MAJOR CORRECTION: The Tracker apologizes to Jane Kay for the post below, but not so much to the SF Chronicle. Jane was laid off in August, and wrote this for Environmental Health News. As such,. she’s bears no responsibility for my confusion. The Chronicle might have – given the familiarity by readers with her byline – made it clearer that Kay is no longer on staff. But the credit line did say EHN. I’m leaving  the rest of the post as it was. But there is no objective way to varnish this – I was careless in not seeing the credit line under her byline.

Furthermore, Environmental Health News is a foundation-supported and, by its assertion, non partisan service. That makes my suspicion it is an advocacy organization perhaps too strong. It has a number of well-respected journalists on board including former LA Times reporter Marla Cone as chief editor. It may have crusading zeal, but so do many legit news outlets.)- CP

Original post follows.

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The SF Chronicle‘s Jane Kay is a crusading environmental writer who punches industry and regulators hard, regularly, for any spill of any toxin or contamination of food with pesticides, preservatives, plasticizers, or most anything else that might be carcinogenic, teratogenic, or otherwise sickening to people or wildlife.  The Tracker has remarked before on her tendency to lead with the worst case scenario.

Today on the local news section’s front page she has Lead in red wine vinegars could hurt kids. Well-aged balsamics are most often the potential culprits, she writes. It is, we read right off the bat, so toxic and persistent that there is no known safe level, it causes neurological systems especially in children, and in adults can also damage hearts, kidneys, and immune systems.

Her primary source, she writes – and provides a link – is an organization called Environmental Health News. Her story provides reactions from attorneys and one lead toxicology specialist in Canada, but nothing that resembles work in a peer reviewed journal. That’s not necessarily a flaw – some things are found out and are worrisome before the professors can do their academic thing.

But here’s the twist. When one checks at Environmental Health News’s site there is indeed a long report on lead hazards in some red wine vinegars – and the author is Jane Kay. She wrote the report on which she is reporting. The newspaper piece attributes it all the Environmental Health News but it appears that Kay was the one who gathered the sample vinegars, sent them out for test, and is now putting it in the Chronicle. One, that is quite enterprising, doing an investigation first hand. But if she was doing it for what is, as far as I can tell, an advocacy organization her connection and in fact authorship of her own primary source …. gad, must one spell it out? It should be spelled out in the newspaper. It wouldn’t hurt the piece to say, “Based on reporting Jane Kay also did (under fellowship to, contract with, or maybe pro bono or whatever) for Environmental Health News.”

The absence of any rigorous epidemiology takes some of the edge of this as news. But if the numbers are correct then it merits reporting that, in principle, some vinegars in the market might pose a risk, same as mercury in tuna or swordfish. But the odd provenance of the reporting is…. more than odd.

Grist for the Mill: Environmental Health News Special Report ;

- Charlie Petit

This entry was posted on Monday, November 9th, 2009 at 4:06 pm and is filed under Environment & Energy Stories, Health & Medicine Stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.