In the early 1990s, a discrepancy between big city survival rates for cardiac arrest cases began to come into focus in medical journals - some cities saved 10 times more victims than others.
As a back-burner issue project that I pursued amid daily stories, I began looking for ways to detail those differences. Whenever I spoke with an emergency room physician, fire department official or cardiology researcher for a story, I asked them about the discrepancies.
I began to see that the officials explained away the differences with reasons they usually said were out of