mark Ferenchik: Fly me into the moon ;
• Daily Mail (UK) Claire Bates : How to watch NASA bomb the Moon live this Friday afternoon ; With LAVISH illustration.
• Space.com: Leonard David: Observatories gear up for Friday lunar crash ; This is for the hardcore astronomy buff – complete with map of professional observatories that will be watching ;
• Wired News: Brian McLaughlin: Moon Shot Part Deux: Even More Ways of Observing the LCROSS Impact ; also has links to additional WIRED coverage.
• Popular Science – Rebecca Boyle:  How to Watch NASA Smash a Rocket Into the Moon Tomorrow Morning ;

A few to show how small outlets are drumming up business for the show:

• Stamford Advocate – John Burgeson: Discovery Museum to host live feed of lunar crash ; Good pointers to how to see it, but dated info on what’s already known of water on the moon.
• Ashland (Ky) Daily Independent – Mike James: Live NASA coverage set at MSU ;
• Twin Falls (Idaho)  Times-Union – Chris Anderson: NASA dredging for lunar ice in spectacular fashion Friday morning ;
• Times of India – Srinivas Laxman : Catch lunar event live at planetarium ; Just a little piece, and Times of India is hardly a small outlet, but this news is localized all over.

And finally, a giggle-worthy report or two on lunar lunacy:

• Register (UK) Lewis Page: ‘Stop NASA bombing the Moon!”
• Huffington Post – Amy Ephron : Help Save the Moon; Indeed – does NASA have permission to whack the Moon this way?

Grist for the Mill: NASA LCROSS News etc ;

- Charlie Petit

The universe is 100 times less orderly and closer to decline into random noise than we thought, and hardly anybody else has it? The Tracker would like to say he was waiting for the rest of the media to catch up with last Friday’s Science News scoop  by Ron Cowen. Truth is I’ve been a bit too lazy to get it in until now. But it’s a good piece and a lesson in how to tell a truly obscure story in reasonably simply language. Plus, that scary factor of 100 in the increased entropy for the universe comes against the previous figure of merit in some crazy unit: 10¹⁰², and it’s now up to 10¹⁰⁴, out of a theoretical maximum of 10¹²². And it’s not every day you see numbers like that in the news. But they rather put an adjustment by a mere 10² in context.

The meat of the piece is another bit of arcana well-suited to Science News’s readership of dedicated science fans. This is that supermassive black holes account for most of the entropy in the universe. The estimated mass distribution and absolute numbers of such things has changed, ergo the overall change, and this means that the universe we easily see out there, of galaxies and clusters and leptons and bosons not to mentions old Ladas in eastern Europe’s scrapyards has not changed much for the messier.

A few other outlets, even more focussed than is Science News, do have it:

• New Scientist – Rachel Courtland: Mammoth black holes push universe to its doom ; I think Cowen’s piece was out first. If not, apologies to NS and Ms. Courtland.
• io9 – Graeme McMillan: The Unseen Truth About Black Holes ;
• Physorg.com – Lin Edwards : Cosmic entropy could be 100 times greater than previously thought.

Grist for the Mill: Full paper, on line at arXiv.

- Charlie Petit

In the past week a series of small to moderate earthquakes has rattled the Owens Valley area of eastern California, just to the Nevada side of the high Sierra not far from Mt. Whitney and Death Valley. It has gotten some local press coverage, plus – interesting – a couple of pieces on China’s news service Xinhua that seem intrigued by the long history of quakes in the region. And finally, a trustworthy blog based at the UC Berkeley Seismological Laboratory puts them into even deeper context.

First the standard coverage:

• San Francisco Chronicle – Victoria Colliver: Cluster of quakes hit eastern Sierra ;
• AP: More earthquakes shake California’s Owens Valley.

