Eight authors, including me, discuss the roles and responsibilities of journalists who disseminate health information in a PLoS Medicine special edition.

PLoS Medicine is a relatively new peer-reviewed open-access journal.

See my article on the Poynter Institute website, documenting perhaps the most disturbing trend in television health news coverage today.

A review in JAMA shows that journal article findings that a treatment worked were contradicted 16 percent of the time by later studies. And another 16 percent of the time, studies found weaker results than earlier suggested. So nearly a third of original published results did not hold up to further scrutiny.

Dartmouth and VA researchers Steve Woloshin and Lisa Schwartz have warned about news coverage that is "Too Much Too Soon" in coverage of presentations at scientific meetings.

For those journalists who live off weekly journals for their stories, and who fail to follow up on subsequent findings, the same "too much too soon" message is valid.