If you have a credit card and a kid, add your kid on as an authorized user and pay the bill on time. By the time that kid hits 18, boom 800+ credit score for them to succeed in this world.

Explanation: If Your Child is an Authorized User on Your Credit Card, Do They Automatically Start Out with an 800 Credit Score?

On February 18 2020, the Facebook page “Real Badass Moms” shared a screenshot of the following tweet, which advised people “with a credit card and a kid” to add their child as an authorized user on that card — an act that would purportedly grant the child a credit score of 800 when they turned 18 (provided that payments were timely):If you have a credit card and a kid. Add your kid on as an authorized user and pay the bill on time. By the time that kid hits 18. Boom 800+ credit score for them to succeed in this world. Schools ain't teaching this. It's up to us.— ❤💕MaMa Odie🥰😍 (@mama_thickmadam) February 15, 2020It read in full:If you have a credit card and a kid. Add your kid on as an authorized user and pay the bill on time. By the time that kid hits 18. Boom 800+ credit score for them to succeed in this world. Schools ain’t teaching this. It’s up to us.The post on “Real Badass Moms” was shared more than 75,000 times in just over a week; @mama_thickmadam’s tweet was liked nearly 200,000 times and shared nearly 50,000 times.Clearly, readers liked what sounded like a good idea on paper, particularly parents of children entering into a difficult financial climate in 2020. But some of the top response tweets disputed the tweet’s advice. Some users posited that should the parent themselves encounter financial difficulties (many of which, such as car accidents or medical expenses) are unexpected, the child might be worse off in general or turn 18 with a “tanked” credit score:“Imagine something terrible happens and your child is 18 with a pre-tanked credit score because their parents thought they’d help. Be rich or dont do this. Schools do teach stuff like this, your school just didn’t. Mandatory personal finance class in my high school in nowhere[. ]”“And also don’t have any expensive emergencies, don’t become disabled and unable to work, etc etc. People get bad credit lots of ways, unforeseeable ways. I can see maybe putting your kid on your credit card for a few months before they turn 18 but that’s enough.”Others Twitter users claimed they were either beneficiaries of the advice or familiar with it, but that with no credit history otherwise, a 750 score alone was unhelpful:“It doesn’t help as well as you think. I had 780 coming out of college and was denied for credit cards because of “no credit history”. It’s a high score but it’s basically a fake score according to credit agencies.”“It’s a good place to start but the score alone isn’t enough to have good credit. I’ve worked in a financial institution for some time and have seen plenty of people with authorized user trades on the credit file with a good score get declined. It doesn’t show experience at all.”“It can help. But as an underwriter I wouldn’t lend an 18 year old any funds even if the credit score was 800. Bc there is no true payment history. Got to have more than a good score. But yes. Parents need to teach these things early ❤❤”If that claim was accurate, the ratio of risk (that a parent’s score could drop through no fault of their own, affecting the child) seemed possibly higher than the reward (a child starting adult life with a 780 or 800 credit score). Others said that they did add a child as an authorized user (or were added by parents), and consequently obtained or transferred a high credit score:“this is how my credit was built and i didn’t know it until i checked it one day for no reason and i had a 750 lol i don’t even use my credit, but it’s nice knowing it’s there”“my mommy did this for me and i’m not finna brag but i have an amex, venture card, perf credit score (u still gotta pull ur own weight tho bc even if u have an 800 u might not get approved for stuff bc of ur age), and hella flyer miles to go anywhere”Finally, at least one commenter claimed that being added as an authorized user on another person’s card was a factor in boosting their score from 550 to 796 in under a year:I fucked up my own credit long ago. Jus fixed all my negative remarks about a year ago. Had my OG add me on to her card. Went from a 550 fico to a 796 fico in about 8 months.If comments on the tweet were to be believed, the advice was of mixed veracity. Some reported obtaining high scores after parents added them as authorized users, but others said those scores were not as effective as scores obtained by building credit personally — the latter echoed by people claiming to work with lending institutions. And though the tweet indicated the advice worked if the card was paid off “on time,” others cautioned that many people with high credit scores could encounter financial trouble, which would adversely affect authorized users.In discourse about the advice, “FICO scores” came up quite a bit. FICO (formerly Fair and Issac Co.) is a data analysis firm known for providing credit scores. FICO scores are used by three major credit bureaus (also known as credit reporting agencies, or CRAs) — Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion. According to FICO, their scoring is used by “top lending institutions” in the United States, and it “rank-orders consumers by how likely they are to pay their credit obligations as agreed.”FICO scores were not always a major factor in loans and extensions of credit. What we currently call a FICO score came into play about three decades ago:[Bill Fair and Earl Isaac, two statisticians] made a number of correlations between which behaviors made a person a good credit risk and which made them a bad credit risk. And for the most part, their predictions were accurate. But it wasn’t really until the 1970s that credit scores became as important in lending as they are now. The modern iteration of the FICO score, based on credit files from the three credit bureaus — Equifax, Experian and TransUnion — was introduced in 1989.Before credit scores, people still had credit reports. But these reports weren’t distilled down into three-digit numbers. “Credit scores took a lot of randomness out of lending,” says Ken Lin, CEO of CreditKarma. “Scores were developed in the ’50s, but became much more prevalent in the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s.”In the thread, users claimed having high scores and no credit history was not very helpful; Lin estimates that a person’s credit score is “only 20% to 40% of the final decision, with the rest being hidden deeper inside the overall credit report and its extenuating circumstances.”A lot of credit card and finance blogs offered advice posts on adding children as authorized users. Unfortunately, it nearly always mentioned the risks to parents, neglecting to mention the risk this practice might pose to their children as well. Parents turning to those resources received a partial picture, neglecting some of the major pitfalls of that decision.Many people replying expressed general, profound frustration about the effects of FICO scores and credit reporting agencies — particularly when something like illness or job loss lay outside their control while heavily driving down their supposed creditworthiness. After one of those three agencies — Equifax — had a massive data breach in 2017, The Verge published an editorial about these generalized grievances and a “broken” system:Even worse, all this information [on your credit reports] is generally being shared without your consent. The three big credit bureaus — Equifax, TransUnion, and Experian — see their customers as the businesses checking people out, not the people themselves. They’re worried about keeping banks and car dealers happy, but the targets themselves are an afterthought. As a result, even basic inaccuracies can persist for years, bouncing between the three major bureaus. (Convincing credit bureaus that you’re not dead, for instance, is much harder than you think.) There have been a few regulations aimed at fixing that — most notably the Fair Credit Reporting Act — but it’s still an extremely clunky system, and the average consumer has little awareness or control over their own profile.Yet another element likely driving interest in the Twitter thread about kids as authorized users and credit scores of 800 was that by their nature, FICO and the three credit reporting agencies (Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion) remain highly secretive about their calculations of creditworthiness. Credit card blogger The Points Guy explained:Credit scores consist of a three-digit number, usually between 300 and 850, designed to represent the likelihood that you’ll repay a loan on time. They’re also a little mysterious and that’s not an accident. The major credit-scoring companies, FICO and VantageScore, keep their formulas secret, so only a handful of people know the exact recipe that’s used to turn your credit history into a credit score.In fact, it was only in fairly recent years that people had any access whatsoever to their own FICO scores. A 2001 article about FICO scores becoming accessible to borrowers reported that people were finally getting to see their scores — because FICO was selling their own information back to them:When it comes to getting a mortgage, credit card or insurance policy, most consumers have no clue about the most important number affecting their application: their FICO scores, behind-the-scenes calculations drawn from credit reports.Designed to predict future consumer behavior, FICO scores regularly make the difference between approval and rejection. And even after a loan or insurance policy is issued, FICO scores sway prices and credit lines, with the lowest rates going to consumers with the highest scores … After 35 years, Fair Isaac is finally emerging from the shadows, trying to leverage its influence on household finances to become more of a household name through an online service that sells people their FICO scores at $12.95 per peek.On Twitter and in the excerpted articles, it was demonstrated that FICO and the three credit reporting agencies typically did little to enable people to manage their own credit scores — except in cases where they hoped to extract money from them for access to their own personal information.That also ought to make “advice” from said companies slightly suspect. Lenders are FICO, Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion’s primary customer base. Borrowers are a middling secondary market, and consumer financial woes remained an area of massive profit for those agencies. Encouraging risky behavior or unfettered borrowing did, after all, serve to boost the bottom line of all involved.Bearing that in mind, credit rating agencies did offer tips on adding children as authorized users to build their credit scores. TransUnion’s blog had an Q&A entry about that very topic:Q: One tip I’ve heard is that a parent can put a child on their credit card as an authorized user and that can sometimes (with some cards) contribute to a child’s credit history. Is that true? What kind of cards should we be looking for?A: Adding your child as an authorized user is one way to help them begin building a credit score if you yourself have a good credit. With some credit cards, the entire account history can show up on the authorized user’s credit report, so you’ll want to select a card where you have a good credit history. While there are many different credit scoring models available, the most commonly used scores — FICO 8 and VantageScore 3.0 — factor in authorized user accounts when calculating a score. Determining if an authorized user account is right for you is a personal decision — as the card holder you are responsible for any charges on the card, so be sure that you set some guidelines in advance.TransUnion cautiously advised the practice “if you yourself have good credit,” stopping short of explaining what they meant by “good credit.” (Is that a 650 credit score? 600? 750?) Their answer also vaguely noted that “some” credit cards allow for “the entire account history” to appear on an authorized user’s own individual credit report, suggesting that activity that took place even before the user was added could be factored into their credit profile. That alone made the advice seem risky for anyone who had ever at any point made a late payment on any card.Equifax also had a blog, a Q&A about children as authorized users, and advice on its effects on a child’s future credit score:Even though an authorized user isn’t responsible for the financial obligations on the account, they can be impacted by whether or not the account is paid on time. Since they are considered account holders, any activity on the account that is reported by the creditor to any of the major credit bureaus will appear on the authorized user’s credit reports. If the primary account holder pays as agreed, it can help an authorized user establish or build a positive credit history. If they don’t, however, it can have a negative impact. Depending on the credit scoring model, credit scores may also be impacted. […]Being an authorized user can be one way to establish responsible credit habits. Some parents will add their children as authorized users to help them establish and build a credit history. Some couples will also add each other as authorized users on an account.But “you are going to inherit the credit of that cardholder” – for better or worse, said Jennifer Cox, Equifax chief client officer, who has worked in the credit card industry for decades. If you are considering becoming an authorized user on someone else’s account, it’s a good idea to discuss their credit situation with them.As Equifax described here, a level of risk accompanied any reward, and CRAs seemed to consistently frame those risk as related to “responsibility” or “reliability.” But as we pointed out, damage to credit isn’t always related to responsibility (as we also noted on our page about medical bankruptcy rates). By linking chosen traits or behaviors (like responsibility) to the advice, parents were tacitly advised that their best intentions were good enough to protect their child — but unforeseen circumstances never appeared to be mentioned by credit bureaus encouraging the behavior.Experian too had a Q&A blog post about adding children as authorized users to help the child eventually build credit. It also used words like “responsible” and “reliable,” advising putative authorized users to “ask the primary account holder” about factors like late payments and even suggesting that those same authorized users ask to see a credit report:Just as joining a responsible credit user’s account can help you, linking yourself with a less reliable cardholder can hurt you. If the cardholder misses a payment or maxes out their card, your credit could be negatively affected. Some credit reporting agencies, including Experian, do not include negative payment history in an authorized user’s credit report. But others may.Before becoming an authorized user, ask the primary account holder about past late payments, how long they’ve had the account, and how often they use more than 30% of their credit limit. Experts say those with good credit scores use less than that on a regular basis (and those with the best scores stay around 10% or less). To be extra sure you’re making the right call, consider asking if the account holder will let you see their credit report.Discover’s Credit Resource Center reiterated the same advice in a Q&A format; Discover does, of course, profit more from borrowers using their subprime products, thanks to higher interest rates:By Becoming an Authorized User, am I Inheriting the Primary Account Holder’s Credit Habits? Before you consider becoming an authorized user, the first, and most important, thing to look for is whether the primary account holder pays their bills on time. If they do not make timely payments, that gets documented on the credit reports of authorized users. And credit card issuers report late payments to credit bureaus.So it doesn’t take much to begin to negatively impact your credit score. What’s more, late payments, as bad as they are, are not the only thing that can hurt you. If the account in question has a high utilization rate, that too can weigh heavily on your credit score.So before signing on to be an authorized user, it’s best to do your own due diligence by evaluating the credit habits of the primary account holder. Otherwise, instead of working to build a positive credit history, you may find yourself achieving the opposite.Caveats about debt-to-income ratio accompanied tips about not paying bills late when lenders and CRAs gave advice. But as of 2018, the average American household held $38,000 in personal debt, against a median household income of $63,000 the same year. On top of that, only 41 percent of Americans had the ability to pull together $1,000 in case of an emergency as of January 2020, leaving 59 percent lacking sufficient savings to cover that proposed unexpected expense.In the larger scheme of things, credit reporting agencies and lenders offered a few broad caveats about transference of negative credit history as well as positive, sometimes advising prospective authorized users to credit check their parents. Overwhelmingly, that advice was couched in such a way users would identify themselves as a responsible borrower, and see less risk than they perhaps should in adding a child as an authorized user.Now let’s go back to the crux of the advice –in which the child wasn’t consulted, and likely couldn’t assess the risk anyway:Add your kid on as an authorized user and pay the bill on time. By the time that kid hits 18. Boom 800+ credit score for them to succeed in this world.Although Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion made it look like a safe bet if you considered yourself responsible (as most people do), no one ever mentioned negative credit history acquired due to a car accident, an illness, job loss, or other catastrophe. One of the advice posts mentioned the authorized user in question doing “due diligence” before piggybacking on a card, but the post referenced children under the age of 18 added unwittingly to parents’ credit cards.As the first commenter observed above, the advice, like nearly all financial advice, works best for those who are already rich. Credit pitfalls were typically related as much to circumstance as responsibility, and only the wealthy maintained the resources to apply the advice to optimal effect. The rest of the population is typically just one unexpected development away from a score drop.The massively viral piece of well-intentioned advice posits that adding a child to piggyback on a credit card would grant that same child a FICO score of 800 once they were old enough to apply for a credit line of their own (provided the parent paid their bills on time.) Of the little information given out by FICO and CRAs, an absence of credit history would make that score less useful than it might be for a borrower with their own credit score. But more importantly, many timely bill payers could follow the advice before falling on hard times — even a few months of delayed payments could impart a negative rather than positive history to the child, which would help them not at all.


