Al's Morning Meeting

And Vibrio can cause death. One doctor tells Baskin about a patient who died within 24 hours of showing symptoms. The number of documented deaths is still fairly small, but the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guesses Vibrio cases are drastically underreported.

Watch the story and read the script here.

I interviewed Baskin (who will be my guest faculty for Poynter's Enterprise and Investigative Reporting seminar in August) to find out the backstory:

Al: How did you learn about this story?

Baskin: Coming back to WJLA-TV (after 17 years in other places), I immediately put out an "APB" to many longtime sources. A great source of environmental story ideas is a public interest organization called the Public Education Center (now at www.storiesthatmatter.org). I had done a report on Gulf Coast oysters contaminated with Vibrio about 20 years ago. I knew it was a nasty bacteria. But I didn't know it could cause nasty wound infections, or that the bacteria had migrated much farther north.

Al: How did you find so many victims to help personalize your story? You even had photographs of a lot of them. How did all of that come together?

Baskin: We looked for victims with help from the Public Education Center, Nexis searching, contacting watermen's groups, and talking to public health officials. Victims were willing, and sometimes eager,to share their stories and photos so others would be alerted to the problem. They knew from their own experiences that there wasn't enough information available, even in the medical community. Victims hoped getting information out would help others get diagnosed and treated properly.

I interviewed more victims than we used in the report. In the final edit we decided to tell the stories of two men. One almost had his arm amputated. The other case involved a waterman who died as a result of a virulent Vibrio wound infection. We also got some photographs from a plastic surgeon who had done skin grafting and reconstruction surgery on a Vibrio victim. Some of the photographs we gathered were too gruesome to use on the air.

Al: What records or public documents did you use to help prove the story was true?

Baskin: Statistical reports from the CDC, the Maryland Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, the Virginia Department of Health, National Association of County and City Health Officers, Association of Public Health Laboratories and the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials. We also called more than a dozen hospitals in our area.

Al: Why do you think this story has been so underreported until now?

Baskin: The CDC doesn't require reporting nationwide. The problem can be misdiagnosed when doctors don't culture the bacteria. The CDC estimates there are some 1,900 of these infections nationwide. But less than a tenth are reported. One of the doctors I interviewed at a hospital in Virginia was very worried about misdiagnosis. He said someone on vacation (fishing, boating or swimming) in a recreational area where they're aware of the problem, could go back to a place like Detroit where they wouldn't know how to treat a Vibrio infection until it's too late. Vibrio infections need to be diagnosed and treated with massive antibiotics immediately.

Al: What advice would you give to other journalists who want to follow up on this investigation?

Baskin: Contact environmental groups, organized watermen and fishermen in your area. Also, contact hospital microbiology laboratories.The Public Education Center remains an important clearinghouse for information and research about Vibrio wound infections.

Reasons to Celebrate Journalism

We all are tempted sometimes to think journalism is going down the tubes -- but take heart. In fact, take pride.

Tomorrow in Phoenix, one of our best journalism organizations, Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE), will award honors on these outstanding investigative projects from 2006. 

I have been proud for the last several years to be one of many screeners for these awards. They honor large and small newsrooms of various media around the world. Among the projects were a newspaper that investigated coal mine safety, a TV station that investigated immigration fraud and a radio station that investigated post-traumatic stress disorder of Iraq war veterans. The awards even celebrate remarkable work by college students who investigated the use of police Tasers. 

This week's IRE convention in Phoenix is bittersweet. It is the 30th anniversary of the "The Arizona Project," which investigated the murder of Arizona Republic investigative reporter Don Bolles. Click here to read more about IRE's unprecedented involvement in the investigation of the Bolles case 30 years ago. 

If you do not know the story of Don Bolles, it is worth your time to read The Arizona Republic's collection of stories. 

The Internet is teeming with good Web sites now about a topic near to the faces and hearts of young readers: acne.

You would think that these days we would have found some cure for zits wouldn't you?

Click here to see some acne treatments out there. I am talking about a bottle of gel that retails for more than $200!

Sites like Acne Assasin and Acne.org are particularly attractive. Acne.org sells skin stuff, and there is a fairly vigorous conversation on the site message boards about how well it works.

Think nobody cares about this topic? Look at this one message board with more than 120,000 replies to one thread!

Here is the National Institutes of Health acne page, which includes fast facts and gazillions of links to medical-journal articles and other useful stuff.

Corn Prices Force Farmers to Sell Livestock

WFIR Radio News Director Becky Bruce says her Roanoke, Va., newsroom followed up on an Al's Morning Meeting column last week. The station found that small farm operations can't afford the cost of feeding cattle or chickens these days, so they are selling out.

Al's Morning Multimedia: Short Chunks of Information

The Boston Globe site is continually coming up with interactives that are fun and fast to read. This example is called "Take five with Keith Olbermann." I like the local nature of the questions and the depth of the responses, despite being very short copy. Take a look.

As David Beard, the editor of Boston.com, told me:

We've got to be creative.

People have settled on their Web choices, not surfing as much as before. Therefore, to keep page views up in a world with more outlets, [we] have to offer info in chunks, which happily is the way many are ingesting information.

It's also a way to bankroll audio/video/flash explorations that have yet to really pay for themselves.

Editor's Note: Al's Morning Meeting is a compendium of ideas, edited story excerpts and other materials from a variety of Web sites, as well as original concepts and analysis. When the information comes directly from another source, it will be attributed and a link will be provided whenever possible. The column is fact-checked, but depends upon the accuracy and integrity of the original sources cited. Errors and inaccuracies found will be corrected.