The Knight Science Journalism Tracker is a great resource, the natural counterpart to Health News Review. Unfortunately, a good chunk of the health and science reporting out there is weak, sometimes no more than rewrites of press releases.
The Knight page offers an analysis of the coverage of recent MGH/NEJM melanoma study.
It’s always best to be calm and cautious when approaching claims for a new drug, especially for cancer. A new cancer drug that cuts the death rate by just 2 or 3 percentage points is considered a winner. Treatments that extend survival by a few months can command top dollar.
So when the New England Journal of Medicine publishes a report on the Phase 1 trial of a new drug for advanced melanoma and, in an editorial, labels the drug “a major breakthrough,” attention must be paid.
Fortunately, there seems yet to be no excessive hoopla about the drug, which targets one particular mutation that makes people prone to melanoma and other cancers.