Wedding guests should refrain from throwing rice at newly-wedded couples because the rice kills birds who eat it.

Explanation: An old rumor warns that discarded rice eaten by birds can expand in their tiny birdy stomachs and kill them.

Critter Country, birds, Crusader Habit, Wild Inaccuracies

We’re cautioned not to throw rice at the bride and groom, because the grain will prove harmful to the birds who swoop down to eat it. The rice expands in those little birdy stomachs, causing our avian companions to explode, we’re warned. This rumor was so pervasive, that in 1985 a Connecticut state legislator introduced a bill (amusingly titled “An Act Prohibiting the Use of Uncooked Rice at Nuptial Affairs”) to outlaw the practice:  Saying it isn’t healthy for birds, a state legislator has proposed a bill that would ban the traditional showering of newlyweds with uncooked rice at weddings in Connecticut. “An Act Prohibiting The Use Of Uncooked Rice At Nuptial Affairs” would provide that “no person shall throw, fling, cast or hurl any uncooked rice at any time during the celebration of any marriage,” according to Rep. Mae S. Schmidle’s proposal. The “statement of purpose” of the Newtown Republican’s bill says it would “prevent injury and death of birds as a result of ingesting raw rice thrown at weddings.” “The rice that’s left, that’s not in your hair or on your suit or in your bouquet, you leave for the birds,” she explained. “Unfortunately, when the birds eat the raw rice, they cannot digest it. When it gets in their stomachs, it expands and causes them to have violent deaths. I’ve heard from several ministers who say that the next morning after a wedding, they see all these birds toppled over because they got poisoned by the rice,” Mrs. Schmidle said. Her bill would impose a $50 fine for anyone caught throwing rice at a wedding. However, local ornithologists said that they had never heard of or seen birds dying after consuming rice thrown at weddings:  Although she said the Audubon Society thinks the idea “is wonderful,” a check with three Connecticut Audubon members produced no such assessment of the idea. “It sounds crazy,” said Roland C. Clement of Norwalk, a past president of the Connecticut Audubon Society and currently president of the Connecticut Ornithological Association. “I have 50 years of professional experience as a practicing ornithologist and I’ve never heard of such a thing before. Of course, there can always be a first time, but I would have to see some evidence before I would promote the idea.” Asked if he thought it was possible that birds would be killed by raw rice, Clement said: “I personally doubt it.” Karl Wagener, a former top official with the Connecticut Audubon Society who now heads the state Council on Environmental Quality, also questioned the need for Mrs. Schmidle’s bill. “I’ve never heard of anything like that ever, and I read an awful lot of bird-oriented literature,” he said. David Emerson, assistant director of the Connecticut Audubon Society, said the topic had never come up in any discussions he knew of within the society. “This silly myth pops up periodically, and it is absolutely unfounded,” responded rice expert Mary Jo Cheesman at the USA Rice Federation. Many migrating ducks and geese depend on winter-flooded rice fields each year to fatten up and build strength for their return trek to northern nesting grounds. Uncooked, milled rice is no more harmful to birds than rice in the field, Cheesman said. The Curator of Ornithology at the University of California at Berkeley agrees. “It’s a myth. There is no reason why birds, including small songbirds, can’t eat rice,” said Ned Johnson, a professor of biology at Berkeley who lectures frequently on the food and feeding of birds. Ann printed a response from one New York ornithologist who took her to task for spreading misinformation:  I am writing in response to a letter and your answer that appeared in the Ithaca Journal recently. There is absolutely no truth to the belief that rice (even instant) can kill birds. This rumor received publicity because of a bill introduced into the Connecticut legislature in 1985 by Mae Schmidle. This wild story resulted in frightening thousands of brides into putting birdseed in little tulle and chiffon bags so the guests wouldn’t throw rice and “kill the birds.” Rice is no threat to birds. It must be boiled before it will expand. Furthermore, all the food that birds swallow is ground up by powerful muscles and grit in their gizzards. Many birds love rice, as any frustrated rice farmer will tell you. I hope you will print this information in your column and put an end to this myth. In the meantime, keep throwing rice, folks. Tradition will be served and the birds will eat well and be healthy. Steven C. Sibley, Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology, Ithaca, N.Y. Dear Steven Sibley: Your letter proves once again that if a story is repeated often enough, people will believe it, even though it is false and defies logic. We checked with an authority in the Bird House at Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago, and she verified your statement. Shame on me for going along with that crock. I feel like a birdbrain. As noted in those responses to Ann Landers’ spreading of this rumor, plenty of wild birds eat naturally growing, uncooked rice without suffering death or any other harmful effects. The notion that rice absorbs moisture, and would therefore swell up to many times its original size in the crop of a bird and thereby rupture avians from within, is a mistaken one based upon our  culinary experiences with rice. We typically boil rice prior to eating it, and rice grains do absorb a fair amount of moisture during that process. But otherwise rice absorbs moisture only very slowly, and the interior of birds is not nearly as hot nor as moisture-suffused as a pot of boiling water — any uncooked rice eaten by birds is digested or excreted long before it can pick up enough water to expand in size to the point of causing injury to them. Still, nothing satisfies curious minds like empirical evidence, so in 2002 University of Kentucky biology professor James Krupa put the matter to test with his students, conducting experiments that he eventually published in the April 2005 edition of the journal American Biology Teacher under the title “A CLASSROOM EXERCISE FOR TESTING URBAN MYTH: Does Wedding Rice Cause Birds to Explode or Were Ann Landers, Martha Stewart & Bart Simpson Wrong?” One factor Krupa and his students measured just how much rice actually expands when soaked in water. They found that soaked white rice expanded in volume by 33%, which might sound like a lot, but not so much when compared to ordinary bird seed, which they found increased in size by an even greater percentage (40%). If a 33% increase in volume of ingested rice could cause birds to explode, then bird seed should be turning even more of them into avian bombs. Krupa’s group found that instant rice, both the brown and white varieties, expanded considerably more (2.4 to 2.7 times its original volume) than plain white rice when soaked. Instant rice isn’t typically the sort that people throw at weddings (because it’s costlier and more difficult to buy in bulk), but nonetheless the experimenters tested the possibilities by constructing models of bird crops from thin plastic and wet paper and filling them with instant rice. Although a paper bag filled with soaked instant white rice ruptured in about 15 minutes, none of the avian crop models burst. Krupa’s students prevailed upon him to also test the exploding rice theory on real birds, an entreaty he finally acquiesced to because he felt their previous experiments had sufficiently demonstrated that no birds would come to harm through the process. He agreed to try some rice-feeding tests with flocks of doves and pigeons he kept at home, feeding 60 of his birds a diet of nothing other than instant rice and water for one day and monitoring them for any ill effects. He found that none of the birds showed any obvious signs of pain, discomfort, or distress; none of them exhibited ruptures or other injuries (including explosion), and none of them took ill or died. Many churches and reception halls still have rules prohibiting the throwing of rice, or require that thrown rice be enclosed in those “little tulle and chiffon bags.” This practice isn’t about protecting birds, however: these rules work to keep the properties clean so that subsequent happy couples don’t get their send-offs amid the leavings of a previous pair. Rice and confetti can be notoriously hard to clean up, and sometimes not even vacuuming a lawn will return the grass to its pristine condition. Rice also poses a unique danger, albeit it to people rather than birds: rice scattered on a hard surface (such as the steps of a church or a dance floor) puts anyone who walks across that surface at risk of taking a nasty spill. Far better to prohibit rice throwing at a wedding than to end up with an injured guest. Don’t do it for the birds, do it for the inlaws. Sightings:   In The Simpsons episode of 14 May 2000, Bart is warned not to throw rice at Otto’s wedding, lest he cause birds to explode. Also, in the 16 July 2001 episode of the TV soap opera Passions Charity told Tabitha that they don’t throw rice at weddings anymore, stating this legend’s premise as the reason. And in an episode of the TV sitcom Cybill (“Bachelor Party,” original air date 6 January 1997), Holly (Ira’s fiancée) dictates that rice won’t be thrown at her wedding because it “makes pigeons explode.”


