Morning Briefing
Summaries of health policy coverage from major news organizations
Longer Looks: Diagnosing Mental Illness, Epi-Pen Price Hikes and Zika
The Atlantic: How Artificial Intelligence Could Help Diagnose Mental Disorders
People convey meaning by what they say as well as how they say it: Tone, word choice, and the length of a phrase are all crucial cues to understanding what’s going on in someone’s mind. When a psychiatrist or psychologist examines a person, they listen for these signals to get a sense of their wellbeing, drawing on past experience to guide their judgment. Researchers are now applying that same approach, with the help of machine learning, to diagnose people with mental disorders. (Joseph Frankel, 8/23)
Vox: EpiPen’s 400 Percent Price Hike Tells Us A Lot About What’s Wrong With American Health Care
The EpiPen was invented in the 1970s by a biomedical engineer, Sheldon Kaplan, who was searching for a way to treat allergic reactions quickly. What he came up with was the EpiPen we know today: a pen-like device that delivers a premeasured dose of the hormone epinephrine in emergency situations. The device is ubiquitous in our country, carried by those with asthma or life-threatening allergies. (Sarah Kliff, 8/23)
Pacific Standard: The Law Of Positive Attraction
Say you’re living with HIV in one of the 35 states with exposure laws — you can end up behind bars simply for having sex. That’s right: If you sleep with someone without telling them about your HIV status, that’s grounds, in many cases, for a prison sentence. What if you didn’t even transmit the virus? Doesn’t matter. The laws vary from state to state, and are modified from time to time, but, in most cases, you don’t even have to have sex, you just have to engage in behavior where there’s a risk of transmission. Just hope you’re not in one of 28 states that considers HIV exposure a felony: You could end up serving more than 20 years. (Whitney Mallett, 6/22)
The Atlantic: The Mystery Of Zika’s Path To The Placenta
Among the many mysteries that have vexed scientists about the ongoing Zika epidemic is the question of how, in pregnant women, the virus manages to cross the maternal-fetal barrier. A woman’s body is usually quite good at protecting her growing baby. There are biological blockades to prevent the transmission of viruses to a fetus through the bloodstream, by way of the placenta; the same path for the nutrients and oxygen that sustain a developing baby. The placental membrane is similarly adept at keeping harmful agents out. (Adrienne LaFrance, 8/18)
The Houston Chronicle: Parents Seek Hope For Mentally Ill Son
Warren [Muldrow] was not doing well in jail. If he was suicidal or homicidal, his attorney told the judge, Warren needed to get to a state hospital immediately. All agreed during the courtroom conference that he should be assessed immediately as a crisis case. Their decision put his fate, for the moment, in the hands of an outside evaluator who, they hoped, would make a quick determination. There was little time to lose. But few things ever went as planned for Warren, and county jails across Texas filled with the mentally ill spoke to how few options existed for meaningful, long-term care. (Emily Foxhall, 8/21)