Then there are these from Xinhua, datelined Los Angeles (bf names may be bylines but are id’d by Xinhua as editors. Dunno if they’re in China rewriting wires and p.r., or in LA):

• Xinhua – Fang Yang: Latest earthquakes in Eastern California part of series began in 1933: LA seismologists ;
• Xinhua – Lin Zhi: More earthquakes struck eastern California ;

Somebody may soon inform The Tracker why Xinhua is so interested and, more important, the provenance in a press release or elsewhere of the angle that these quakes are part of a series going back 70+ years. But it is curious that the agency is keeping tabs.

And Now, the really big picture.

• UC Berkeley Seismoblog – Horst Rademacher : Triple Shock in Owens Valley ; This really explains the region’s historic, and immense, seismic history including a mag 8.0 (estimated) in 1872. So if something bigger comes along and generates major news, reporters ought to read this for instant background. Horst, by the way, is an old pal, a geophysicist-turned-reporter who covers US science for the Frankfurter Allgemeine-Zeitung (and a former Knight fellow in my year at MIT). His wife, seismologist Peggy Hellweg and a staffer at the UC seismo station, reports that the region is still popping along. It had a M 4.0 quake yesterday.

- Charlie Petit

Saturn’s rings are magnificent things, bright and unmistakable. And those of  Neptune and Jupiter are faint, but are narrow circular lanes that fit the geometric implication of “ring.” But one wonders whether NASA’s proclamation of discovery of a vast new ring of Saturn isn’t just a tad bit misleading. The discovery is notable enough: a belt of diffuse dust so extensive that its thicker regions, if bright and visible to the eye, would extend across a patch of Earth’s nighttime sky as extensive as two full moons side by side. But a ring? You can’t see it, and it hasn’t sharp edges. This looks like poaching on a term with a specific resonance in the mind to draw media and public attention to something different. Sort of like putting pictures of beautiful young models in ads for shaving cream, cars, or beer. Speaking of beautiful, that artist’s impression is striking, in part for the background nebulosities. Very spacey.

And most outlets swallowed it. One that did not is AAAS’s ScienceNOW, where veteran space writer Richard Kerr has it under another kind of hed: Mystery Solved: The Dark Side of a Moon. This one suggests that Kerr took a moment to think the news’s content through for himself – and thus take ownership of the story that would run under his name. It’s not this wispy dusty disk that he sees as the diverting news, but the odd face of Saturn’s moon Iapetus. It appears that orbital mechanics sends some of the dust – whose plane is tilted sharply compared to most of the rest of the Saturnian system and orbits in pretty much the opposite sense – paints one side of the tidally-locked moon dark while the other icy side shines strikingly bright.

The news arises from a meeting of the AAS’s Division of Planetary Sciences, in Puerto Rico, and a report by university-based users of NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope. The group also is describing the results in a future issue of  Nature – which has lifted its embargo, posted it, and where press material also advertises it as the solar system’s largest ring.

It seems as though a better phrasing would be that far beyond the famous rings, a small moon (not Iapetus, but eccentric Phoebe) has spread a huge disk or belt of hyperfine dust. Most accounts do get around to the Iapetus sand-painting angle, which NASA’s release and Nature’s press bulletin also ranks as a secondary aspect of the story’s significance.

Playing up the discovery as a ring is not any sort of egregious mistake. It is huge, and it is sort of a ring, if one considers a broad rim on a hat a ring.

Other stories:

• AP: NASA telescope discovers giant ring around Saturn ;
• Science News – Ron Cowen: Largest Known Planetary Ring Discovered ; First story out, covered from the meeting.
• Reuters: Huge new ring spotted around Saturn ;
• Brisbane Times – Jennie Curtin: Saturn’s supersized ring has an icy, eccentric orbit ;
• Telegraph (UK) New ring discovered around Saturn is the largest in the Solar system ; Hmm. The asteroid belt is as much ring as this is. So perhaps are the dust-filled orbital paths of comets. And they are larger.
• Scientific American – John Matson: Astronomers Discover Solar System’s Largest Planetary Ring Yet around Saturn ;  Smart qualification: planetary ring.
• Space.com – Andrea Thompson: Enormous New Ring Found Distantly Orbiting Saturn ;
• National Geographic – Ker Than: New Saturn Ring Is Largest Known; May Solve Moon Puzzle ; Hmm. Not sure if its invisible because the material is dark, or because it’s so wispy. But good double-fisted hed on what this means.
• Nature – Michelle Grayson: Huge ‘ghost’ ring discovered around Saturn ; That’s a good compromise. A ghost ring.

