The Washington Post reported on the equivalent of an ongoing academic thriller unfurling at Johns Hopkins earlier this week, involving a researcher who alleges he was fired in retaliation for his criticism of flawed methodology — later used in an article published in Nature, one of most prestigious research journals — and the suicide of the primary author of the research while drafting a response to that criticism.

But while the full story remains to play out — Johns Hopkins refuses to comment and Nature has been quiet besides saying they expect to release a response in the future — this seedy tale can help bring one dark underbelly of the modern research world to light: How the academic politics of retraction and the pressure to publish may have an adverse effect on the quality of modern research.

A study published last year by Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences noted that there has been a tenfold increase in scientific articles retracted due to fraud since 1975. Of the over 2000 biomedical and life-science retracted research articles studied, 21.3 percent of them were attributed to errors while 67.4 percent were due to researcher misconduct.  The Washington Post discussed the issue with one of the study’s authors, Ferric C. Fang:

“Fang said retractions may be rising because it is simply easier to cheat in an era of digital images, which can be easily manipulated. But he said the increase is caused at least in part by the growing competition for publication and for NIH grant money.

He noted that in the 1960s, about two out of three NIH grant requests were funded; today, the success rate for applicants for research funding is about one in five. At the same time, getting work published in the most esteemed journals, such as Nature, has become a “fetish” for some scientists, Fang said.”

While public funds support a majority of basic research in the U.S., those resources have been dwindling for years and took a significant hit in the sequester. That increase in competitiveness pressures researchers to present results, undoubtedly leading to some researchers falsifying their data in order to preserve their slice of the dwindling public research pie — also known as fraud. And when fraudulent research makes it through the publication process, it becomes part of the knowledge base built upon by other researchers around the world. For every fraudulent piece of research published, many more may rely on faulty grounding for future research projects, thus intellectually contaminating research areas with incorrectly drawn conclusions and impeding future advances.

The pitfalls of fraudulent research aren’t just theoretical: In the late 1990s, a medical researcher “misrepresented or altered the medical histories of all 12 of the patients” in a much-publicized study linking childhood vaccination to autism, in what some other researchers have called “the most damaging medical hoax of the last 100 years.” Between when the study was first came out and when it was disproved and retracted, there was a notable drop in youth vaccinations — which is bad for the health of our nation’s children, and the public at large.

Yet despite the severity of the problem and the great stakes at play, there is no centralized database to track these retractions — although new resources have emerged, like Retraction Watch, a blog run by two health journalists keeping tabs on the ongoing drama.

During a hearing before the House Military Personnel Subcommittee Wednesday, American civilian and military leaders issued lawmakers a stark warning: federal budget cutbacks under the so-called “sequester” will leave veterans with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and other mental illnesses without access to the health care that they desperately need.

The sequester cuts will force multiple governmental departments to cut back on programs or eliminate them entirely. Charged with taking care of the staggering percentage of Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans with PTSD, the Defense Department has had to increasingly rely on civilian mental health specialists to address the backlog. In fact, out of the 2,118 psychologists, 809 psychiatrists, and 2,533 social workers now employed by the military — a substantial increase over past years — over half are civilians. But under sequestration, the Department has been bracing for massive cuts to this civilian workforce, and is preparing to send notices to “more than 800,000 Defense Department civilian workers telling them that once-a-week unpaid furloughs will begin in April and continue for 22 weeks.”

As Military.com reports, that is particularly problematic for the military when it comes to these civilian mental health specialists because “they have options to seek employment elsewhere” and might be tempted to do so seeing as they are not exempt from the furloughs:

Lt. Gen. Patricia Horoho, the Army’s surgeon general, has lobbied to exempt the mental health specialists from furloughs to retain them for treating PTSD. The Pentagon has said that 20 percent of the civilian workforce will be exempt from furloughs. However, it did not look like the mental health specialists would receive that exemption, said Col. Rebecca Porter, the chief of Behavioral Health in Horoho’s office.

“We value these individuals greatly,” Porter said of the mental health workers. “If they start to go out the door, it’s going to take a lot longer for us to rebuild that” mental health workforce, Porter told a defense writers breakfast Tuesday.

“We have in the past offered retention bonuses, but that’s not specifically on the table now,” said Porter, a former military police officer and now a clinical psychologist whose main task is treating PTSD in the Army.

Her comments echoed those of Gen. Ray Odierno, the Army’s chief of staff, who told a Senate hearing last month that “before sequestration, we allocated the dollars and positions to increase military and civilian mental health providers.”

“The problem is there are not enough out there,” Odierno said. “Now what’s going to happen is we’re going to have to reduce the number we already have.”

The officials’ testimony is a clear-cut demonstration of the real world consequences brought on by budget cuts that lawmakers and the media tend to discuss in rather shallow terms. Budget cuts to military health care programs are also particularly cruel considering the already-massive backlog of over 900,000 veterans’ benefit claims — a problem that will be exacerbated as more military personnel return home from the waning Afghan war. Those veterans will already be plagued by poverty and a bleak economic outlook when they return home — and under sequestration, their mental health care outlook is even worse.

