Dr. Kenneth Berry Update
The head scratching continues about this “person of interest” [my term] for the FBI. A medical doctor has e-mailed me with his thoughts, and please note his final comment:
This guy is a zero. The American Univ of the Caribbean is a fifth pathway school — guys from the East Coast go there when they can’t get into a US medical school, and they then try to transfer to an American med school (the “fifth pathway”) prior to graduation. Used to work some (the Carter administration tried to make it mandatory for US med schools to accept fifth pathway transfers, but the med schools told them to shove it). But in the last decade or so transfers are almost completely shut down.So our bright boy graduates from AUC. He is NOT going to get a good residency in the states in any specialty. St. Joseph’s Med Ctr — which St. Joe’s, there are a number of them. He did a community hospital residency in family medicine, probably a free-standing residency not affiliated with a university. Ick. Training is mediocre, more like an apprenticeship, with (mostly) a non-dedicated teaching staff and relatively few opportunities to distinguish himself.
Regardless, he gets a certification in family medicine. I’d like to know what the 2nd residency was all about. The AMA page doesn’t specify the order of residencies done, so I don’t know if the surgery residency was first (and he asked to leave) or second. But he’s not a certified surgeon, so he obviously didn’t complete it. And “Wilson Memorial Regional Medical Center” isn’t a stellar residency, either (Googled it to Johnston City, NY).
Rex is correct, there is no specialty training in WMD per se. Physicians with expertise in biologicals generally would be infectious disease specialists. For any, the Emergency Medicine docs would be expected to have good, basic knowledge in triage and treatment, but they wouldn’t be expected to have in-depth knowledge as to pathophysiology, research, etc.
Rex is also correct in noting that, especially for small hospitals in rural America, a family medicine doc who wanted to be an ER “specialist” could be one. Emergency Medicine as a specialty is a new idea, but their residency programs are cranking out graduates. Those new docs tend to cluster in better-supported, more desirable places to live. But if he wanted to be an ER doc in Wellsville, he could do it.[snip]
There is no “Board of Certification of Emergency Medicine.” There IS an American Board of Emergency Medicine, a member of the American Board of Medical Specialties. The ABMS certifies doctors in their specialties after training, and the ABEM would do the certifying of emergency medicine docs.
Go here for a description of their Board of Directors. It seems that one of the requirements is that you’re EM certified, which Dr. Berry apparently isn’t. He’s also not a graduate of an ACGME-certified (ACGME = American Council of Graduate Medical Education, which certifies the training programs) EM program, according to his bio.[snip]
I ran Dr. Berry’s name through PubMed, the interface for the National Library of Medicine, a premier search engine for health care. It lists and indexes every single article published in every medical and biological sciences journal that is indexed, and that’s a big list. “Berry KM” brings up 2 listings, neither of which is our guy.
In simple terms, Chuck: I think this guy stinks to high heaven.
Here’s where we stand.
- Dr. Berry’s public CV has some inaccurate names for groups that he should know the correct names of.
- He is not published in any manner that we can discover.
- His CV lists nothing that would qualify him to be an expert on WMD.
- Dr. Berry’s CV lists nothing that would have allowed him access to anthrax spores.
- His CV lists nothing that would make him in any way expert enough to be a part of the Flight 800 crash investigation, other than in a very minor role.
Let’s keep in mind that the FBI and the Postal Inspectors investigate a variety of crimes other than terrorism, and that the anthrax murders could involve other crimes. Is it possible that crimes such as mail fraud, extortion, or filing a false instrument might occur in the context of these murders? On the other hand, the problems with Dr. Berry’s past might all resolve if we postulate that he spent some time as a government employee which he cannot list on his CV for some odd reason.
Dr. Berry has not, as far as I know, been charged with a federal crime. And there may be very satisfactory answers to our questions about his CV. And… yes, he did not graduate for a prestigious medical school but that does not make him a bad doctor. So, he still remains a mystery to us.