Democratic 2020 candidates vie for unions, Latinos in Nevada.

Explanation: Democratic presidential candidates descended on Nevada on Saturday in an attempt to build relationships with Latino voters and win the coveted endorsement of the powerful casino workers’ Culinary Union.

Race and ethnicity, Health care reform, General News, Politics, Election 2020, Elizabeth Warren, Medicare, Bernie Sanders, Las Vegas, Nevada, Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar

Amy Klobuchar and Pete Buttigieg, both running as Midwestern moderates who’ve warned against liberal plans to move the U.S. to a government-run health insurance system, pitched themselves Saturday morning to Culinary Union workers, who prize their robust health plans. Klobuchar, a Minnesota senator, said the “Medicare for All” proposals like those put out by Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren “might sound really good on a bumper sticker” but would cause millions of Americans to lose their current health insurance, including the plans the casino workers bargained hard for. “All of that work, I don’t want it to go down the drain,” Klobuchar said during her appearance at the workers’ union hall just off the Las Vegas Strip. Buttigieg, who took the stage after Klobuchar left, made a similar point as he pushed his plan to offer government-run Medicare insurance to those who want it. “I believe that if it’s the best answer for everybody, well, then everybody will choose it anyway,” said the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana. Visits from Klobuchar, Buttigieg and former Vice President Joe Biden came a little more than a month before early caucus voting starts in Nevada, the third state to weigh in on the primary race. Biden has maintained a top spot in Nevada polls. In the most recent poll of the state, released Thursday by Fox News, he has a slight lead over Bernie Sanders, followed by Elizabeth Warren and Tom Steyer, with Buttigieg trailing slightly. Klobuchar, who has only recently established her campaign in Nevada, has been polling in low single digits. Biden held a town hall-style meeting at a high school in north Las Vegas with Latino and immigrant advocacy group Mi Familia Vota. Nevada, considered the first state to test a candidate’s appeal before a diverse population, is a minority-majority state that’s about 29% Latino. Hispanic voters are a key constituency for Democrats in the state, along with labor unions. Biden spoke to an audience of about 200, mostly people of color, packed into chairs and on stairways to listen. The former vice president said he has no Hispanic heritage but that he understands what it’s like to be a second-class citizen, growing up Irish Catholic in his Scranton, Pennsylvania, neighborhood. “We were considered sort of the bottom of the rung,” he said. Mi Familia Vota leader Héctor Sánchez Barba asked Biden if he’d commit to having four Latinos in his Cabinet. Biden wouldn’t commit to any specific number but said he would have a “significant number of Latinos” in his Cabinet, along with Latinos serving as core members of his senior White House team. “Latinos make up 25% of every single solitary person in school in America today. The idea that we are not going to have overwhelming representation of Latinos in my Cabinet says we’re not going to move forward as a country,” he said. “You are the future.”  The biggest immigrant organization in Nevada is the Culinary Union, 60,000 strong, mostly women and mostly Latinos, and one of the most important endorsements in Nevada Democratic politics. The Culinary Union’s leaders have not yet said if they will endorse in the primary. The union’s parent organization, Unite Here, will decide at the end of the month whether to endorse. If it doesn’t, Culinary may endorse on its own, according to Culinary spokeswoman Bethany Khan. Biden, Warren and Sanders all made their pitch to the union in December. While Warren sidestepped discussion of her “Medicare for All” plan to move the country away from private insurance, Sanders took on the issue directly and was heckled by some in the audience. But all three of those candidates, who are much better known, received more enthusiastic receptions at their earlier visits than Klobuchar and Buttigeg did Saturday. Klobuchar told jokes and touted her family’s long union membership as she warmed up the crowd. Buttigieg drew whoops and claps as he broke into Spanish several times during his speech. Biden, while answering a question about Latino representation at his event, apologized that he couldn’t speak Spanish. He said he took five years of French in high school and college and was still made fun of when he tried to speak that language. Later Saturday afternoon, Buttigieg held a town hall at a high school across town, where he drew an enthusiastic audience that appeared to be at least 700 people. Sharon Sampsel, 61, said she would like to see a woman in the White House but that she’s going to caucus for Buttigieg, saying he has “the most winnable, stable, middle-of-the-road, commonsense platform that’s out there.”


FDA approves AstraZeneca type 2 diabetes drug.

Explanation: U.S. health regulators on Wednesday approved an AstraZeneca drug from a new class of medicines to treat type 2 diabetes after previously rejecting it over safety concerns.

The Food and Drug Administration’s approval had been expected after an outside advisory panel of medical experts voted by a wide margin in December to recommend its approval, saying the benefits of the drug, dapagliflozin, outweighed its safety risks. It will be sold in the United States under the brand name Farxiga. The medicine was co-developed by Bristol-Myers Squibb Co and AstraZeneca. AstraZeneca late last year bought out Bristol’s stake in their diabetes joint venture for more than $4 billion, including upfront and sales-related milestone payments. Farxiga, which has already been available in Europe, belongs to a class of diabetes drugs called SGLT-2 inhibitors that work by blocking reabsorption of glucose by the kidney and increasing its excretion through urine to lower levels of blood sugar. It will compete with a similar drug from Johnson & Johnson called Invokana, as well as diabetes medicines from other classes. Other drugmakers, including Boehringer Ingelheim, are also developing SGLT2 inhibitors. “We’re big believers in SGLT-2 class. It’s going to be a pretty big product,” said Morningstar analyst Damien Conover, who forecast Farxiga annual sales reaching about $1.5 billion by 2018. Conover said the new class was underappreciated by investors and sees those drugs taking market share from some older diabetes treatments that cause weight gain. SGLT-2 inhibitors led to weight loss in clinical trials, which can be an attractive advantage because type 2 diabetes is closely associated with obesity. The potential market for type 2 diabetes treatments is enormous despite a crowded field with many medicines from several different classes from which to choose. An estimated 90 percent to 95 percent of the more than 370 million people living with diabetes worldwide have type 2, according to the International Diabetes Federation. Many type 2 diabetes patients require two or more medications to get their blood sugar down to target levels. Farxiga was tested in combination with several other widely used medicines. “Farxiga provides an additional treatment option for millions of Americans with type 2 diabetes,” Curtis Rosebraugh, of the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, said in a statement. The FDA had initially rejected the Astra and Bristol-Myers drug in early 2012 over concerns about possible cancer and heart risks. The companies provided additional data that addressed those concerns to the satisfaction of the advisory panel and the agency. Still, as a condition of approval, the FDA is requiring six post-marketing studies, including a cardiovascular outcomes trial to make sure the medicine does not increase the risk of heart attacks in patients deemed at high risk of heart disease, and a study to assess bladder cancer risk. The FDA-approved label for Farxiga says the drug should not be used in patients who also have kidney disease or who are being treated for bladder cancer.


