Longer Looks: AIDS Victims; Food Recalls; And The Dangers Of Power

The New York Times: Dead Of AIDS And Forgotten In Potter’s Field
The bodies reached Hart Island on a ferry like all the others, in spare wooden boxes and bound for ignominious mass internment off the coast of the Bronx where New York City buries its unclaimed dead by the hundreds in long, shallow trenches. But when these 17 bodies arrived in 1985, the island’s hardened crews, used to burying dozens of indigent people per week, recoiled. These were different. They had died from a widely feared nascent disease called AIDS, a highly contagious illness with a skyrocketing death toll. (Kilgannon, 7/3)

Politico: Victims Blame FDA For Food-Recall Failures
People had been getting sick from eating I.M. Healthy Original Creamy SoyNut Butter for more than two months when Peter Ebb, a 59-year-old Boston lawyer and health enthusiast, went for a run and then ate his usual gluten-free English muffin smeared with soy nut butter. Later that morning — March 6, 2017 — Ebb saw a message from Amazon, which had sold him the nut butter, that the manufacturer had recalled it for contamination by E. coli bacteria. Ebb threw away a protein drink he had made with the soy nut butter, but didn’t worry too much. The Food and Drug Administration warning that was linked to the email was worded very cautiously: Though serious illnesses might result, even potentially leading to death, “most healthy adults can recover completely within a week.” (Haughney, 7/4)

The Atlantic: Power Causes Brain Damage
If power were a prescription drug, it would come with a long list of known side effects. It can intoxicate. It can corrupt. It can even make Henry Kissinger believe that he’s sexually magnetic. But can it cause brain damage? When various lawmakers lit into John Stumpf at a congressional hearing last fall, each seemed to find a fresh way to flay the now-former CEO of Wells Fargo for failing to stop some 5,000 employees from setting up phony accounts for customers. (Useem, 7/1)

Vox: Polio Eradication: A Vaccine We Don’t Even Use Anymore Is Spreading The Virus
The global push to immunize children against polio has been an incredible success, reducing polio cases by 99.9 percent. But there’s a lingering obstacle to a polio-free world: A scant number of people who got one version of the vaccine before it was phased out in 2016 carry a variant of the polio virus that was in that vaccine and has since mutated. The mutated virus can now be passed around in areas where few people have been vaccinated, sickening some along the way. (Belluz and Resnick, 7/4)

Wired: One Sentence With 7 Meanings Unlocks A Mystery Of Human Speech
Ruth Nall is a talented talker. Always has been. When she was a child, her mother taught her to enunciate her words when she spoke, which she did often and at length. So wordy was she that, in grammar school, her friends nicknamed her "Yakky Roo," partly for her ace Yakky Doodle impersonation, but also for her loquaciousness. I know this because Nall, who these days teaches high school kids, told me so, in a pleasantly wide-ranging conversation about her participation in a study led by UCSF Health neurosurgeon Edward Chang. (Gonzalez, 6/28)

The Atlantic: The Weird, Ever-Evolving Story Of Your DNA
In 1555, Holy Roman Emperor Charles V announced his plans to abdicate, and his 28-year-old son, Philip II, became the king of Spain the following year. The throne was Philip’s natural—hereditary—right. The Habsburg dynasty, to which Charles and Philip belonged, had raised strategic matrimony to an art form, using marriage bonds among relations distant and close to seize control over much of Europe. Power came with a price, however: severe, recurring mental and physical problems. Charles’s mother was Joan the Mad; his son Philip was said to be “of weakly frame and of a gloomy, severe, obstinate, and superstitious character.” Philip’s descendant Charles II was 4 before he could talk and 8 before he could walk. He died in 1700, not yet 40, childless and sterile. Geneticists have calculated that he was more inbred than he would have been had his parents been siblings. After his death, the Spanish Habsburg dynasty collapsed, crushed under the weight of a heredity that as yet had no name. (Comfort, 7/1)