Grist for the Mill:

JPL/NASA Press Release ; U. Maryland Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit

Note: For an oblique angle on this news don’t miss the very last bullet on this post

Three competing researchers won the 2009 Nobel Prize for something that might sound like pure biology – deciphering the structure of protein-manufacturing ribosomes inside cells – but when you come down to it, living things are bundles of chemicals. This year’s Physiology winner for telomerase could’ve been construed as chemistry, for that matter. But the Royal Academy of Sciences in Stockholm honored an odyssey of X-ray crystallography (which in turn is physics, sort of)  by splitting the chemistry prize  among Ada E. Yonath of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel ; Thomas A. Steitz of Yale University, and Venkatraman Ramakrishnan of the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England. The latter was born in India and trained in the US, where he took American citizenship and conducted much of the ribosome work (Univ. of Utah, Brookhaven, Oak Ridge, and more)  before moving to Britain ten years ago. Yonath gets one third share, but she appears to have opened the way down this line of research for the other two.

Thus, as with the medicine/physiology and physics prizes earlier this week, the prize has a dominant US representation. But the prizes also sport a stew of national identities, sometimes blended in one person. It’s a commonplace that (non-military) science  knows no borders. Even during the most paranoid days of the Cold War US, Soviet, and Chinese scientists were able to travel and stay more in touch than members of most other, non-diplomatic  lines of work.  But if one wanted to write a story on science’s transcultural fabric, this year’s multiple-passport, globe trotting science Nobel class is exhibit A.

The chemical X-ray analysis that won the prize is stupefying, and yet easy to appreciate. Just look at this image. It’s a bacterial ribosome colored by major units. How one takes a solution of a jillion of these snarls of molecular yarn and coaxes them into lining up in perfectly overlaid ranks as one single crystal for an X-ray shadow portrait has just gotta be extraordinarily hard work. The Grist down at the bottom has links that leads one to extensive background from the Nobel committee in Sweden (which is where The Tracker found this image). What Watson and Crick did with X-ray crystallography (and at same lab as where Ramakrishan is now)  to realize DNA’s structure was historic and impressive. This ribosome replay is freakin’ amazing. Plus. one has to note that the Swedes’ background material notes coyly that modern equipment for gathering the diffracted X-rays’ caustics relies on CCDs – those video chips that won the physics prize this year. It’s all connected.

Almost forgot: this is a journalism site. Some of the usual crowd is hard at work trying to turn the same basic material and event into individually distinct, accurate, spritely, and uplifting stories of scientific spirit and triumph. Onward:

