I don’t like to brag** so I’ll let my former major professor do it for me:
I engage in this shameless self-promotion because this story was hard. Really hard. You’ll notice in the video component that many shots have Christmas trees in the background. That’s not because it’s always Christmas in Northwest Georgia.*** That’s because I started this project back in November.
…and I actually turned it in January 9th. There it was–video, print story–all done, with cute little Chelsea-isms comparing traffic on fast food row to a clogged artery. Trouble was, I really didn’t do what the assignment asked me to do, that is, answer the question, “Why is Pickens County so much healthier than neighboring Murray County?”
I tried again. And I still couldn’t answer the question.
So I made that the point of the story.
I know it gets a little confusing sometimes, but the media is not God. We actually don’t know everything, and, try as we might, we can’t find out everything. Don’t get me wrong, we can figure out a lot of things, like a given state’s Medicare spending or how a senator voted on excise taxes.
But why one county is healthier than another? Give me a break. This is hundreds of thousands of people we’re talking about here. Who am I as a reporter to tell you why one grouping of them is healthier than another?
As it turns out, I’m no one. Because that’s the sort of question you pose to an epidemiologist. So I found a few of those, and they couldn’t really answer the question either. You see, looking at available public health data constitutes surveillance. From that, you can spot patterns and areas for further inquiry. That takes money, time and effort (and I can guarantee you a journalist typically doesn’t have the first two.) Depending on what you want to know, you launch one of several types of inquiries involving real people–not just populations.
So if you’re interested in knowing whether proximity to a carpet mill is linked to cancer incidence, you could do a cohort study, monitoring people living at different distances from said mill over time and tracking who gets cancer. If you maybe don’t have that much time but do have access to patients in a hospital, you can do a case-control study, which would evaluate the proximity to the carpet mill of patients admitted for cancer as opposed to those admitted for, say, a broken bone. These and other study types are subject to bias and therefore are better left up to professionals.
Hence, I don’t know why the people in Pickens County are so much healthier than the people in Murray County. I have quite a few leads, and I hope my story opens the door to a more exacting investigation (or ten).
That said, one of the editors who picked up this story felt that the answer was clear: the people in Pickens County made more money than those in Murray, so that’s the reason. Case closed.
While I understand his reasoning and appreciate the ills that come with (relative) poverty, I certainly hope that’s not the case, or at least, not entirely. What is that saying? That if you have five dollars in your pocket and I have ten, then you’re more likely to catch the flu next season? Could it really be that simple? And if it were, why?
To me, it all deserves a closer look.
*I chose this title in part because of something really embarrassing that happened recently. A friend of mine mentioned a song he wrote about Atreyu, and I asked him, “Isn’t Atreyu that dog thing from The Land Before Time?” …Yeah. That “Think before you speak” lesson is a tough one to learn.
**Ha.
***Although jury’s out on whether everyone is a relative or a friend of a relative of everyone else up there. How else do you explain my being deemed at fault for someone else rear-ending me as I was stopped in a left-turn lane with my blinker on?
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