Welcome to the October 2022 chapter newsletter. 

October is, in this writer’s estimation, the most beautiful time to live in Minnesota. The air crispens, the lakes crystallize and the leaves pause to blush before taking their final bow. 

On a mostly unrelated note, please take a listen to “Musetta’s Waltz,” from Puccini’s La bohème. This opera comprises various vignettes of the lives of young bohemians (essentially, hipsters) in nineteenth-century Paris. Critics have dismissed La bohème as simplistic and shallow—not unlike its subject matter. But what it lacks in depth, it makes up for in lush, intoxicating glamour. Sometimes, life really is simple 🙂 

Let us know what you think, and remember, you can also read it on the chapter website. You can find previous newsletters on the website as well.

In this issue:

CHAPTER NEWS

• Don’t forget! Meet your fellow chapter members at AMWA National Conference  

• President-Elect and Programming Chair position currently open! See details below. 

• Join our AMWA North Central LinkedIn Community! Link here. 

CHAPTER EVENTS

• Future book club dates and selections for 2023 

FEATURES 

• Chapter happy hour summary 

• Book club notes: The Premonition by Michael Lewis 

• What’s your favorite music to work to? 

CHAPTER NEWS

Don’t forget! Meet fellow chapter members at AMWA National Conference 

The 2022 meeting of the AMWA National Conference will take place November 2–5 in Denver, CO. If you plan to attend, make a plan to meet up with fellow chapter members for dinner, drinks, etc. More conference details here.  

Volunteers needed for President Elect and Programming Chair

Volunteers are needed for chapter President Elect and Programming Chair positions Please consider volunteering! More information below. 

The AMWA North Central chapter is looking for a new President-Elect, Programming Chair and CAC Representative. Please consider volunteering! More information below. 

AMWA North Central is a volunteer-based organization. If members don’t take an active role, the chapter will cease to function, and members will lose access to programming, news, and networking opportunities. Consider taking your turn to lead (or join) a committee or serve as a chapter officer. Please submit your interest or nominations for any of the above positions to bod@list.amwanorthcentral.org. 

• President-Elect: We are seeking a President-Elect for the 2023 term. This position is critical to our status as a chapter!  Without a volunteer to fill this vital position, we will not be able to continue as a chapter. Please volunteer! As President-Elect, you will attend the monthly AMWA NC chapter board meetings, take minutes, and chair the meeting if the president is unable to attend. Other duties may be assigned by the President or Board on an ad hoc basis. 

• Programming Committee Chair: The Program Committee Chair is responsible for organizing AMWA events throughout the year, including identifying topics of interest and recruiting speakers. This is an important role in AMWA and is valuable for both member engagement and education. Please submit your interest or nominations. 

• CAC Representative: Starting in January, we will be looking for a new CAC Rep. The Chapter Advisory Council Representative attends all meetings of the Chapter Advisory Council, either held in person at the annual AMWA National meeting, or by conference call. The CAC Representative then communicate all concerns and questions from chapter leaders and chapter members to the Chapter Advisory Council. 

Not ready or able to lead a committee? All of our committees invite members to share ideas and keep the workload light. 

In addition to keeping our group viable, volunteering with AMWA is a great way to network with your fellow members. It’s also a good way to fortify your C.V. with an extra line showing how you give back to your profession! If you can volunteer a few hours a month to help, please send a message to bod@list.amwanorthcentral.org. 

EVENTS

Book club selections for 2023

Mark your calendars!

We have selected books for the North Central AMWA 2023 Book Club. AMWA members may want to add these selections to their current reading lists. The selections are as follows:   

• January 30, 2023: How Charts Lie: Getting Smarter about Visual Information by Alberto Cairo.  This book may help writers understand how to present data and watch for ways graphic presentations can misrepresent information. How Charts Lie: Getting Smarter About Visual Information – YouTube 

• April 24, 2023: The Illusion of Evidence–Based Medicine: Exposing the Crisis of Credibility in Clinical Research by Jon Jureidini and Leemon B McHenry. The book presents a detailed account of two influential clinical studies that seriously misrepresented the drugs’ efficacy and safety. The drugs, paroxetine and citalopram, are used for pediatric and adolescent depression. The book argues for reevaluating the relationship between medicine and the pharmaceutical industry. 

• September 25, 2023: Man’s 4th Best Hospital by Samuel Shem. The cast of characters from Shem’s book House of God (a popular 1978 novel about medical training), now mid-career physicians, return, recruited to raise the status of a local hospital that has fallen from their first place in the ranking system. The modern plagues causing the drop stem from the affliction of many modern hospitals: a bloated administration, corporate greed, and an inefficient electronic medical record system. 

Please feel free to send us any title (medical, technical, or nonfiction) that you would like to discuss at our Book Club.   

Book Club Notes: The Premonition by Michael Lewis

By Paul W. Mamula, PhD

Our Book Club met via Zoom on September 26, 2022, to discuss The Premonition: A Pandemic Story by Michael Lewis. The Premonition examines how the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) functioned during the COVID-19 pandemic. Lewis is the author of 15 other books on topics as diverse as the finances of major league baseball (Moneyball) and the financial meltdown of 2008-2009 (The Big Short). The Premonition derived from his book The Fifth Risk, published during the Trump administration, which addressed the workings of the federal government as a manager of multiple risks ranging from natural disasters to food security.  The Fifth Risk posed this question: What happens when the people in charge of managing risks and their in-house experts have no interest in these problems? The Premonition presents a startling picture. 