• AP – Karl Ritter, Matt Moore: 2 Americans, 1 Israeli Win Nobel Chemistry Prize ; They and most reporters, as does the Nobel committee, stress highly that the work’s payoff includes understanding how antibiotics cripple bacterial ribosomes, and how to design better ones.
• Reuters – Mia Shanley: Trio win chemistry Nobel for solving ribosome riddle ; Exuberantly but perhaps too broadly declares that DNA carries the blueprint for life and ribosomes translate that into life itself. Is is a mere quibble to wonder whether such phrasing categorizes things properly? Should’ve stuck to protein encoding, one thinks, tediously.
• The Hindu/ Press Trust of India: Venkatraman Ramakrishnan: from a physicist to a Nobel laureate in Chemistry ; Says he is the seventh Indian or person of Indian ancestry to win a Nobel.
• Jerusalem Post* (staff + AP): Israeli scientist Ada Yonath wins Nobel Prize for chemistry ; This is interesting, if brief. She is the Weizman Institute’s first Nobel prize winner. That is a small surprise, for such a prestigious center of scholarship.
• *Speaking of Jerusalem Post – scroll down to yesterday’s tracker post on physics Nobels for the update there on its distinctive version of that news.
• NYTimes – Dennis Overbye, with Isabel Kershner in Israel : Three win Nobel for Ribosome Research ;
• LA Times – Thomas H. Maugh II, with Richard Boudraux in Israel:  2 Americans, Israeli share Nobel Prize in chemistry ; Maugh definitely has earned a day off : he wrote all three Nobel prize stories this week and to do it from California means an early wake-up. He sifted all three science prizes to realize that Yonath is the only among nine new laureates to have no US citizenship – whether native born, naturalized, or naturalized and dual. And Maugh finds the right term to describe a requirement for a job in X-ray crystallography: excruciating patience.
• USA Today – Dan Vergano: Nobel Prize for chemistry goes to Israeli, 2 Americans ;
• NPR- Nell Greenfieldboyce: Ribosome Map Makers Win chemistry Nobel ;
• Guardian (UK) Ian Sample: Cambridge chemist wins Nobel prize for showing how proteins are made in cells ; Hmm. He trained in physics, then went into biology. Not sure he is, formally, a chemist. Further hmmm – does it matter?
• BBC – Victoria Gill: Nobel Prize for chemistry of life ; Nice job on the vein of international collaboration and competition that suffuses much of science, as here.
• Financial Times – Clive Cookson: Trio share Nobel Prize for the chemistry of life ;
• Science News – Rachel Ehrenberg: Nobel Prize in Chemistry Awarded for Ribosome Research ;

Grist for the Mill:

Nobel Press Release ;  Information for the Public ; Scientific Background ; These links all  lead on to plenty more info.

Yale U. Press Release ;

MRC Laboratory of Mol. Biology Press Release ;

ONE MORE THING: At his CardioBrief site science writer Larry Husten asks: October thought experiment: suppose the World Series was covered like the Nobel Prize ; Great (but subjunctive tense, Larry, subjunctive!)

- Charlie Petit

John Tierney, a blogger of sharp and contrary wit most days, does a star turn for the section today with a lavishly illustrated catch-up on a project to reveal a hidden masterpiece. This has gotten fair coverage over the years: an effort to see through newer, giant epic paintings on the walls of the Venetian Palazzo Vecchio to find a long-unseen painting by Leonardo da Vinci depicting a Florentine military victory. (One such media account 2 yrs ago is here, at Wired, by Nicole Martinelli.)  Documents prove it once was there. And, this story says, its locale is pretty well certified after years of preparation getting some  exotic wall-penetrating detection gear ready to go. In a year or so, it says here, the location should be fully confirmed and some very careful art restorers and building trades worker may move the newer giant painting aside to see Michelangelo’s supposedly greatest unfinished work of all. This story hasn’t much science, just a lot of excellent gizmo-talk, but it helps maintain the section’s high, culture-savvy sheen. If the image up there isn’t there, that’s not some lame joke by The Tracker. I messed up the publishing hour for this post and cant’ seem to get it coordinated with the text. Click on it to see the painting.

Other notable headlines:

• Gardiner Harris: For N.I.H. Chief, Issues of Identity and Culture: Yes and still, Francis S. Colllins is a regular-guy rock music playing super scientist who also prays devoutly to a personal god who tilts events this way or that at supernatural whim or wisdom and sees no contradiction to that. Good line that Harris attributes to nobody in particular: Collins suffers therefore a mild dementia. The piece provides no reason to think Collins is, however, not a perfectly competent steward for NIH.
• Benedict Carey: How Nonsense Sharpens the Intellect ; About just what it says it’s about, with a citation.
• Henry Fountain : Discovery Challenges Ideas on Plant Amber ; A brief from the Observatory roundup. It is an immediately engrossing visit, quickly over, with an arcane new puzzle in the science of fossilized resin.
• Carl Zimmer: Self-Destructive Behavior in Cells May Hold Key to a Longer Life ; This excursion through autophagy makes a good complement to all the talk of telomeres and aging and biology’s evolved strategies that came with yesterday’s Nobel in Physiology.
• And in the category of perfectly sensible self-interest: Dennis Overbye: Name That Atom Smasher ; A new machine that Fermilab needs if it is to stay vital is getting moniker help from the Times and its readers. I think the Tracker’s readers ought to pipe up on this one and let the Times know their ideas. How about recycle SSC, but for Superconducting Stimulus Collider … after the funding source?

