Morning Briefing
Summaries of health policy coverage from major news organizations
Longer Looks: Eco-Anxiety In Young People; The Disabled Photographer's Gaze; Gene Editing Progress And More
The Washington Post: Eco-Anxiety Is Overwhelming Kids. Where’s The Line Between Education And Alarmism?
The teenagers pour off buses near Denver’s Union Station under a baking September sun. Giggling with excitement at skipping out on Friday classes, they join a host of others assembled near the terminal. Native American drummers and dancers rouse the crowd, and there’s a festive feeling in the air. But this is no festival. The message these young people have come to send to their city, to their state, to the nation — to the world of adults — is serious. Deadly serious. “We won’t die from old age,” reads one of the signs they hoist above their heads. “We’ll die from climate change.” (Plautz, 2/3)
The New Yorker: The Visceral Satisfactions Of A Disabled Photographer’s Gaze
Toward the end of his junior year of college, Joey Solomon contracted a fever of a hundred and three degrees. When it didn’t subside after several weeks, his parents retrieved him from his apartment, in Brooklyn, and rushed him to a health center near their family home, in Queens. Solomon spent the next month under the study of ultrasound technicians and surgical oncologists, who found an oblong tumor stuck to his sciatic nerve. The suddenness of this discovery stunned him. An art student at the time, Solomon had sat out of the term’s final classes with what he thought was a bad cold. (Orbey, 2/6)
WIRED: Crispr'd Cells Show Promise In First US Human Safety Trial
It’s been over three years since US regulators greenlit the nation’s first in-human test of Crispr’s disease-fighting potential, more than three years of waiting to find out if the much-hyped gene-editing technique could be safely used to beat back tough-to-treat cancers. Today, researchers from the University of Pennsylvania and Stanford finally revealed the first published report describing the trial. The highly anticipated results showed that the procedure is both safe and feasible; the Crispr’d cells went where they were supposed to go and survived for longer than expected. They didn’t cure anyone’s cancer, but they didn’t kill anyone, either, which means the results hold significant promise for the future of Crispr-based medicines. (Molteni, 2/6)
Undark: In Food Safety Regulations, A Surprising Paucity Of Research
In preparation for this month’s column, I set alerts to notify me of news about food safety. At least one or two popped up every day: Ping: A multistate outbreak of salmonella tied to ground beef resulted in nine hospitalizations and one death. Ping: A flour recall linked to an outbreak of E. coli that sickened 21 people in 9 states expands. Ping: A mysterious multistate listeria outbreak claimed two lives. But on November 22, the warnings really hit home. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advised people not to eat romaine lettuce from the Salinas Valley in Northern California (or of unknown province) because it was linked to an E. coli outbreak involving the same virulent strain that caused several other outbreaks in the previous two years. Since January 2018, the CDC has reported that 474 Americans have fallen ill, 219 have been hospitalized, and six have died in multistate outbreaks of E. coli linked to leafy greens — primarily romaine. (Carr, 2/5)
