Last spring, the c-word–cure!–came up more than once.
“Doctors announced on Sunday that a baby had been cured of an HIV infection for the first time,” was the lede on a story in The New York Times by Andrew Pollack and Donald G. McNeil, Jr. They called it “a startling development that could change how infected newborns are treated and sharply reduce the number of children living with the virus that causes AIDS.”
In a tweet, Atul Gawande of The New Yorker repeated the claim of a cure in the Times, and added, “This is huge, stunning, world changing.” Ron Winslow of The Wall Street Journal was careful to qualify the story in his lede, writing that the baby “appears to be cured.” But the headline and the rest of the story referred to the “cure” without that important reservation–that the baby appears to be cured.
There were many others. “Scientists Report First Cure of HIV In A Child,” said NPR. “Researchers: Toddler cured of HIV,” wrote CNN.
Lauran Neergaard, the veteran medical reporter at The Associated Press, very carefully avoided the c-word, writing that the baby “appears” to be cured. She went even further in her second paragraph:
There’s no guarantee the child will remain healthy, although sophisticated testing uncovered just traces of the virus’ genetic material still lingering. If so, it would mark only the world’s second reported cure.
Interestingly, all Neergaard did to stay on course–unlike so many others–was to follow the language in the press release from the National Institutes of Health. The release avoids saying cure without qualification. It refers only to a “functional cure,” meaning that the baby had no “detectable levels of virus and no signs of disease in the absence of antiretroviral therapy.”
In a Tracker post on that story, I wrote the following:
…The proper approach with stories such as these is to be very careful not to overstate the findings or the implications. Be cautious now, and be excited to write the follow-up in a year or two reporting that these are cures and do have implications for others, if that turns out to be the case.
The alternative is to get excited about “cures” now and likely be forced to write the follow-up that says, no, we were wrong to talk about cures; this just didn’t work out.
That is exactly what happened. Yesterday, we saw a very different story about the baby with the functional cure. “A child in Mississippi who was thought to have been cured of H.I.V. with aggressive drug treatment immediately after birth is now showing signs of infection with the virus, federal health officials announced Thursday — a serious setback to hopes for a cure for AIDS,” wrote Donald G. McNeil in the Times.
The news outlets that reported the “cure” last year ran similar stories yesterday. Gawande tweeted, “Drat. This seemed so promising.”
To be fair, the scientists involved in the case and those who commented on it were far more exuberant–and careless–than they should have been. Many of them spoke of the development last year as a cure. But they were wrong, and it’s our job to know when people are wrong. We’re not stenographers; we report.
Drat.
For us, this is a lesson in good journalistic practice. For others, it’s a tragedy. What must it mean for the mother of that baby, and the rest of the family? For a year, they’ve been told that their baby was cured.
Who, I wonder, broke the news to them that she wasn’t?
-Paul Raeburn
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