The IRE Resource Center is a major research library containing more than 23,250 investigative stories — both print and broadcast. These stories are searchable online or by contacting the Resource Center directly (573-882-3364 or rescntr@ire.org) where a researcher can help you pinpoint what you need. Browse or search the tipsheet section of our library below. Stories are not available for download but can be easily ordered by contacting the Resource Center:
Search results for "Doe Run" ...
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Bad to the Bone
When four executives of a medical-device company called Synthes went to jail for illegally marketing a bone cement—five patients had died after it was injected into their spines—Mina Kimes knew there had to be a compelling saga behind a case that had generated little coverage beyond local news articles. So she began digging, first with FOIA requests for never-before-published government documents, and then assembling hundreds of pages of court transcripts and internal company e-mails and reports. She used that foundation to begin the harder challenge: persuading Synthes employees, many of them terrified by the criminal case and the company’s intimidating chairman, to talk to her. With six months of grueling, old-fashioned reporting, Kimes succeeded, and “Bad to the Bone” is the masterful result. Not only did she persuade more than 20 current and former company employees to speak, but she also revealed a story whose disturbing breadth far exceeded the case presented in court. Her tour de force reporting raises profound new questions about the culpability of a key figure who wasn’t charged: Hansjörg Wyss, the reclusive and controlling Swiss founder and chairman—one of the richest people in the world—who made crucial decisions about how to sell the bone cement. This is a classic tale of corporate malfeasance: Warned by the government not to sell its bone cement for use in the spine, Synthes ignored the admonition despite clear evidence of lethal danger—a pig had died within seconds when the cement was tested on it—and encouraged surgeons to use the cement on people, five of whom died soon afterward. But “Bad to the Bone” isn’t just an exposé. It opens a window into a broader issue: how the medical system actually runs. Readers see how salespeople with no medical training advise surgeons—inside the OR during operations—on how to use their devices. They experience the tale of one surgeon who continues using the cement even after two of his patients died. Oh, and what sort of justice does Synthes itself receive? Wyss sells it, for $20 billion, to health care giant Johnson & Johnson, which praises Synthes’s “culture” and “values.” Corporate crime. Death on the operating room table. Secret e-mails. Surgeons on the edge. An imperious multibillionaire CEO. It’s a mesmerizing article, and Kimes’s reporting takes readers on a deeply unsettling journey that ensures they’ll never look at the medical system the same way again.
Tags: Medical devices; bone cement; Synthes
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Assignment Peru: Poison in La Oroya
American mining company Doe Run bought a metalurgical plant in La Oroya, Peru, promising to clean it up after tests showed 99 percent of children born after the take-over had incredibly high level of lead contamination. Ten years later, the company has asked for extensions on the deadlines.
Tags: lead poisoning; air pollution; Doe Run; Hunter Farrell; SEC filings; La Oroya; Peru;
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Lead Astray
The Doe Run Co. is one of the largest lead producers in the world, owning smelters in Herculaneum, MO and evwn one in La Oroya, Peru.The smelter in Peru has not been cleaned up as promised, and the emissions from the smelter are endangering the lives of nearby families. Nearly half of the children near the smelter have mental defiencies, 10 percent of kids under the age of 7 have enough lead in their blood to need medical treatment.
Tags: St. Louis; Lead; Peru; Environment; Pollution; poison; EPA; cancer
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La Oroya
KMOV reporters investigated a smelter in La Oroya, Peru, run by a St. Louis-based Doe Run Company. La Oroya has been heavily contaminated by the smelter and almost every child in the small community has tested positive for lead poisoning.
Tags: Environment; pollution; lead poisoning; Peru; Doe Run Company; metal smelter; Andes
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Poisoning of a Town
The town of Herculaneum, Missouri was built around the Doe Run plant, now the nation's largest lead smelter. Though officials say they have taken measures to limit pollution and contamination from the plant, the area still shows much higher levels of lead than normal. It affect the soil, the air, and especially the several children who live near the plant and now have too-high levels of lead inside of them. The article examines not only the legal issues, but also the conflicting feelings town residents have about their ties to the plant versus their safety.
Tags: lead poisoning; environment; health; pollution; contamination; Department of Natural Resources
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Government played down smelter risks, Officials failed to sound warning on lead levels in air, soil and blood.
For 25 years, health officials from local, state and federal agencies played down the health risks Herculaneum residents faced from the Doe Run Co.'s lead smelter operations. Documents obtained by the Post-Dispatch through open records laws show that from the mid-1970's to the mid 1980's officials knew about the lead poisoning problems but they did not take action to clean things up.
Tags: lead poisoning; Herculaneum
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Broken homes
A New York Times investigation reports on the poor conditions in which mentally ill people live in the state of New York. Many of them die prematurely in adult homes typically run by businessmen with no mental-health training, and troubled by systemic problems like untrained workers and gaps in supervision. Some of the major findings are that the government does little to hold the home operators accountable; many deaths go unreported; residents have been pressured to undergo medical treatment they do not need so that operators can earn Medicare and Medicaid billings; mentally ill people suffer from lack of air conditioning in oppressively hot summer days. "The mentally ill are among the most powerless of all populations, lacking the political influence to demand change," the Times reports.
Tags: mental health; retardation; abuse; neglect; suicide; caregivers; poverty; deaths; health care; minorities; disabilities; disabled
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Does Crime Pay?
"For years, the hard-charging executive had run Avant! more like a sole proprietorship than a publicly traded company. His hand-picked board, which included a retired Park Ranger who is friends with his sister and a host of insiders with business deals with Avant!, okayed huge pay packages for Hsu and CEO-like salaries for a son with limited business experience and a former stewardess who was his top lieutenant. The story spelled out suspicious Avant! investments into entities win which Hsu holds a personal stake, the legal stalling tactics employed by Avant! to buy time of for the company, and a PR campaign to raise its image that included the creation of a foundation that has spent twice as much on advertising its good works as it has on actual charity." - excerpt from IRE contest entry form
Tags: business; computers; software; Silicon Valley; Avant!
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Prospect and Peril
The Tribune deals with lead prospecting in Mark Twain National Forest. Doe Run Co., a mining operation, drilled prospecting holes in 1992 and 1993. Over the past 25 years, nearly 20 companies have drilled more than 200 such holes on national forest land in the Ozarks. Environmental issues are discussed.
Tags: None
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"King David; Power and Paranoia at Baptist Hospital"
Baptist hospital is the largest nonprofit medical center in Nashville, competing in the shadow of Columbia/HCA How does Baptist distinguish itself? Longtime chief executive, C. David Stringfield, purports to be a devout Christian who runs a caring, philanthropic and religious institution. But a three-month Nashville Scene investigation revealed a vast gap between Stringfield's public persona and his true identity. Although a capable hospital administrator, Stringfield is a bizarre personality-- paranoid nasty, ultra-competitive, womanizing and money-grubbing. Under his stewardship, Baptist and its affiliate organizations have run into a string of financial and management problems. Stringfield himself appears to have been involved in several questionable financial dealings.
Tags: None