The Book 

We all enjoyed the book and found that it read more like a biomedical thriller than a simple history. Its 301 pages began with a girl’s high school project that grew into her father’s computer model used for tracing the spread of disease. 

The principal characters included Dr. Charity Dean, who identified cases in California and tried to implement policies for control and treatment. Incredibly, when she contacted the CDC, they proved pedantic and uncooperative. A bit later, they ordered her to stop implementing her plans. Also prominently highlighted were the actions of a loosely associated group of dissenting doctors (dubbed “the Wolverines”) who developed methods to fight the pandemic. As members of world class laboratories, they had previous experience with bird and swine flu outbreaks. But their suggestions received no endorsement from the CDC, whose representatives often replied, “We need to have more data.”  

Other commentators have noted that the CDC likes to rely on published studies; however, such studies take a long time to produce and are not the best strategy for dealing with a fast-moving pandemic.1 The Premonition, with its major characters interwoven throughout, concluded with a wrap-up (chapter 11) summarizing the pandemic and an epilogue. 

In this and other books, including The Great Influenza, the CDC has been described as functioning more like a university department than an organization dedicated to solving problems. Protecting the institution becomes more important than taking risks (and having to explain any mistakes). Some actions were glaring. Initially, mask mandates, social distancing, and closing schools were thought to be ineffective, based on old and spotty data from the 1918 pandemic. The best counter analogy presented in The Premonition was that such measures served as slices of Swiss cheese layered on top of one another (p 70)—any individual measure was ineffective but became effective when employed with other measures (our best preventive strategy until a vaccine was ready). Additional historical sleuthing also showed that the sooner preventive measures were all implemented, the lower the case count. For the COVID-19 pandemic, countries (eg, Mexico) that implemented a multipronged preventive strategy had fewer cases than those that did not. Conversely, the Swedish government decided not to implement any control measures and had relatively high numbers of cases and a high percentage of deaths. The United States was late in implementing control measures, partly because the measures became a political issue. As a result, with 4% of the world’s population, the United States has about 20% of the cases worldwide and now more than 1 million deaths.  

Mary Knatterud exclaimed, “I knew that the CDC had long been crippled by political kowtowing, bureaucratic ineptitude, and the ingroup arrogance of so-called experts. But I had no idea to what extent, across all recent Presidential administrations—until Lewis’s scathing account of the CDC’s cowardly, antiscientific foot-dragging during this never-ending pandemic.” 

The CDC declined to be interviewed for the book. Without defending that choice, I (and others) believe that part of the problem has been a steady decline in CDC funding over multiple decades and administrations. The CDC was organized to address problems such as the COVID-19 pandemic, yet failed to do that effectively. 

Quibbles 

We did have a few quibbles. Most annoying was the use of first names for many of the physicians in the book, especially a problem if you don’t read the book straight through. I found myself having to flip back and forth to find out full names. I would have preferred that the use of last names at subsequent mentions. A good editor might have solved this shortcoming, but it is a minor quibble to the overall story. 

Mary Knatterud echoed this shortcoming and said, “I loved the book but was irked by Lewis’s overfamiliar first-naming of both the female and male protagonists: an erratic habit that was especially jarring when Dr. Dean was called Charity in the same paragraph that the fleetingly mentioned Stephen Hosea was called Dr. Hosea (p 25). All people in the book should have always been referred to by their surname alone on subsequent references.” Knatterud added, “Moreover, in this day and age, ‘he’ should never have been lazily deployed as a pronoun for ‘the reader’ (eg, p xv).” 

Other passages Lewis included were both appalling and inspirational. Knatterud said, “I was appalled by Dean’s backstory of being viciously persecuted for pursuing higher education—not only by her ultraconservative church elders and many supposed friends, but also by members of her own family, including her former husband.” That Dean succeeded in becoming a public health physician despite those obstacles added depth and perspective to what otherwise might have been merely a historical recounting. 

Minor style issues were also a concern. Knatterud noted, “As a longtime editor still working on manuscripts, I too dislike what Carter Mecher called ‘stupid rules’ in many style manuals, although I don’t share his irritation at ‘more than’ being preferred to ‘over’ (p 76): I know of far worse examples of out-of-it overreach in guidebooks.” 

In sum, this book was a fast worthwhile read and a nice behind-the-scenes look at a rapidly unfolding pandemic. We recommend it highly. 

Next Up 

For our next book club, we leave the pandemic literature for the statistical realm. How Charts Lie: Getting Smarter About Visual Information by Alberto Cairo looks like fun, particularly given how data are typically presented in the media. Please join us for our next meeting at 7 pm, Monday, January 30, 2023. We are continuing via Zoom, so attending a book club discussion is just a keystroke away!  

References 

1. Interlandi J. Can the CDC Be Fixed? The New York Times Magazine. June 20, 2021, pp 36-44

What’s your favorite music to work to?

Hi all! Adam here. A little while ago, Lynelle Martinez and I were swapping suggestions for favorite music to play in the background while working. As our conversation careened from hair metal to smooth jazz to video game soundtracks, we got to wondering: What kinds of music do our fellow chapter members enjoy while working? I’ll start with one of YouTube’s greatest hidden gems: 

• Die lange Gerade 

This is a piece of electronic music composed as a training soundtrack for the East German Olympics Program in the 1970s and 1980s. It’s from an album entitled Kosmischer Läufer (Cosmic Runners). I hope you’ll agree the name is quite accurate. 

If you would like to submit a favorite work music for next month’s newsletter, please email me at adamfix1@gmail.com. Thanks!