Viagra may help heart effects of muscular dystrophy

Explanation: Readers should care that this report just briefly summarizes one experiment using the active ingredient in Viagra to treat heart problems in mice that were genetically modified to have a condition similar to Duchenne muscular dystrophy… without interviewing either the researchers or independent experts… and also failing to note that the drug is already being tested in people that have the actual disease. We also note a relatively minor point, but still worth noting for anyone who wants to look up the source of the story’s claims.

Even though this line of research is preliminary, the story should have noted that typical treatment for pulmonary hypertension patients who use the Revatio brand of sildenafil costs more than $15,000 a year and that since the drug does not cure the disease, this sort of treatment might well continue indefinitely. The story has just a vague reference to treating heart symptoms. It does not offer any specific data, not even about the mice in this trial. The story fails to mention any of harms of sildenafil, which include:    * sudden severe loss of vision (see below for more information)    * blurred vision    * sudden decrease or loss of hearing    * ringing in ears    * erection that is painful or lasts longer than 4 hours    * dizziness or lightheadedness    * fainting    * chest pain    * worsening shortness of breath    * itching or burning during urination    * rashSildenafil may also interact with other prescription drugs. What’s more, the story failed to note that the continual administration of sildenafil over many months used in this study (and the sort of life-long daily treatment that would be envisioned in human patients) is more like the way the drug is used in patients with pulmonary hypertension and completely different from the occasional doses of the Viagra brand form of the drug used by men to treat erectile dysfunction. This story included some caveats, such as the fact that researchers don’t understand how the drug works in the lab animals and that the mice used in the experiment have “a condition similar to Duchenne muscular dystrophy,” not the actual disease. However, any story reporting the results of animal experiments should alert readers to the fact that very few treatments that emerge out of animal testing ultimately pass human testing. The story points out that Duchenne muscular dystrophy affects about one in 3,500 males. The story gets credit for reporting that the study was funded by the NIH and non-profit groups. But it does not appear that anyone was interviewed for this story, neither researchers nor independent experts. The quotes are excerpts from the journal article. The story does not tell readers about how the heart problems of patients with Duchenne muscular dystrophy are currently managed, nor does it offer any explanation of how sildenafil treatment might compare to standard therapy. The story reports that sildenafil is the drug in Viagra, used to treat erectile dysfunction, and also Revatio, which is used to treat pulmonary hypertension. The story would have been better if it referred to the active ingredient in Viagra, rather than Viagra itself, and had pointed out that to treat heart problems, the drug would be given continually (as it is for pulmonary hypertension) and not just occasionally as it is when used to treat erectile dysfunction. The story reports the new finding of this study in its next-to-last sentence, while leading with old news. The researchers wrote that to their knowledge “this is the first report of rapid reversal by a drug treatment of the functional symptoms seen in the established cardiac dysfunction that occurs in mdx mice.” But the story lead is that the drug “might help treat heart symptoms of muscular dystrophy”… something that has been reported previously not only in mice, but is already being tested in people. This story does not appear to put this latest study in the proper context of other experiments. Reference:Revatio for Heart Disease in Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy (REVERSE-DMD)http://clinicaltrials.gov/show/NCT01168908 The story quotes the journal article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. It does not appear to rely only on a news release.


On using embryonic stem cells for medical research.

Explanation: U.S. Senate candidate Tommy Thompson no longer champion of controversial research

When U.S. Senate candidate Tommy Thompson gave remarks at a Vatican conference on adult stem cell research, he portrayed himself as a strong proponent of that work while seeming to brush aside embryonic stem cell work -- despite the fact that he previously championed both types of research. The former Wisconsin governor, one of three Republicans seeking the 2012 GOP nomination, has fought criticism that he is not conservative enough. Has Thompson changed his position on embryonic stem cell research, a practice a recent poll shows is opposed by far more Republicans than Democrats? This is a question for our Flip-O-Meter, which determines not whether any move is good politics or good policy, but whether a political figure has changed stances on an issue. The apparent shift in Thompson’s views was raised in a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel article on Thompson’s Nov. 9, 2011 speech at the Vatican, which opposes embryonic research. Before we examine Thompson’s stance on embryonic stem cells, we’ll note three points we’ve made in previous PolitiFact Wisconsin items about stem cells: Let’s start with Thompson’s early involvement with embryonic stem cell research. August 2001: Kevin Keane, a longtime Thompson aide, tells the Journal Sentinel that Thompson had decided in 1998 to back embryonic stem cell research and was criticized by anti-abortion groups in 1999 for praising University of Wisconsin-Madison scientist James Thomson in his "state of the state" message as governor. The UW biologist was the first person to isolate and grow human embryonic stem cells. Keane also said Thompson, who left the governor’s office in early 2001 to become U.S. health and human services secretary under President George W. Bush, offered to develop and announce the Bush administration’s policy allowing federal money to be used for research on existing lines of embryonic stem cells. September 2001: Thompson tells the Journal Sentinel "I was very active," in Bush's decision to allow that limited federal funding for embryonic stem cell research. "I've been active in stem cells ever since Jamie Thomson discovered them," Thompson said. "I've been very, very supportive of the science. I think it has great potential." September 2008: Thompson recounts how, at an August 2001 lunch, he lobbied Bush to approve federal funding -- which was already supporting adult stem cell research -- for embryonic stem cell research. "If it were not for that lunch I feel that research on those first lines of stem cells would not have taken place," he said at the World Stem Cell Summit in Madison. Bush in August 2001 announced he would allow federal funds to be used for research on existing embryonic stem cell lines, "where the life-and-death decision has already been made," but not on new lines that would require the destruction of an embryo. So, it’s clear that Thompson backed embryonic stem cell research as early as the late 1990s, and advocated for it as a Bush cabinet member starting in 2001. So, how does that compare with Thompson’s remarks at the Vatican? Speaking to reporters a day before the conference, Thompson was quoted as saying science had moved beyond destroying embryos. "Why destroy an embryo?" he asked. "We are in a new science of adult stem cells that are pluripotent," or able to differentiate into other tissues. (An important note here: Thompson is suggesting that a scientific advance with adult stem cells eliminates the need to use embryonic cells. It’s true that scientists can change body cells into an embryonic state. But as the Los Angeles Times reported a month before Thompson’s remarks, these pluripotent cells can raise a cancer risk and make it more difficult to safely treat diseases. Scientists also are not certain that these changed or reprogrammed cells will behave exactly the same as embryonic stem cells.) Back to Thompson’s comments. At the Vatican conference, he went further with his statements about embryonic stem cells, according to prepared remarks furnished by his campaign. Thompson said: "I just don't believe that man can engineer something superior to what the good Lord has already given us. That's what I love about adult stem cells -- we're using the divine wisdom inside each of us to supercharge our bodies and wipe away disease. And as we do this, not a single human embryo is destroyed." He also said "we can surely unite to return health to the hundreds of millions of people suffering needlessly throughout the world. And we can do so without destroying one human life." So, Thompson is emphasizing how treatment of disease can be done with adult stem cells and without destroying an embryo. We asked Thompson campaign spokesman Darrin Schmitz whether Thompson has changed his position. Schmitz referred us to comments he made to the Journal Sentinel about Thompson’s speech at the Vatican. He said then that Thompson’s position is consistent with the policy he helped develop with Bush. "As a pro-life Catholic, Tommy Thompson has always sought to protect new and existing life," Schmitz said. "Thompson fully supports adult stem cell research, which does not require the destruction of embryos and has yielded new advancements in regenerative therapies." That’s a far cry from the strong support Thompson expressed for embryonic stem cell search while serving under Bush. Our conclusion  Thompson has gone from being a leading advocate of embryonic stem cell research at the highest levels of government to arguing it is no longer necessary to destroy embryos in order to make scientific advancements with stem cells. While he hasn’t come out against the embryonic work, he has suggested it is no longer necessary given advancements in adult stem cell research -- even though that is far from settled science. PolitiFact defines "a partial change of position or inconsistent statements." That’s how we rate Thompson.


Officials: 21 measles cases in Detroit area since March 13.

Explanation: Michigan health officials say more cases of measles have been confirmed in the Detroit area, raising the number in Oakland County to 21 since March 13.

Health, Measles, Michigan, Detroit, Royal Oak

The highly contagious disease has been linked to a person who was visiting from Israel and had stayed in New York, where there’s a measles outbreak. Officials say people may have been exposed this month in Detroit and in the suburbs of Oak Park, Berkley, Farmington Hills, Royal Oak and Southfield, including at synagogues, Jewish educational institutions, a hospital and grocery stores. A full list of possible exposure dates and locations is posted online . Michigan health officials last year urged people to get vaccinated after confirming several measles cases in the state . They’re urging vaccinations following this month’s cases.


