Vertigo, Ebola, sonar, and: Can artificial turf cause cancer?

After several absorbing days at ScienceWriters2014, I’ve fallen behind. Here are a few quick things that I didn’t want to miss:

Meredith Levine wrote an interesting piece for CBC News in Canada on vertigo, which has little to do with the Hitchcock movie but can be a serious, disabling illness, as she found out herself when she was struck with it. While that sparked her interest, she wisely left herself out of the story, giving us instead a clear and useful update on the condition and its treatments. In a short bio, Levine writes that the story was supported in part by the Canadian Institutes of Health. I don’t know enough about the circumstances to know what to think of that.

David Ropeik, who refuses to panic no matter how hard we try to frighten him, has written a reasoned piece about Ebola in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. He notes that what we mainly have to fear is fear itself; not Ebola. He is echoing the FDR quote from the first inaugural, of course:

 So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.

Ropeik neatly explains why that insight applies to the Ebola epidemic.

Sonar is affecting our ocean’s creatures. So writes Laura Dattaro at weather.com, in a gorgeously laid out story. It’s a strong piece of reporting, much of it gathered from researchers in such exotic locations as the Abaco Islands of the Northern Bahamas. Not to take anything away from Dattaro’s work, but this story raised a question for me. While reading it, I was often distracted by the lovely images slipping by and the cleverly used white spaces that surround the text. And I wondered: When does elegant design do us a disservice, by distracting us from the writing and reporting? It’s important to remember that design should serve the story–not the other way around. We might wonder whether this has something to do with the Weather Channel’s new strategy–less weather, more clickbait.

What to do when Tracker readers disagree? Two weeks ago Hannah Rappleye at nbcnews.com wrote a story–billed as an investigative piece–questioning the safety of artificial turf. Could the black granules that explode from the turf when young soccer goalies dive for the ball cause cancer? One Tracker reader alerted me to what he called “a most glaring case of fear mongering journalism in the face of massive evidence dispelling the fears.” Another wrote to say she thought it was a thoroughly reported piece and that she found it genuinely and appropriately alarming. Both are reporters whose work I respect. (Disclosure: I sometimes write for nbcnews.com.)

I took a look at the piece. The headline seems fair enough: “How Safe is the Artificial Turf Your Child Plays On?” But the story raises an alarm with its lede. We get anecdotes about soccer players with cancer, and we hear about a possible cluster of cancer cases–but not from a researcher. The cases were collected by a soccer coach. Worth reporting, sure–but not in the lede. Rappleye then goes on to raise legitimate questions, and she features quotes from the Synthetic Turf Council defending its product. But too much of the story is devoted to concerned parents and others who raise alarm. The research seems to be unclear; we can’t tell if there is a danger. Rappleye should have been more careful: Raising questions is fine, but not if it’s done in a way that suggests we already know the answers.

-Paul Raeburn