A series published in the Point Reyes Light last fall about the questionable science behind Marin’s breast cancer cluster won a gold award from the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
The association, a nonprofit that publishes the journal Science and has run the award program for 71 years, bestowed the AAAS Kavli Science Journalism Awards in eight categories, with entries spanning 56 countries. Gold winners receive $5,000, and silver $3,500. Winners this year include a Swedish expose on a famed surgeon who had some patients die after trachea replacement, an investigation into the impacts of gene editing technology on agriculture, the significant health effects that HIV drugs have on patients, and more.
In his series “Busted! Breast cancer, money and the media,” freelance journalist Peter Byrne, who won in the small newspaper category, investigated the science behind the long reported “breast cancer cluster” among white women in Marin, where much money has been spent trying to find the cause.
Mr. Byrne interviewed experts and pored over reams of data to explain the truth behind the cluster: in Marin, where higher incomes lead to greater access to medical care, high screening rates mean more detection. In addition, high screening rates produce more false positives, and errors don’t get scrubbed from the state’s breast cancer registry, leading to serious data issues.
Errors stemming from software conflicts and the mismatched goals of medical records and the registry lead to data errors, too. Mr. Byrne wrote of one 2013 data audit that “33 percent of a sample of new lung cancers recorded by registry employees during a single year contained wrong information about the spread of the tumors. Other audits revealed indolent breast cancers described as invasive, and invasive cancers described as indolent. These are substantial issues. And because audits are expensive and rarely performed, most errors go undetected.”