The name Frank has risen in popularity by 20 percent" since the debut of 'House of Cards' on Netflix.

Explanation: Lauer asked Spacey if he knew that "the name Frank has risen in popularity by 20 percent" since the debut of House of Cards in 2013. Lauer seems to be referencing a 2014 press release from the website BabyCenter.com that played up the influence of Netflix shows on new children’s names. It should be obvious that the company’s priority is generating publicity and not sound scientific methods. Experts say the best data comes from the Social Security Administration, which will not release its baby name rankings until May 2015. And we do know that, according to Social Security data, Frank was never more unpopular than in 2013, when House of Cards debuted. Now you know more than you probably need to about baby name trends, and how a fact-checker’s mind works while trying to watch mindless television. Help fund PolitiFact’s Kickstarter to live fact-check the 2015 State of the Union and GOP response.

Hollywood red carpet interviews are reliably substance-free safe zones for fact-checkers, a rare opportunity to turn on the TV and turn off our ears for misleading claims. That’s what we thought, anyway, going into Sunday’s Golden Globes. We tuned in for the pre-show, with a beverage in one hand and our phone in the other. Our only care was coming up with snarky tweets about the rich and famous. Then Today host Matt Lauer had to go and kill our vibe with an apparently researched question for Kevin Spacey, who plays the conniving House Majority Whip Frank Underwood on Netflix’s House of Cards. "You know, we were sitting together at breakfast, and we saw a fact," Lauer said, ticking us off because now we had to put our beverage down and give him our full attention. "Do you know that the name Frank has risen in popularity by 20 percent since this show debuted? What does that say about parents across America?" "Well," Spacey said, "if the parents also have last names that start with a ‘u,’ then, F.U. as initials has risen dramatically as well." "We are live, Kevin," Lauer said, fearing an expletive. "Where’s that seven-second delay when you need it?" joked co-host Savannah Guthrie. Spacey went on to have a pretty great night, winning his first Globe for Best Actor in a TV Series (Drama) for his role as Underwood. We still had work to do. We wanted to know if Lauer was for real about the name Frank taking a leap into popularity since the world was introduced to House of Cards (the third season premieres Feb. 27, 2015). What the numbers say We turned first to a super glamorous source: the Social Security Administration. The agency, which maintains a list of baby names going back to 1880, receives information on names from parents when they apply for a child’s Social Security number at his or her birth. Frank, a form of Francis as you would know from watching the show, used to be a really big name near the turn of the 20th century. From 1880 to 1892, it was the sixth-most popular name of U.S. males. It remained in the top 10 of baby names for boys until 1923, the year it started its long, slow slide to the 327th spot in 2013. The chart shows Frank was never more unpopular than in 2013, the same year subscription-based Netflix released the first season of House of Cards (Feb. 1, 2013, to be exact). The greater the ranking number, the lower the popularity of the name. Ranking of the male name Frank 2013 327 2012 319 2011 308 2010 302 2009 291 2008 278 2007 262 2006 246 2005 231 2004 230 2003 230 2002 216 2001 213 2000 208 1999 187 Source: Social Security Administration So Frank had become pretty unpopular before House of Cards started running. And now? This is where we have to introduce a major plot twist to this fact-check: The Social Security Administration has not yet released its 2014 data. The agency releases that information on the Friday before Mother’s Day in May. Without the last year’s data, we can’t discern if there was a possible increase -- much less what really drove it. We do, however, have an idea of what Lauer is talking about. BabyCenter.com, a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson, is a popular pregnancy and parenting website that releases an annual Baby Names Survey and Top 100 Names list. The names list is based on 406,000 babies born in 2014 to mothers who are registered BabyCenter users. BabyCenter global editor in chief Linda Murray hailed 2014 as the "year of the binge-watching baby name" because of the influence of TV shows that about 20 percent of surveyed moms said had on their baby name choice. The press release doesn’t just single out Frank, which saw a 19-percent increase from the 352nd ranking to No. 297 among BabyCenter users, but also House of Cards characters Claire (Frank’s wife, up 14 percent), journalist Zoe (up 13 percent), and lobbyist Remy (up 11 percent). Another Netflix show, Orange is the New Black, inspired a rash of baby-naming after characters from its female-centric cast, including Galina (up 67 percent), Nicky (up 35 percent), Piper (up 28 percent) and Dayanara (up 19 percent), BabyCenter says. To be clear, these increases are just the percentage that the names moved up the list from the year before. The BabyCenter survey doesn’t include information on how many people named their children Frank (or any other name) year by year. The naming effect is similar for characters in the Shonda Rhimes-produced shows Scandal (Olivia), Grey’s Anatomy (Meredith) and How To Get Away with Murder (Annalise), BabyCenter said, as well as the movie Frozen and its star Elsa. Murray called the correlation between trending baby names and binge-worthy shows "undeniable." Other experts weigh in That doesn’t mean we should take the word of BabyCenter as gold. Some of its user-generated  information mirrors federal name data, but there are discrepancies. BabyCenter’s most popular male name in 2013 was Jackson, and the federal winner was Noah. Sophia remained the most popular girl name according to both sources. For instance, the popularity of the name Frank varied pretty significantly when you compared BabyCenter and Social Security information from years past. (We looked so you didn’t have to.) Basically, experts say we need to wait for the Social Security Administration list to know for sure. It isn’t inconceivable that Frank or Francis is turning a corner after the popularity of House of Cards, said Laura Wattenberg, author of Baby Name Wizard and the website of the name. But it may also have to do with parents who want to honor Pope Francis (but don’t want to call their children Francis). "It’s hard for one use to really move the needle," Wattenberg said. "Frank has been so unpopular for so long that you could get what looks like a really big jump just from a couple dozen names." Echoing Social Security’s 2013 press release about hot baby names, Wattenberg said the reality is that "obscure" Spanish TV shows are more likely to have the hottest name of the year than a Netflix hit. In 2013, the girl’s name Daleyza, the name of a young woman’s character on the Spanish-language show Larrymania, increased in popularity by more than 3,000 places. Who would do this Then we got curious about the name Frank itself. As Lauer prodded, what does naming a child after the murderous, conniving character say about American parents? Parents are "desperate for fresh name ideas" these days, and are not choosy about the source, Wattenberg said. Gone are the days when all-American parents name their offspring in tribute to the new president. "They just want something that sounds fresh and creative," she said. "That includes villains, video game characters." Albert Mehrabian, professor emeritus of psychology at UCLA, wrote the books The Name Game and Baby Name Report Card based on his studies of the attractiveness of names. His studies aimed to capture the impressions left by names isolated from any other factor, such as appearance or personality. Participants in his studies were asked to imagine themselves meeting someone for the first time knowing just their first name, its spelling and the person’s gender. The participants gave numerical scores on a range of adjectives describing the name, and their responses were averaged and categorized into four areas that defined the name’s attractiveness -- ethical/caring, popular/fun, success and femininity/masculinity. The name Frank scored a 65 of 100 overall, doing really well in terms of giving a successful, ambitious impression but lacking substantially in ethics, Mehrabian said. (Sounds a lot like Spacey’s character, don’t you think?) The given name Francis, meanwhile, scores higher at 78 overall. The increase comes from the stronger impression of ethics and compassion for people named Francis, a score of 99 versus 22 for Frank. "So Frank, I would say, it’s a so-so name," Mehrabian said. "But it does have high implications of success." A spokeswoman for Lauer’s Today show did not get back to us. Our ruling Lauer asked Spacey if he knew that "the name Frank has risen in popularity by 20 percent" since the debut of House of Cards in 2013. Lauer seems to be referencing a 2014 press release from the website BabyCenter.com that played up the influence of Netflix shows on new children’s names. It should be obvious that the company’s priority is generating publicity and not sound scientific methods. Experts say the best data comes from the Social Security Administration, which will not release its baby name rankings until May 2015. And we do know that, according to Social Security data, Frank was never more unpopular than in 2013, when House of Cards debuted. Now you know more than you probably need to about baby name trends, and how a fact-checker’s mind works while trying to watch mindless television. The claim is . Help fund PolitiFact’s Kickstarter to live fact-check the 2015 State of the Union and GOP response.


The state GOP ticket "says their top priority is a career-long mission to outlaw abortion in all cases and ban some common forms of birth control.

