Jacklin Kwan wins award for exposing fake healthcare news
Jacklin Kwan is the winner of the 2024 Sarah Hughes Trust Prize, awarded annually for new journalism that exposes false or misleading information in health or medicine.
Jacklin Kwan
Freelance journalist Ms Kwan impressed the judging panel with an exposé published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) highlighting a rise in concerning practices by some private biobanks. Her research for the article found some biobanks may be deceiving expectant parents about the value of banking their children’s umbilical cord blood by using misleading statements to market the procedure.
Organised by The Sarah Hughes Trust in conjunction with the History of Medicine Society at the RSM and the Medical Journalists’ Association, the purpose of the prize is to further positive collaboration between journalists and healthcare practitioners, taking into account both equality and diversity.
Commenting on her win, Jacklin said:
“I'm incredibly honoured to have been chosen for this award. The methods of exposing misleading or deceptive news are only becoming more and more challenging in the current age of journalism. Prizes like this are needed more than ever to drive critical reporting in healthcare, which often employ thin veneers of scientific evidence to target people at their most desperate.”
On how she came to research and write the winning article, she adds:
“I first came across this story when I received PR invitations to cover the 'revolutionary' technologies behind umbilical cord blood banking after I had written an article about how cord blood was used to cure the first woman of colour of HIV. I felt disturbed at the aggressiveness of these marketing tactics, which prompted me to dig deeper into the world of private bio-banking and to speak to midwives and doctors who had encountered it in their practices. What I found was a rapidly growing industry predicated on claims that banking an infant's umbilical cord tissue and blood could provide a near-panacea in the future – protecting children from cancer, developmental disorders, and disabilities like autism. In my interviews with researchers and healthcare practitioners, I heard about how private biobanks would advertise their services in prenatal wards in NHS hospitals, how they would send 'baby boxes' with pamphlets and discount codes to midwives, and how they would pay midwives a commission for every family they recruited into their service.
“These practices were made unsavoury when they were coupled with convoluted and misleading half-truths. Often biobanks would misrepresent promising research into stem cell therapies, and one company even published research in a predatory journal so they could 'prove' the effectiveness of their methods of harvesting stem cells from cord blood. Clients who are the target of these claims are often parents who want the best for their children and are willing to trust what the science supports. Here, I saw how the appearance of scientific rigour was used as a currency to buy these people's trust.
“It's important for science-literate journalists to call out practices like these, not only to hold these actors accountable but to also protect public faith in science, which we so often hear is being threatened.”
The judges commented:
“Our judges were delighted to receive some impressive entries from a range of media outlets this year. Our winner Jacklin's investigative piece in The BMJ on cord blood banking illuminates a troubling profit-driven practice - frequently promoted in NHS spaces, and exploiting families' concerns. Thought-provoking, weighty, informative and impactful, it demonstrates all the attributes the Sarah Hughes Trust Prize aims to reward in terms of journalistic rigour and challenging misleading information in health and medicine.”
Jacklin Kwan will receive her award at the Royal Society of Medicine on 3 December 2024. The prize presentation will come at the end of the annual Sarah Hughes Lecture, which this year will be given by Baroness Hale of Richmond, former President of the UK Supreme Court, on the subject of press freedom and personal privacy.
About the Sarah Hughes Trust prize
Now in its third year of running, the prize was set up in memory of the late Guardian and Observer journalist Sarah Hughes, who died from breast cancer in 2021 at the age of 48. Talented journalist Sarah was a history graduate from the University of St Andrews and was fascinated by, studied and wrote about the human condition in all its manifestations, good or bad, real or imagined. Her family and friends crowdfunded to establish the Trust, memorial lecture and annual prize in her name.
The prize was won in 2023 by Helen Puttick, a specialist reporter for The Times in Scotland, for a series of articles challenging the Scottish government's claims on the NHS Inform website that people waited a median of 26 weeks for orthopaedic care. In 2022, the inaugural prize was awarded to BBC News journalists Rachel Schraer and Jack Goodman for their exposé of the false science that fuelled belief in ivermectin as a ‘miracle drug’ for treating COVID-19.
Professor Sean Hughes, Sarah’s father, is emeritus professor of Orthopaedic Surgery, Imperial College London and a past-president of the History of Medicine Society at the Royal Society of Medicine.