Morning Briefing
Summaries of health policy coverage from major news organizations
Longer Looks: Silent Gun Slaughter In D.C.; Reducing Heroin Overdoses; And Drinking And Breast Cancer
Politico Magazine: D.C.’s Silent Gun Slaughter
Ryane Nickens stood in a patch of grass as sleet rained down on one of the most historically troubled neighborhoods of Southeast Washington. It was the first time Nickens had come back to this spot in Washington Highlands since her brother, then 19, had been gunned down in the parking lot 22 years ago. A little boy, on his way to school, had found the body. (Joanne Kenen, 4/14)
The Atlantic: How The United States Can Reduce Heroin Overdoses
In the 1980s, France went through a heroin epidemic in which hundreds of thousands became addicted. Mohamed Mechmache, a community activist, described the scene in the poor banlieues back then: “To begin with, they would disappear to shoot up. But after a bit we’d see them all over the place, in the stairwells and halls, the bike shed, up on the roof with the washing lines. We used to collect the syringes on the football pitch before starting to play," he told The Guardian in 2014. (Olga Khazan, 4/16)
New York Magazine: Did Drinking Give Me Breast Cancer? I Don’t Know.
I don’t know why I got cancer. Statistically, it seemed likely that I would join the One in Eight probability brigade at some point in my life, thanks to a family history of breast and colon cancers. At 37, the two-centimeter malignant lump in my left breast was still unusual enough to warrant a partial mastectomy, a dozen rounds of chemotherapy, four weeks of radiation, and a year’s worth of immunotherapy drugs. All that hospital and treatment time afforded me ample opportunity to come up with correlations and transform them into causes. (Sarah Weinman, 4/18)
BuzzFeed: In Closed-Door UN Meetings, Trump Administration Officials Pushed Abstinence For International Women’s Health Programs
In closed-door meetings at the United Nations in March, Trump administration officials pushed socially conservative views on women’s rights issues — including abstinence-based policies over information about contraception — that were further to the right than those expressed by most other countries present, including Russia and the representative for the Arab states, UN officials who attended the meetings told BuzzFeed News.
