On TWA Flight 800 and Other Press Failings

During the summer of 1996, I found myself, recently returned from Tokyo, sitting in a bar in a Holiday Inn on Long Island, covering the investigation of the demise of TWA Flight 800. The guy sitting next to me was an engineer from Boeing. Both of us had been reading, day after day, headlines in the New York Times about the traces of chemical explosives that bomb-sniffing dogs had found in the wreckage. The stories, based on undisclosed sources, had been leaked to the reporters, presumably by government agents. I say presumably because it was my job to compete on those stories, and I couldn't get anyone associated with Louis Freeh's office, he was then head of the FBI office in charge of the investigation, to open up to me, a lowly Chicago Tribune reporter.

So what did you think of the latest story, I asked the Boeing engineer. I remember his laugh and snarky reply as if it were yesterday. "It's the central fuel tank. Sparks. It happened in Manila, too." He took another drink. "And you can't use my name with that."

Yesterday, the Times
reported that the government has finally gotten around to rewriting the rules so that the fumes in those empty fuel tanks do not pose even a remote risk to passengers. And if you're wondering what happened to the reporters who "broke" all those wonderful investigative stories about the terrorists behind the destruction of TWA Flight 800, their bylines would later be seen on other "investigative" pieces about Monica Lewinsky and weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, other stories that were entirely dependent on deliberate "leaks" by government investigators.

Other stories that left my head scratching the last couple of days included this one in the Wall Street Journal on the failure of electricity deregulation in Texas, where ratepayers will be absorbing huge increases later this year and could be subjected to brownouts and blackouts. Reporter Rebecca Smith won widespread plaudits earlier in this decade for her coverage of the Enron collapse, but I was mystified by her conclusion at the end of this story. She quoted a Republican legislator saying the "toothpaste is out of the tube."

That's absurd. We've seen this before, in California, and what has been deregulated can be re-regulated. Interested readers may want to read this article that I wrote for the American Prospect in August 2001.

Finally, the scientific quest to come up with an AIDS vaccine hit another stumbling block yesterday. Training the body's immune system to fight diseases that it does not naturally develop immunity to after the initial exposure (assuming you survive that initial bout with the disease) is one of the hardest intellectual challenges in modern medicine. The ongoing failure to develop an AIDS vaccine doesn't mean it is impossible, only that the evolution of science hasn't reached the point where scientists know what to do. Maybe they'll never know. One thing we do know, though, is that success does not hinge on how much money gets poured into the project. Money is necessary. But it certainly isn't sufficient.

That's why I had to laugh yesterday when reading about the Clinton Foundation's deal to use advance purchase agreements to get a consistent supply at a fixed cost of the plant that produces artemisinin for treating malaria. Why are global drug companies continuing to rely on Chinese farmers, who seem more than willing to price gouge when suppliers are tight? This is a weed that can grow anywhere (when it first appeared on the cover of Science magazine in 1984, the picture came from the banks of the Potomac River near Washington, DC). What has happened to efforts to get poor farmers in Africa, where most of it will get used, to grow it as a cash crop? Alas, the story was silent on that subject.

The other mysterious part of yesterday's announcement involved the comments of Novartis chief executive Daniel Vasella. The Swiss drug company has been supplying the overwhelming majority of artemisinin-combination therapy to the developing world -- 66 million treatment courses last year alone. The company complained its investment in the drug and associated losses exceeded $100 million, "including research-and-development costs."

Vasella was also quoted as complaining that the Clinton agreement "doesn't address the need for new drugs and the incentives for innovators to engage more. . . How was it possible that we have a product that completely transformed malaria treatment, saving 500,000 lives? It's only possible by innovation," Dr. Vasella said.

Readers not intimately familiar with the world of malaria drug development might have been led to believe that Novartis was somehow involved in bringing artemisinin to market (their role, if I understand it correctly, has been in coming up with a once-a-day version that includes all the necessary drugs in one pill -- an innovation to be sure but hardly the kind of breakthrough that requires massive investments).

Two years, I spent time on the Thai-Burmese borders with the physicians who have struggled for two decades to make the world aware of this revolutionary treatment for malaria. It was the cover story in The Scientist in December 2006. If you read that and these two sidebars (here and here), you'll get a much better sense of the history.

Posted by gooznews at July 18, 2008 07:30 AM