Wire Service Challenge Could Change the Way of Medical Reporting

A tiff between the nation’s top medical journal and an international wire service over reporters’ rights to scoop the journal on its own stories threatens to unravel a tradition that controls how medical news reaches the public.

The British news agency Reuters vowed this week to ignore in future the weekly embargo imposed by The New England Journal of Medicine--an agreement under which news organizations delay publication of stories in return for early copies of the prestigious and influential journal.

Reuters’ move could mean that reports of some medical advances become news before most doctors have a chance to study them, a change that some people say could benefit the public but some medical journal editors contend could harm public health.

‘A Public Responsibility’

“There is a public responsibility here,” Dr. Arnold S. Relman, editor of The New England Journal of Medicine, contended this week in a telephone interview about Reuters’ decision. “Damage can be done when news is released prematurely. Damage can be done to the public health.”

The journal is arguably the most prominent of hundreds of medical publications that serve as the principal forum for reports on research. Before they are aired, each article is subjected to a process of pre-publication scrutiny by scientific experts known as peer review.

The dispute between the journal and Reuters arises at a time of increasing public interest in advances in medical science. That interest has prompted news organizations to begin covering meetings and reports that in the past were the exclusive turf of scientific journals.

In that context, some critics have suggested that the role of embargoes has changed: Once a means of ensuring that doctors know of medical advances before patients read about them in newspapers, they are also now tools that enable journals to break big stories.

Others suggest they may be simply out of date.

“In a sense, I think maybe a policy involving an embargo date would have made sense back in the 19th Century,” said Dr. Edward Huth, editor of Annals of Internal Medicine, who said he is reassessing his publication’s use of embargoes.

“Now with most scientific information of importance having been aired at major meetings with the press present before publication, I think increasingly it doesn’t make sense,” said Huth, whose monthly journal is considered one of the most important.

The disagreement between Reuters and Relman stems from the agency’s decision to transmit on Jan. 26 a story on a study suggesting aspirin’s ability to prevent heart attacks. The journal had a report on the subject, seen as an unusually significant breakthrough, embargoed for late Jan. 27.

Reuters contends that a business reporter in its Washington office learned of the breakthrough independently, unaware of the journal and its embargo. For that reason, the agency sent the story out on its wire about 36 hours before the embargo was to be lifted.

Once the Reuters story appeared on the news wire, other major publications throughout the United States, including the Los Angeles Times, saw no point in withholding the story and also published in advance of the embargo date.

This week, Relman retaliated with a six-month suspension of Reuters’ early, air-mail subscription.

“He told me to go and stand in a corner because I’m a bad boy,” smirked Desmond Maberley, executive editor of Reuters North America. Maberley said the punishment “was based on a false premise because we never broke the embargo.”

Maberley said his agency intends in the future to “obtain copies of the journal and issue stories on news merit.” Since Relman has suspended the agreement with Reuters, Reuters will not feel bound to respect the Journal’s embargo date, Maberley said.

“Why should we?” he asked. “We don’t have an agreement, do we?”

Although Maberley suggested that the agency would have no difficulty getting copies of the journal through other sources, Relman said he doubted that would be possible and he would take steps to see that no early copies would be accessible to Reuters.

One person expressing anger about the embargo policy this week was Dr. I. Herbert Scheinberg, a professor of medicine at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City, who was one of the 22,000 doctors who served as subjects in the aspirin study.

Scheinberg said the public could have benefited by the earliest feasible release of the findings of the study, which was cut short Dec. 18 after data analysis convinced the researchers that aspirin was effective against heart disease.

Scheinberg accused the researchers of respecting a request from the journal that they not publicize their findings in advance. He contended that people with heart disease might have been helped had they been able to begin taking aspirin six weeks earlier.

Scheinberg accused the journal of wanting “to protect their right to get on Dan Rather’s program, to get a front-page story in the New York Times” when the article was finally released.

Relman, however, countered in an interview that the findings had to be scrutinized by other experts before they could be published and that to release them early would have been irresponsible. He called Scheinberg’s argument “simply nonsense.”

“It really makes no difference to the journal as an entity whether there’s an embargo policy or not,” Relman said. “It does, obviously, make a great difference to our subscribers who are physicians and to their patients.”