As usual, lots more. Whole Section ;

- Charlie Petit

Should we get the swine flu vaccine?

This is a critically important question, particularly if swine flu ripens into the epidemic that public health authorities are warning us about.

So we look for coverage that helps us answer that question. We find creditable stories from many outlets, some of which has been noted here earlier by Charlie Petit. But there are other stories slipping into the news stream that raise concerns about reliability and accuracy.

Two themes caught my eye this morning: Stories about the dangers of vaccine preservatives; and others about health care workers refusing to take the vaccine.

In the first category, see a youtube video that pops up prominently in a Google search, and which has been reposted on various websites. It’s entitled “Makers of the Swine Flu Vaccine Refuse to Take It,” and it comes from RT, an English-language television network based in Moscow. For starters, here’s what the video actually says:

“I know from talking to people in the research community, even scientists who helped develop the vaccine for smallpox are saying they’re not going to take the vaccine and they’re urging their friends and family not to take this vaccine either.”

That’s from Wayne Madsen, an online investigative journalist I’m not familiar with. In an interview in RT’s Washington studio, he says unnamed developers of the smallpox vaccine–not the makers of the flu vaccine–refuse to take it. Perhaps that’s a minor error; his point is that people who make vaccines and know a lot about them don’t want to take this one.

But before we lend too much credibility  to this report, however, stick around for what comes later. He says the vaccine contains thimerosal (some flu vaccines do), and that thimerosal, which contains mercury, has “been proven to cause not only Guillan Barre syndrome but also autism in young children.” [Emphasis mine.]

The CDC begs to differ. “There is no convincing evidence of harm caused by the small amount of thimerosal in vaccines,” on a web page on the seasonal flu vaccine. You can find similar information on the FDA’s website.

Despite these stories, many people still want the vaccine. The New York Times, in a front-page story by Anemona Hartocollis, discusses the huge demand for the swine flu vaccine, and notes that pediatricians are being overwhelmed by demand, even though the vaccine is not yet available. USA Today reminds us that the signs still point to a potentially devastating epidemic, and it includes some helpful news-you-can-use sidebars on the vaccine, including one by Steve Sternberg noting that thimerosal “isn’t thought to pose a problem.”

And what about health care workers refusing to take the vaccines? Many of the stories are coming out of the UK. The Guardian reports that “up to 60% of GPs would oppose being immunised because they are concerned the safety trials will be rushed.” The Telegraph hits the other side of the story, quoting authorities who say doctors are “potentially putting patients at risk if they refuse the swine flu vaccine.”

On this side of the Atlantic, Donald G. McNeil Jr. and Karen Zraick covered the issue for The New York Times on Sept. 20, reporting that health care workers oppose a rule that they must get the vaccine. The story includes this tidbit: “Across the country, federal health officials say, only about 42 percent of all health care workers get an annual flu shot.” I caught part of an interview on WNYC this morning featuring a health-care worker angry that she was being forced to get the vaccine.

At issue here is whether these stories, while accurate in their particulars, provide a confusing message to the public.

It’s clear that public-health authorities believe Americans should be vaccinated with both the swine-flu vaccine and the seasonal-flu vaccine. But when we write that many health workers are not getting vaccinated, do we not convey the idea that vaccination may be a bad thing? And isn’t that contrary to what our reporting is telling us?

I’m not suggesting that we ignore or suppress stories about swine flu dissidents. I’m saying that these stories require particular care if we want to report the disagreements without confusing our readers.

- Paul Raeburn