Members of the Democratic state ticket gathered recently in Richmond for their first campaign rally an immediately labeled their Republican opponents as extremists. "The Tea Party ticket says their top priority is a career-long mission to outlaw abortion in all cases and ban some common forms of birth control," Terry McAuliffe, the Democratic gubernatorial nominee, told a crowd of about 150 at the Hippodrome Theater in Jackson Ward. The claim caught our attention. There’s no doubt that the members of the GOP slate -- gubernatorial candidate Ken Cuccinelli, lieutenant governor candidate E.W. Jackson and attorney general candidate Mark Obenshain -- are strongly opposed to abortion. But have they really said their No. 1 goal is to ban abortion and some forms of contraception? We asked McAuliffe’s campaign for proof and spokesman Josh Schwerin pointed to a comment Cuccinelli made at a February 2012 rally to support personhood legislation. The bill, which defined life as beginning at conception, had passed the House when Cuccinelli spoke but would subsequently die in the Senate. "It’s hard to believe we actually have to come and advocate for something as basic as life, but we’ve had to do it for decades and we’re going to have to do it for the rest of our lives," The Washington Times quoted Cuccinelli as saying. "The fight for life is going to last for all of our lives." Schwerin cited various press reports and other materials saying the personhood measure would lead to a ban on all abortions and forms of birth control that prevent a fertilized egg from implanting in a uterus. But this Truth-O-Meter is not about the consequences of personhood legislation. We are examining whether the GOP ticket has proclaimed that ending abortion and certain types of contraception is its top priority. So Cuccinelli’s comments at the rally are immaterial. There are plenty of instances when members of the GOP ticket opposed abortion. Cuccinelli helped muscle through controversial new regulations that require clinics performing abortions to comply with building code standards for hospitals -- an action that was criticized as a ruse to force clinics to close. In a May 18 speech at the Republican state convention accepting the gubernatorial nomination, Cuccinelli called for "defending those at both ends of life -- protecting the elderly from abuse as well as the unborn." Jackson, the lieutenant governor nominee, has called abortion "genocide." And Obenshain, running for attorney general, has consistently voted to restrict abortion rights during his nine years in the state Senate. But when it comes to identifying the most important issue facing voters this fall, Cuccinelli has said it’s the economy. He was asked in a Jan. 3 radio interview on The John Fredericks Show how a Cuccinelli administration would differ from current GOP Gov. Bob McDonnell. "In some ways it would be very similar," Cuccinelli replied. "Certainly the same top priority of focusing on economic opportunity would be the same in a Cuccinelli administration." And in a May 7 news conference announcing his tax plan, Cuccinelli said "as governor, job creation will be my top priority." We asked McAuliffe’s spokesman if he had any other evidence that Cuccinelli and his running mates have stated that ending abortions and restricting birth control are their main reasons for running this year. Schwerin pointed to comments Cuccinelli made last September during a visit to Prison Fellowship, a Lansdowne-based ministry. "Start with the priorities. Work your way down: life, family, community, world -- a lot of ways to affect the ones at the bottom," Cuccinelli said. "It gets narrower and narrower as you get to the top. None of those other rights matter a whole lot if you don’t get born." Schwerin provided another snippet of a clip, this one from Cuccinelli’s appearance at a June 2011 conference of homeschoolers in Herndon. "And that’s where the candidate’s responsibility arises. You give a campaign purpose. My purpose was to fight abortion, to shrink government, to protect life and families," Cuccinelli said. That establishes once again that one of Cuccinelli’s key reasons for entering politics is to oppose abortion. But it falls short of a declaration by the GOP ticket of its No. 1 goal. Our ruling McAuliffe claimed the GOP ticket "says their top priority is a career-long mission to outlaw abortion in all cases and ban some common forms of birth control." A compelling argument can be made that members of the GOP ticket will do everything possible to restrict abortions and those actions could ban certain types of birth control. But McAuliffe went an extra step and put words in the mouths of his opponents. We rate McAuliffe’s statement .


Bill Clinton Says Hillary Clinton tripled the number of people with AIDS whose "lives are being saved .. and it did not cost you any more money.

Global News Service, Foreign Policy, Public Health, Bill Clinton,

When Bill Clinton wasn’t retelling how he courted his wife, he filled his Democratic convention speech, later published on Medium, with a long list of Hillary Clinton’s achievements in public life. When he got to her time as secretary of state, he applauded her work on HIV/AIDS. "She tripled the number of people with AIDS in four countries whose lives are being saved with your tax dollars," Clinton said. "Most of them in Africa, going from 1.7 million lives to 5.1 million lives, and it did not cost you any more money. She just bought available FDA-approved generic drugs." We decided to take a closer look at those treatment gains and the price tag that came with them. Clinton’s statement is a bit unclear, first referencing a tripling in four countries, then giving the top-line treatment numbers that span many nations. We reached out to Clinton’s office for clarification. His staff told us that Clinton was talking about the overall HIV/AIDS treatment activities of the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR. We took his essential claim to be that thanks to his wife, treatment tripled and costs held steady. That’s not perfectly accurate, but it's close. PEPFAR started under President George W. Bush and President Barack Obama kept it going. Hillary Clinton can take some credit for PEPFAR’s achievements because it is a State Department program. One of PEPFAR’s major goals is to get as many people as possible into treatment, primarily in Africa but on other continents, too. There is no cure for AIDS, still, antiretroviral drugs can slow down the HIV virus in the body, sometimes for many years. In 2013, the Government Accountability Office, the auditing arm of Congress, looked at how efficiently PEPFAR was getting those antiretrovirals to people in need. That report backed up Clinton’s statement, but it only covered the years between 2005 and 2011. Here’s why that’s important. Hillary Clinton served as secretary of state from 2009 through January 2013. For a full view of what PEPFAR did on her watch, we got the numbers through 2012. Drawing on the GAO report, PEPFAR’s own reports, and numbers we got from PEPFAR staff, we found these trends: The charts tell us that the number of people in treatment rose from 2.1 million at the end of 2008 to 5.1 million by the end of 2012 (fiscal years). That number more than doubled, but it didn’t quite triple as Clinton said. However, that increase did come without additional tax dollars. Using constant 2009 dollars, treatment spending fell dramatically for two years, and then returned to the 2009 level. When you put the two trends together, the big picture is that the United States used the same amount of money to deliver about 250 percent more treatment. Eric Goosby, the head of PEPFAR during those years and now professor of medicine at the University of California San Francisco, said the George W. Bush administration laid the groundwork for those gains. "It takes a lot time to find the places to set up treatment, and get all the pieces in place to deliver it," Goosby told us. "We benefited from all of that." But Goosby also points to the rapid shift to generic drugs after 2009. "We went from buying 90 percent brand name antiretroviral drugs to less than 3 percent," Goosby said. The generic drugs were much cheaper. The program also cut costs by cutting out air delivery and moving goods by land and sea. "This saved millions of dollars and allowed for an uninterrupted expansion of the number of patients on treatment," he said. The chart above shows that on Hillary Clinton’s watch, the costs per patient were driven down by more than half — from $673 when she took control to $338 when she left. The question is, does she deserve the credit? Mead Over, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development, a Washington policy center, urges a bit of caution. Over told us that while a lot of the work is done by State Department agencies, not all of it is. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health and other agencies also play a role. But at the end of the day, Over told us the secretary of state sets the priorities and in this case, the priority was to expand treatment at a lower cost per person. There's evidence that Clinton wasn't just phoning it in. AIDS activists counted her as an ally. Mark Harrington, executive director of the Treatment Action Group, a New York-based advocacy organization, said he would give Clinton a lot of credit for what happened. Harrington said she built stronger reporting ties with PEPFAR than her predecesor and had a clear picture of what was needed. Harrington gave one example of how that led to her direct involvement. "She helped clear the way for the switch from using expensive international NGOs to deliver services, to working with in-country partners and ministries of health," Harrington said. "There was a concern about corruption, and she made it very clear to foreign leaders that that could not happen. And it’s really surprising for a program this big that it hasn’t." Harrington also noted that Clinton was engaged with HIV/AIDS before she became secretary. When she was in the Senate, she met with activists and advocated for the programs and funds they sought. Our ruling Bill Clinton said when Hillary Clinton was secretary of state, she tripled the number of people with AIDS whose "lives are being saved," and it didn’t cost taxpayers any more money. Clinton took some liberties with the numbers. Treatment rose rapidly by about 250 percent. That’s not quite triple. But Clinton was right that those gains came without additional spending in inflation-adjusted dollars. And while Hillary Clinton can’t take full credit, outsiders said she did set the overall direction for how the program should move forward and intervened in specific ways to help it do more at a lower cost.


Potential Parkinson’s Treatment Explored

Explanation: Reporters of some business stories we’ve evaluated say that our criteria aren’t fair to or shouldn’t be applied to business stories – that some health care industry business announcements may be incomplete but are still newsworthy. We have no disagreement with that latter statement. However, it is the framing of the news coverage at such times that is worth scrutinizing. This story demonstrated exemplary caution and analysis. And we hold it up to those who cover the business of health as an example of how you can satisfy most of our criteria – even with a very preliminary business announcement. Nice job. Parkinson’s disease is a progressive degenerative disease. While there are newer treatment options including newer drugs and deep brain stimulation, a definitive treatment remains elusize. Newer approaches, such as the delivery of a treatment directly to the sites in the brain affected by the disease are exciting possibilities. Stories about the development of new treatment approaches should focus on the difficulties and uncertainties as well as the possibilities. This story did a good job of that.

Not applicable. There was no discussion of costs but that is understandable at this early stage. What we especially appreciated was the tone and the framing of the story. It didn’t call this idea a treatment. It called it a “potential treatment.”  It’s not a treatment until it’s been shown to actually treat someone for something. It used the word “potential” three times in the story. Not applicable. No track record to discuss. The story highlighted some of the uncertainties. For example, it stated: and There was no disease-mongering in the story. No one truly independent of the Medtronic-Lilly partnership was quoted. We would have liked to have seen independent expert perspective on the approach. The story at least made brief references to other approaches in the treatment of Parkinson’s disease. We would have liked more substance, but this was adequate given the context of the new announcement. The story makes it clear that the effort “is still many years from yielding a marketable treatment or even starting human testing…The drug may not enter human clinical trials for up to five years.” The story did an adequate and appropriate job of wrapping this approach into the context of other related research. It’s clear that the story didn’t rely solely on a news release.


Explanation: The story describes using an existing chemotherapy drug after surgery to try to delay pancreatic cancer from returning. The story does a nice job of meeting the criteria, including desribing the type of evidence for the latest findings, reporting absolute benefits (including a discussion of the modest cancer-free survival gains), availability and novelty of the drug, cost information, and use of an independent source (and disclosure of study funding sources). And all of this was done in just 688 words.

