You would think it was the war in Iraq, or the Israeli-Lebanese conflict. The amount of news coverage being given, sometimes seemingly unquestioningly, to a questionable condition some call “Morgellons Disease� is staggering.

Just in June and July, the “Morgellons Research Foundation� boasts on its website of appearances on ABC, NBC, CNN, and on local stations in Tulsa, South Bend, San Diego, San Antonio, New York and Salt Lake City. The ABC Good Morning America show and NBC Today each featured stories on Morgellons last Friday at almost the exact same time.

Also just in the last two months, print coverage of Morgellons has appeared in Time magazine, Popular Mechanics, the Washington Times, Chicago Tribune, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Minneapolis Star Tribune, Dallas Observer, and the San Francisco Chronicle.

The “Morgellons Research Foundation� lists these signs of the “disease�:

1. Skin lesions with intense itching.
2. Crawling sensations, both within and on the skin surface.
3. Significant fatigue.
4. Cognitive difficulties described by patients as "brain fog".
5. Behavioral effects are common in many patients. Many have been or will be diagnosed as Attention
Deficit Disorder, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, Bipolar Disorder, or Obsessive-Compulsive
Disorder.
6.“Fibers� are reported in and on skin lesions. They are generally described by patients as white, but
clinicians also report seeing blue, green, red, and black fibers, that fluoresce when viewed under
ultraviolet light.

Yet what suddenly made this such a hot story?

Many stories quote or cite just one researcher from the Oklahoma State University Center for Health Sciences & College of Osteopathic Medicine.

But stories don’t seem to discuss who named this a disease.
Journalists don’t seem to push for much evidence.
And the journalists seem to have short memories, forgetting past, very similar stories.
They also don’t seem to mind that they are being manipulated: breast cancer, prostate cancer or heart disease aren’t even getting this kind of attention. And what do they really know about the people making the claims?

But someone is pushing all the right media manipulation buttons – something that is increasingly easier to do these days.

One skeptical website, though, may be publishing more than the advocates. See Morgellons Watch, a site dedicated to examining the claims made regarding this phenomenon. The site’s host writes: “I believe that much of the current media coverage of Morgellons is inaccurate and sensationalist. This is misleading sick people into thinking they may have a terrible disease, when the evidence does not indicate that such a disease actually exists. People have very real physical symptoms, but those symptoms have many possible causes, which have very real treatments. Misdirecting people into a wild goose chase, after a disease that probably does not exist, is wrong.�

People have been saying good things about HealthNewsReview.org, and we wanted to share some of them with you.

HealthNewsReview.org has been named one of the winners of a 2006 Knight-Batten Award for Innovations in Journalism. The Knight-Batten Awards spotlight the creative use of new information ideas and technologies to involve citizens in public issues. They are administered by J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism at the University of Maryland.

The site is also a finalist for a grand prize that will be announced Sept. 18 at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.

The site has also been written about recently in the following places:

CBS Public Eye website : "Grading the Nation's Health Care Coverage"

Editor & Publisher: "Site Looks for 'Sick' Health Stories"

National Public Radio, On the Media, "Health News Gets a Checkup"

Minnesota Public Radio, Midmorning, "Separating hype from fact in health news"

We're gratified by the recognition and by the response from journalists, consumers and health care providers.

The editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association says that for the third time in three months, the Journal was misled by authors failing to disclose their ties to drug companies. This time it was in a study appearing in this week's Journal linking migraines to heart attacks in women. All six authors of the study have had financial ties to drug companies making products for migraines or heart problems.

The Associated Press reports that "the authors said they did not report their financial ties because they did not believe they were relevant to the study."

JAMA was burned last week when authors of a depression study failed to report their connections to drug companies making antidepressants. And two months ago authors of a study on arthritis drugs and cancer failed to fully disclose.