A new food inspection rule proposed by the US Department of Agriculture would let poultry plants conduct their own inspections, removing federal food inspectors from the assembly line. At a House appropriations oversight hearing on Wednesday, Food Safety and Inspection Service administrators argued the move would save taxpayers money and allow the department to focus on testing for pathogens like e. coli and salmonella.

But other FSIS inspectors working in poultry plants piloting the new rule protest that public health is sacrificed by outsourcing inspections. Poultry plant employees often miss contaminated birds, and are even discouraged from removing the ones they do flag:

In affidavits given to the Government Accountability Project, a nonprofit legal-assistance group for government whistle-blowers, several inspectors who work at plants where the pilot program is in place said the main problem is that they are removed from positions on the assembly line and put at the end of the line, which makes it impossible for them to spot diseased birds.

The inspectors, whose names were redacted, said they had observed numerous instances of poultry plant employees allowing birds contaminated with fecal matter or other substances to pass. And even when the employees try to remove diseased birds, they face reprimands, the inspectors said.

While public health may suffer, the poultry plants will reap huge benefits from this rule change. The USDA says the elimination of inspector jobs will save $90 million in taxpayer dollars over three years — but poultry businesses are projected to save $125 million a year. The rule would also let plants speed up the production line to 175 birds per minute from 140, giving inspectors a third of a second to check each chicken for contamination.

Not only does speeding up production make it impossible to screen contaminated chickens on the assembly line, it also endangers workers. According to interviews conducted by the Southern Poverty Law Center with over 300 poultry workers, nearly 75 percent of workers have suffered a workplace injury or illness. As many of them are immigrants, their employers threaten them with deportation or firing for offenses like taking a bathroom break (many workers reported wetting themselves because they were not allowed to leave the line), falling ill, or seeking medical treatment from someone outside the company. Poultry plant assembly lines already run at rapidfire speeds, and workers are forced to handle the birds even if they are injured, sick, or bleeding.

Foodborne illness sickens 48 million Americans and kills about 3,000 people every year. The most common culprits are pathogens carried by feces in tightly-packed factory farms. Despite the ubiquity of foodborne illness, food safety inspectors stationed in these plants are notoriously lax. Shortly before an e. coli outbreak caused by Cargill hamburger meat, federal inspectors repeatedly discovered violations of Cargill’s own standards at 55 plants in handling beef, but never imposed penalties or sanctions. Soon, 940 people fell ill. Many suffered permanent damage. If plants are allowed to swap out federal inspectors with their own employees, this haphazard approach to food safety will only worsen.

Vice President Joe Biden and Attorney General Eric Holder announced a new gun violence prevention initiative on Wednesday aimed at addressing issues of intimate partner violence. By helping local government officials better identify high-risk offenders and their potential victims, the new Domestic Violence Homicide Prevention Demonstration Initiative hopes to prevent gun-related domestic homicides:

The program will help law enforcement and social service officials identify vulnerable women who may be in potentially fatal abusive relationships and connect them with law enforcement, prosecutors, court personnel and other service providers. As part of the initiative, the Justice Department will distribute a total of $2.3 million in one-year grants to 12 counties and municipalities. [...]

The vice president noted that from 2009 to 2012, 40 percent of mass shootings — those with four or more victims killed — started with the shooter targeting his girlfriend, wife or ex-wife, according to the White House. And Biden repeated a factoid — often noted by advocates for tighter gun control such as the Mayors Against Illegal Guns — that in states that require a background check for private handgun sales, 38 percent fewer women are shot to death by their intimate partners.

“The issue of domestic violence and reducing gun violence are connected,” Biden said. “That’s why the president and I believe that every person who buys a gun — every person — should have a criminal background check.”

The announcement comes the same week that legislation to expand background checks to almost all gun purchases is beginning to advance in Congress.

A similar initiative to make sure domestic abusers can’t easily access firearms is making its way through the Colorado legislature. Local law enforcement often mishandle sexual assault cases, but more training — through local VAWA grants as well as through these new initiatives — could help start to change that.

In recent months, gun issues and domestic violence issues have become particularly intertwined — but not in the same way that Biden and Holder are approaching them. On the other side of the issue, gun advocates have attempted to construe increased access to firearms, particularly concealed carry laws on college campuses, as a “women’s issue” because they claim guns are necessary to help protect women against sexual assault. But hidden guns won’t actually do anything to help address rape culture. In fact, as Biden pointed out, those weapons typically end up being used against victims of domestic abuse themselves. Abusers who have access to a gun are more than seven times more likely to kill their partners.

In Nebraska, state lawmakers are considering updating the public school system’s sexual education standards so that each school district’s health classes will be required to meet comprehensive, medically accurate standards. As legislators debated the measure this week, one Nebraska resident testified in favor of the sex ed bill by citing her own personal story: since she doesn’t believe she was fully educated about the HIV virus, she wants to prevent other students in her state from making the same mistakes she did.