The story provides monthly costs of the drug (at least when used to treat inoperable cancer, which may or may not be used the same as for treating cancer after surgery). The story provides absolute data, including proportion of participants in the treatment group and control group who had their cancer come back and the timing of when that occured. Some harms of treatment are described, such as fatigue and hair thinning. These are also described as relatively mild, which may be true in comparison to other chemotherapy agents. The story describes that some participants were randomized after surgery to receive the study drug, which is a description of a randomized clinical trial. The story also provides some indicators of the strength of the latest study, such as the number of participants followed, and also mentions this study in connection with a larger study published last year that supports the latest findings. No obvious disease mongering. The story describes disease burden and natural history of the cancer. An independent source of information was quoted, but the story could have been improved had the expert actually commented on the study findings vs. the disease burden of pancreatic cancer. The story describes other treatment options, including surgery, with or without chemotherapy. Radiation is also mentioned as an option, combined with chemotherapy. The story reports that the study drug is currently used to treat inoperable pancreatic cancer and is also a common chemotherapy drug, often used to treat other cancers. The story describes that the drug studied has been used to treat inoperable pancreatic cancer as well as some other types of cancer, letting readers know this is not a new drug, but rather, a new application of an existing drug. The story provides a quote from a researcher not involved in the study, so it's clear that resources other than a press release were used.


Hearing concludes in Missouri abortion clinic licensing case.

Explanation: An administrative hearing to decide whether Missouri can revoke the license for the state’s only abortion clinic concluded Thursday with emotional testimony from a clinic official.

Michael Brown, Health, General News, Abortion, St. Louis, U.S. News

The hearing in St. Louis before a commissioner with the Missouri Administrative Hearing Commission was expected to last five days but wrapped up a day early. A ruling isn’t expected until February at the earliest. The state health department wants to revoke the license for Planned Parenthood’s St. Louis clinic, citing concerns about four instances of what the state called “failed abortions.” Planned Parenthood officials say conservatives are trying to use the licensing process to end abortions in Missouri. Revocation would make Missouri the first state since 1974, the year after the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision, without a functioning abortion clinic. The St. Louis clinic remains open pending the commission’s ruling. Kawanna Shannon, director of surgical services at the clinic, testified that the state’s March inspection was tense from the start. It was the first inspection under the administration of Republican Gov. Mike Parson, a staunch abortion opponent who ascended to governor in June 2018 after Republican Gov. Eric Greitens resigned. Investigators were adamant that the clinic should be performing two pelvic exams before an abortion, at a patient’s first visit and again immediately before the procedure. The clinic initially agreed to the second exam, but soon decided it was so “unbearable” for patients that it stopped in defiance of the state law, Shannon said, her voice breaking. “Patients were made to get unnecessarily violated,” Shannon said. The health department relented in June, issuing an emergency rule relieving Planned Parenthood of the requirement. Shannon said that a month after the March inspection, a top health department official showed up to scrutinize records. That investigator was William Koebel, chief of the division that oversees licensing of abortion clinics and other surgical centers. Koebel told Shannon he was there in response to an unspecified complaint, Shannon said. She later learned it was Koebel himself who filed the complaint, she said. The investigation eventually turned up four instances where women required multiple procedures before abortions were successfully completed.


Getting the focus back: There’s new hope for people with age-related macular degeneration

Explanation: Age-related macular degeneration (AMD) is a significant cause of blindness in the elderly and is becoming more common as the population ages. There are two major kinds of AMD, "wet" or neovascular and "dry." Although the "wet" form is much less common than "dry", it is much more likely to lead to blindness, which can occur very suddenly. Until recently, wet AMD was treated with lasers or phototherapy, however in June, 2006 the FDA approved the drug Lucentis for the condition. This story reports on advancements in treatment of AMD but then goes on to talk about developments in treating cataracts, diabetic retinopathy and glaucoma. This review will focus on the discussion of treating wet AMD with Lucentis, which comprises the first five paragraphs of this story. By not exaggerating the seriousness of wet AMD, the story avoids disease mongering. The story should have provided some sense of the prevalence of wet AMD, which is relatively rare compared to the more common dry AMD. The story mentions Avastin, laser treatment, and phototherapy as alternatives. The story could have provided more information on the advantages and disadvantages of the different approaches. The story does mention the increased risk of strokes with Lucentis, however the story should have also mentioned risk of inflammation and infection from injection into the eye. The story does not mention the cost of Lucentis, which is substantial, up to $2000 per injection. Since the injections need to be given monthly for an indefinite amount of time, cost is a major issue and has the potential to be a signficant barrier to obtaining the drug. The story does mention that Avastin is a much cheaper alternative, but this is not enough information on the cost of treatment. The story does not adequately describe the strength of the available evidence, nor does it quantify the benefits of Lucentis. Finally, the story only quotes one expert and one satisfied patient who happens to be a physician. The story should have quoted other clinicians/researchers who could have provided some additional perspective.

The story does not mention the cost of Lucentis, which is substantial, up to $2000 per injection. Since the injections need to be given monthly for an indefinite amount of time, cost is a huge issue and has the potential to be a signficant barrier to obtaining the drug. The story does mention that Avastin is a much cheaper alternative, but this is not enough information on the cost of treatment. The story does not quantify the benefits of treatment. The story does mention the increased risk of strokes with Lucentis. The story should have also mentioned risk of inflammation and infection from injection into the eye. The story does not adequately describe the strength of the available evidence. By not exaggerating the seriousness of wet AMD, the story avoids disease mongering. The story should have provided some sense of the prevalence of wet AMD, which is relatively rare compared to the more common dry AMD. The story only quotes one expert and one satisfied patient who happens to be a physician. The story should have quoted other clinicians/researchers who could have provided some additional perspective. The story mentions Avastin, laser treatment, and phototherapy as alternatives. The story could have provided more information on the advantages and disadvantages of the different approaches. The story should have also mentioned that Avastin isn't approved for this indication. The article mentions that Lucentis was approved last June for wet AMD, but doesn't tell the reader how available it is – that is, is it in widespread use? The story clearly states that Lucentis is a novel approach to treating wet AMD. There is no way to know if the story relies on a press release as the sole source of information.


US plans reimagine fighting wildfires amid crews’ virus risk.

Explanation: In new plans that offer a national reimagining of how to fight wildfires amid the risk of the coronavirus spreading through crews, it’s not clear how officials will get the testing and equipment needed to keep firefighters safe in what’s expected to be a difficult fire season.

Wildfires, General News, Lifestyle, Health, Fires, Science, U.S. News, Idaho

A U.S. group instead put together broad guidelines to consider when sending crews to blazes, with agencies and firefighting groups in different parts of the country able to tailor them to fit their needs. The wildfire season has largely begun, and states in the American West that have suffered catastrophic blazes in recent years could see higher-than-normal levels of wildfire because of drought. “This plan is intended to provide a higher-level framework of considerations and not specific operational procedures,” the National Multi-Agency Coordination Group, made up of representatives from federal agencies who worked with state and local officials, wrote in each of the regional plans. “It is not written in terms of ‘how to’ but instead provides considerations of ‘what,’ ‘why,’ and ‘where.’”  Federal and state agencies have been scrambling to plan for wildland firefighting since the coronavirus took hold in the U.S. The standard approach to fighting fires means bringing in large numbers of firefighters from different places, housing them together in often unsanitary conditions, then redeploying them to new locations. That’s the opposite of social distancing and other restrictions that health experts say can slow the spread of COVID-19. A Forest Service risk assessment predicted that large fire camps could have a disproportionately high mortality rate in worst-case scenarios, according to an April 30 letter from a group of lawmakers. They are raising questions about how that risk is being communicated to people on the front lines and regional leaders. “Given the various state-level stay-at-home orders, will national crews and assets be able to move between regions to respond to wildfires?” U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon and 10 other Democratic senators from California, Oregon, Washington, Nevada, New Mexico, Arizona and Colorado wrote to Forest Service Chief Vicki Christiansen. “What are you doing to communicate the scale of risk?” The Forest Service said Monday that the risk assessment was just a draft, declining to offer more details or a copy. “The previous version of the report was a draft and is now outdated,” the agency said in an email. “The report is being reviewed and updated with the most current data and is not ready to share.” The regional plans, released last week, urge fire managers to use an approach called “Module of One” for crews, which recognizes that the work often requires close physical contact between firefighters who travel and camp together. The guidelines suggest that crew members only have close contact with each other and stay at least 6 feet (2 meters) away from everyone who isn’t a member of the module, wearing masks when interacting with others. Camping should be done mostly in small groups, instead of the traditional approach where sometimes hundreds of firefighters stay in the same area. That means relying on military-issue ready-to-eat or bagged meals instead of catered buffet-style meals at campsites. “We’re trying to mitigate the potential for spread as much as possible while still providing for safe fire suppression efforts,” National Interagency Fire Center spokeswoman Jessica Gardetto said Monday. “This involves insulating our fire crews as much as possible — so they’re operating more as family units than individuals — and avoiding the establishment of large fire camps and other situations that involve large groups of people gathering in one location.”  The biggest question for many states has been whether they can count on help from the federal government when wildfires threaten communities. The plan for the U.S. Southwest warned, “in the event of a high disease spread scenario with a high rate of infection, the associated loss of individuals from service will, in even a moderately active fire season, severely tax the ability to maintain an adequate wildfire response.”  States requesting help should be able to show they have enough resources to keep firefighters safe, the guidelines say. That could mean access to testing, a variety of firefighter housing options and plenty of personal protection equipment. But it’s not clear how fire managers will meet those requirements. Some of the regional plans call for testing fire crews if or when tests become available, and taking temperatures with touchless thermometers if they are available. The plans advise fire managers and medical workers to buy and bring their own thermometers. Not all firefighting agencies are sold on the value of COVID-19 testing, however. The Department of Interior’s Fire Management Board chairman Leon Ben Jr. warned in a May 1 memo that the tests’ false negative rate could lure fire managers into a false sense of safety. As a result, the department’s advisers on health issues in wildland firefighting don’t recommend using the tests for routine screening. “Given the limited accuracy of available testing, current COVID-19 tests provide limited-to-no screening value for the wildland fire community,” Ben wrote.