The engtanglement of conflicts of interest in the dissemination of health, medical and science news is worsened when journalists don't question researchers about potential conflicts of interest, or when they take as gospel anything that is published in a journal. Consumers are hurt when there is not full disclosure. They're not getting the full story. That's why, on our HealthNewsReview website, we give an "unsatisfactory" score to any news story that fails to pursue questions of conflicts of interest in the sources used in a story.

This situation must change.

Jeremy Olson in today's St. Paul Pioneer Press reports on concerns about the "medical arms race" -- "relentless drive to buy the newest technology to stay competitive and offer the industry standard in care."

But, as he reports, that comes with high costs and questions about benefit.

You've seen the marketing for CT scans, da Vinci robotic surgery systems and the Cyberknife.

Read his story. There should be more like this in more news outlets more often.

"Celebrity sickness" campaigns will always be less than truthful if they fail to disclose who's paying the bills for the campaign. When journalists join in by giving free advertisiing - disguised as news - to drug-company sponsored celebrity campaigns without disclosing the drug company funding, it is a travesty. I have written about how CNN failed to disclose former NFL-er Joe Theismann's drug company support on a tour promoting prostate health.

The latest example I've seen was in The Oregonian last week. The paper ran a story that proclaimed that "Actress Sally Field joins the women who are fighting osteoporosis with medicine, supplements and exercise." Not surprisingly, there was an overt plug for a drug: "Field chose to take Boniva, a once-a-month medication from Roche Therapeutics." And the paper let her get away with this: "I feel it's kind of a miracle."

Nowhere did the paper mention that Roche pays for the former Flying Nun to sprout her wings for its drug Boniva, something that is easily found on the Web.

Readers of The Oregonian deserve better. The "Nun", proclaiming miracles, is just an actress being paid in a new role, following a script.

The Star Tribune bought a UnitedHealth Group news release hook, line and sinker this week. United announced the findings of a three-year study of "consumer-driven health care plans." It reported "that the cost to employers per member in a high-deductible plan declined 3 to 5 percent, while increasing 8 to 10 percent for others."

The paper provided no details of the group surveyed. How old were they? How well-educated were they? What was their average income? Was this a cherry-picked group of healthy, higher-motivated, higher-educated, better-informed, better-able-to-shop-around employees? These are essential questions. The answers were not provided.

The Star Tribune at least did note some other opinions: one that such plans are not necessarily cheaper than traditional plans for employers, and another that these results may be preliminary. But the story still tilted far too much to the insurance industry party line, that "consumers are more discerning when they are confronted with prices and are less inclined to pay for expensive visits to the emergency room to treat something basic such as a fever or an ankle sprain."

The "put-consumer-skin-in-the-game" philosophy, in the absence of sufficient tools to help consumers play the game, is wrongheaded.

In their own city, the paper could have turned to skeptics such as former U.S. Senator David Durenberger, who recently wrote: "It’s in my best interest – and that of my children and grandchildren – to live in communities of integrated health, medical and long term care systems. It is in such communities that responsibility is shared equally among consumer, professional and insurer, and where greater accountability is demanded of those whose mixed motives might conflict with serving the consumer’s primary interest. Dis-integration is the goal of consumer-driven health care and its principal supporters in the individual insurance industry."

Scott Hensley of the Wall Street Journal published an interesting piece last week headlined, "Quest for youth: how research on anti-aging pill lost momentum."

In it, he writes; "Four years after Pfizer Inc. ended a clinical test of an experimental anti-aging pill and stopped its development for that use, the results of the study still haven't been published in a scientific journal, where other researchers could take advantage of them.

The research behind medicines that get nixed in the trial stage could be valuable to the scientific community. But that information may not immediately reach people, working in academia or at other companies, who might be able to solve the problems or otherwise build on the results."

But, oh, did Pfizer enjoy the publicity after small exploratory studies "showed promise." And journalists continue to cover non-peer-reviewed presentations on the drug at scientific meetings. See one review of one recent story. Journalists must realize they're not getting the whole story when they report on "revelations" at scientific meetings.