WCAU chief meteorologist Glenn “Hurricane” Schwartz is resting in a Philadelphia hospital after undergoing double bypass heart surgery this morning.

“Glenn is recuperating well and is in good spirits,” WCAU news director Chris Blackman said. “He feels fortunate that he recognized the signs of potential trouble. We’re all keeping him in our thoughts and wish him a speedy recovery.”

As Schwartz spends the next several weeks recuperating, the NBC station plans to run a series of special segments about heart health. Read more

KUTV anchor-reporter Mary Nickles took cameras along as she went in for a recent mammogram to show viewers how quick and easy it is to get screened. While she stressed the importance of regular mammograms in her story, she didn’t realize at the time how important this one would be for her.

Nickles’s mammogram displayed a dense spot of tissue that doctors eventually diagnosed as a malignant tumor.

Nickles announced the diagnosis on her Facebook wall today, telling people that she recently had a successful lumpectomy and will soon undergo chemotherapy and radiation.

“I’m sharing to encourage more of you to get your screenings!” Nickles wrote. Read more

In a freak accident, Angie Moreschi, who currently hosts the Emmy Award-winning “Smart Health” series on Tampa’s WEDU, unexpectedly gained first-hand knowledge of the topic she was covering.

Moreschi, an anchor with WFTS before joining WEDU, was working on a story about pain pill addiction when she was struck by a car, an accident that crushed her legs and required her to take pain medication.

“The crazy irony of being a health show host going through this horrible medical trauma has given me new insight into the medical system,” Moreschi told The Tampa Tribune recently.

When a doctor advised her to take morphine and other pain-relieving medications, Moreschi admits that she was afraid to because she “had seen what happens to people who get hooked.” Read more

While cell phones, artificial sweeteners, and certain prescription drugs may, according to myriad news reports, cause cancer, it appears that local TV is a significant source of cancer fatalism.

Two recently published research papers suggest that a steady diet of local TV news leads people to believe that they have little or no control over whether or not they get cancer.

The papers, published by researchers at Cornell University and The Ohio State University, and reviewed by Miller-McCune, show that local TV news is more likely than other news outlets to emphasize recent scientific findings and less likely to include context and information about prevention.

Miller-McCune summarizes the findings of Cornell University’s Jeff Niederdeppe:

By focusing on shocking new studies that reveal a ‘novel or controversial’ potential cause of the disease, local television news tends ‘to cultivate the belief that everything causes cancer.’ Read more