Janine Brignola urged lawmakers to ensure that Nebraska’s youth don’t grow up to be as “naive” as she was about sexually transmitted infections:

Janine Brignola grew up in a rural area near Ord, Neb., but graduated from high school in Lincoln.

Not once, said the 30-year-old who is HIV-positive, was she warned of the dangers of the virus that causes AIDS at the schools she attended.

Her peers, Brignola said, told her it was a “dirty disease” that could kill her, but she believed that only the sexually promiscuous or “junkies or prostitutes got HIV.”

“I was naive and thought Nebraska was not a place that it could happen,” she said.

That lack of information about HIV isn’t specific to Nebraska. In fact, CDC data shows that HIV infections throughout the country are most concentrated in regions where students don’t learn about the virus in school. Just 20 states mandate both sex education and HIV education, and even those states may not necessarily require health classes to adhere to basic standards to ensure scientific accuracy.

But, just as Brignola highlighted in her testimony, it’s crucial to educate adolescents about effective methods to prevent HIV — rather than feeding them shame-based messages about sexual promiscuity, as if sexual health somehow doesn’t exist outside of “junkies and prostitutes.” Public schools started teaching information about sexually transmitted infections in the 1980s, at the height of the national HIV/AIDS epidemic, but religious conservatives rolled back much of that progress under former President George W. Bush, when sex ed classes became replaced with abstinence-only programs in states across the country.

Now, the CDC worries that today’s young people aren’t getting the message on HIV. Young Americans continue to put themselves at risk for the virus, and half of HIV-positive individuals between the ages of 13 and 24 aren’t even aware they have it.

In 2008, Princeton University took a survey of students to determine the sexual assault statistics at the school. The results of the survey were never published.

Just a few days ago, Princeton’s student paper, The Daily Princetonian, obtained and published the results from Princeton’s 2008 Sexual Experiences Survey. It shows that one in six female undergraduates was the victim of sexual assault — a ratio just slightly lower than the national average, but higher than the reported incidents at the school.

But the administration has not been forthcoming with its rationale for withholding the results. In an interview with the school paper, faculty explained only that they didn’t want to draw “unwanted attention” to the school by publishing the statistics:

It remains unclear why the survey was never publicly released, but one University administrator said the University did not want to draw unwanted attention by publicizing the report’s findings when they were in line with national averages. [...]

Although she explained she was not aware of the precise reasons the survey’s results were kept private, [Amada Sandoval, Director of the Women's Center] said the results were probably never released because they were consistent with national averages and because other universities do not publicize such data.

“Anything about Princeton goes international, practically, and no other universities do that, so does Princeton want to be the one to say that this many of our students are sexually assaulted? I don’t think so,” Sandoval said.

In a later article, a different Princeton spokesperson, Martin Mbugua, explained that the results were meant to be internal:

“Let me note that the 2008 survey was taken for the purpose of informing internal planning and programming and was used for that purpose,” Mbugua said. “Those conducting the survey did not think of it as a survey whose results would be published.”

Now that the old survey results have been revealed, Princeton students are petitioning the administration to issue a new Sexual Experiences Survey. But Princeton’s Director of the Survey Research Center believes that won’t be necessary, since the school is participating in a larger student health and well-being study through the American College Health Association. It is not yet known whether the results of that survey will be made public, though they have been in past years.

(HT: Madame Noir)

A group of Iowa state lawmakers, consisting of five Democrats and one Republican, have sent Gov. Terry Branstad (R) a letter urging him to rethink his decision to shut down a prison mental health care ward in the state.

According to the San Francisco Chronicle, the lawmakers argue that the ward’s closure will be disruptive to inmates’ care, and that Branstad’s fiscal argument for closing the unit comes up short:

The proposed budget that Branstad put forward in February calls for closure of the $26 million, 200-bed facility in 2014. Prisoners would be transferred to prison medical units in Clarinda and Coralville and the new state penitentiary in Fort Madison. [...]

Tim Albrecht, a spokesman for the governor, said closing the facility and dispersing its inmates “more effectively utilizes the department’s resources” and inmates with mental health needs “will receive similar, if not greater, mental health care under this new plan.”

The lawmakers who sent the letter expressed concern that prisoners with mental health needs don’t acclimate well to change and by mixing them with the general inmate population it could stimulate behaviors that create an unsafe the working environment for corrections staff.

The lawmakers also say the building should be given a longer lifespan since the Legislature recently invested $18 million to upgrade the facility.

Branstad’s state budget director also stated that the projected savings from closing the mental health unit is $8 million — a drop in the bucket compared to Branstad’s $6.2 billion budget for fiscal year 2013.

Mental health care issues take a particularly harsh toll on the incarcerated population, and the lawmakers raising concerns to Branstad are correct in stating that abruptly removing them from their treatment centers will have a negative effect on their care and well-being. State budget cuts to mental health care programs have already encouraged a trend where prisons become de-facto asylums, and Branstad’s closure of the Iowa jail’s mental health ward will only exacerbate that problem by denying and disrupting inmates’ care.