U.S. Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden supports "defunding" police agencies.

Explanation: No, I don’t. […] I don’t want to defund police departments. I think they need more help, they need more assistance.

Following a series of high-profile deaths of Black Americans while in police custody, a civil rights movement to call attention to systemic racism in U.S. law enforcement emerged as a key issue in the presidential race between Republican U.S. President Donald Trump and his Democratic challenger Joe Biden. In their public responses, both campaigns stripped the nuance from what was a deep-rooted reckoning over American racism and police brutality. Biden tried to align himself with protesters’ calls for reforming the country’s criminal justice system without going into specifics as to how. Meanwhile, Trump attempted to convince voters his opponent would turn America into a place of lawlessness and destruction by removing or completely eliminating police officers from streets. “Biden has vowed to defund the police,” Trump said in conference call with supporters on Aug. 12, 2020. We should note here: local governments, not the president’s office, decide specific budgets for city, county, and state law-enforcement agencies, though the federal government can levy funding for agencies that meet its chosen requirements. Weeks after the unsubstantiated claim alleging a promise by Biden, the president again suggested without specific evidence that his opponent was essentially a Trojan horse for progressive activists who want to downsize or completely abolish police agencies. “If you give power to Joe Biden, the radical left will defund police departments all across America,” Trump claimed, while accepting the Republican Party’s nomination in the race. (See a transcript of the whole speech here.) Below, we focused on those allegations by the president, considering their frequent appearance in Trump campaign advertisements before the November 2020 election. Snopes relied on evidence to confirm or deny whether Trump was correct — that Biden at one point said he supports “defunding” U.S. law enforcement agencies nationwide. First, let us define what “defund the police” means. Per The Associated Press: Supporters say it isn’t about eliminating police departments or stripping agencies of all of their money. They say it is time for the country to address systemic problems in policing in America and spend more on what communities across the U.S. need, like housing and education. Additionally, a writer for the Washington Post explained: [Advocates] want to redirect some funds now spent on police forces to items such as education, public health, housing and youth services. The idea is that low-income communities would become stronger — and less in need of police — if root problems were addressed. Under this concept, some police officers would be replaced with trained social workers or specialized response teams in an effort to let police focus on violent crime, not drug overdoses or homelessness. The theory is that police would be better positioned to deal with rapes and murders if they were not required to deal with other social ills that sometimes lead to community confrontations with police. Next, we analyzed media interviews, social media posts, and other statements by Biden’s campaign for any reference to the above-described concept — that he said he agrees with “defunding” police departments, or protesters’ calls to redirect funding from U.S. law-enforcement agencies to social services. In June, Andrew Bates, a spokesman for Biden’s campaign, told news reporters in a statement: As his criminal justice proposal made clear months ago, Vice President Biden does not believe that police should be defunded. […] Biden supports the urgent need for reform, including funding for public schools, summer programs, and mental health and substance abuse treatment separate from funding for policing, so that officers can focus on the job of policing. Around the same time, Biden said in an interview with CBS News:  No, I don’t support defunding the police. […] I support conditioning federal aid to police, based on whether or not they meet certain basic standards of decency and honorableness. And, in fact, are able to demonstrate they can protect the community and everybody in the community. Then, in a July interview with activist Ady Barkan, the question surfaced again. Barkan asked Biden if he was open to reducing responsibility on law-enforcement agencies to maintain public safety, and, as a result, redirect existing police funding into social services, mental health counseling, and programs to help people access affordable housing. An edited version of the exchange circulated widely on social media, showing Biden agreeing with Barkan and supposedly providing the proof Trump supporters were seeking. But according to the Washington Post, which obtained a full video of the interview, that shortened version of the interview was misleading. The news outlet reported: [The edited] video does not include Biden adding that his response was not the same as “defunding all the police.” He also speaks about increasing funding for mental health, which is different from saying he would fund mental health aid out of redirected funds from the police. In effect, Biden appears to say he would condition aid on police reforms as an incentive on the one hand, while simultaneously providing additional resources for mental health, homelessness and other kinds of community support. (A Biden campaign aide confirms this is Biden’s position.) Later, in an August interview with ABC’s “Good Morning America,” Biden reiterated that stance. Co-anchor Robin Roberts asked, “President Trump says that you want to defund the police. Do you?” Biden responded:


Scientists find clues to why binge-drinking causes binge-eating.

Explanation: Scientists have found that the brain cells in mice that stimulate the urge to eat can be activated by alcohol as well as by hunger - a discovery that could help explain why binge drinking often leads to binge eating.

In an experiment, mice subjected to a three-day “alcoholic weekend” were found to eat significantly more food than mice that stayed sober. The results, published in the journal Nature Communications on Tuesday, show that major components of the brain’s feeding circuits are activated by alcohol, the researchers said. “Our data suggest that alcohol sustains fundamental appetite signals, (and does) not just disinhibit their behavioral manifestation,” wrote Denis Burdakov, who led the study at the Francis Crick Institute in London. Consumption of alcohol has previously been linked to overeating in humans, but the underlying causes were unclear - particularly since alcohol is high in calories, and calorie intake usually suppresses brain appetite signals. Burdakov said his study found that specific hunger-promoting brain cells known as Agrp neurons, which form part of the feeding circuit in mouse brains, are activated by alcohol. To test the validity of their findings, Burdakov’s team were able to block activity of these neurons in some mice, and they found that this eliminated alcohol-induced overeating. This shows, they said, “that the alcohol-associated activity of Agrp neurons...is the critical step in alcohol-induced overeating”. Obesity and heavy drinking are major causes of heart disease, diabetes and other chronic health problems affecting millions of people worldwide. Public Health England said last month that eight out of 10 middle-aged adults in Britain either weigh too much, drink too much or exercise too little.


Breakthrough in Creating Artificial Pancreas

Explanation: Things didn’t improve much as we read past the sensational headline and first sentence, with an inaccurate study description, lack of truly independent perspective, and no mention of possible harms contributing to a generally sub-par effort by WebMD. Type 1 diabetes is a serious condition affecting millions of people who could benefit from automated glucose monitoring/insulin dispensing device. However, these people won’t be helped by superficial accounts of where this technology is in its development and what it will eventually be capable of.

If this technology is as close to reality as this story suggests, then it’s appropriate to discuss costs. This story didn’t. The story could have at least nodded in the direction of financial impact of new technologies. Many patients with type 1 diabetes are not using currently available pumps and sensors because of the high cost of these devices. It seems likely that this new treatment, if it ever becomes widely available, will be as expensive or more so than the current pump and sensor technology. Compounding the effects of the sensational headline and use of the term "artificial pancreas" (which, as we explain in our review of the competing New York Times piece, is an overly promotional and misleading term), this story wasn’t careful enough in its description of the benefits reported in the study. It had most of the same problems as the Reuters story (see that review for detailed analysis), including reporting relative and not absolute benefits, and not mentioning the fact that the primary outcomes of the study were negative. On the positive side, the story did mention that experimental group in this study had no instances of severe hypoglycemia compared with 9 episodes in the control group. This is a potentially important finding that was not mentioned by Reuters. The story emphasizes the upside but makes no mention of what could go wrong with an automated system. The potential adverse effects of a malfunction, such as hypoglemic shock and death, are serious. The story gives a somewhat better description of the study than the competing Reuters piece, but suffers from the same key shortcomings. It mischaracterizes what happened in the experiment and doesn’t caution readers about the very small size of the study. This story veers toward the sensational in its anecdotal reporting on what nighttime hypoglycemia is like. Overall, though, it didn’t exaggerate the impact of type 1 diabetes and appropriately focused on hypoglycemia as an important risk that a new glucose management system could help address. The story mentions that one source, Aaron J. Kowalski, PhD, is affiliated with the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation (JDRF), and says that he "did not take part in the study." However, it does not disclose that JDRF was a sponsor of the study, which means that Dr. Kowalski could be more likely than a truly independent observer to look favorably on the results. The story also did not identify the financial ties between one of the investigators quoted in the study and a study sponsor. The story does a slightly better job than the Reuters piece of explaining how type 1 diabetes is currently managed and why nighttime hypoglycemia can be a problem. Barely enough for a satisfactory rating This story did a better job than the competing Reuters piece in explaining that the system tested in this study actually consisted of a commercially available glucose monitor and insulin pump–not a "new device" per se. However, it still left the reader with the impression that system was automatically managing patients’ glucose without any outside human intervention, which was not the case. We also wish the story had resisted the temptation to predict that a new "artificial pancreas" system might be be available clinicially in 3 to 5 years. The FDA approval process is notoriously uNPRedictable, and this technology has a lot of hurdles to clear before it will be available for patients. The story mentions that this technology has been in the works for decades and mentions the current availability of continuous glucose monitors and insulin pumps. We can’t be sure of the extent to which this story ws influenced by a news release.