Morning Briefing
Summaries of health policy coverage from major news organizations
Longer Looks: Grief That Won't Die, 'Female Viagra,' Animal Diseases
The New York Times: A Grief So Deep It Won’t Die
Complicated or prolonged grief can assail anyone, but it is a particular problem for older adults, because they suffer so many losses — spouses, parents, siblings, friends. “It comes with bereavement,” said Dr. Katherine Shear, the psychiatrist who led the Columbia University study. “And the prevalence of important losses is so much greater in people over 65.” In a review in The New England Journal of Medicine earlier this year, Dr. Shear listed several symptoms characteristic of complicated grief: intense longing or yearning, preoccupying thoughts and memories and an inability to accept the loss and to imagine a future without the person who died. (Paula Span, 8/14)
Vox: 5 Reasons To Be Skeptical Of The New ‘Female Viagra’
The drug, which will be sold under the brand name Addyi, hits pharmacy shelves on October 17. There's just one problem: the pink pill doesn't actually work all that well. The FDA had rejected flibanserin twice before, and only approved it this time after a powerful marketing push and advocacy campaign from women's groups. (Julia Belluz, 8/19)
The Atlantic: Rewriting Autism History
Steve Silberman, a writer for Wired, had worked on a book about autism for about a year. It was a topic with which he was familiar; he’d written a widely read story in 2001 on the prevalence of the disorder, which is estimated to affect one in 68 children. The new project aimed, in part, to document the history of autism research, and Silberman had a hunch that the conventional wisdom surrounding the allegedly serendipitous discovery of autism by two clinicians working independently was, at best, incomplete. (Elon Green, 8/17)
The Atlantic: Before an Animal Disease Becomes A Human Epidemic
In 1920, a shipment of cattle on its way from India to Brazil made a pitstop at the port of Antwerp, where it deposited a surprise—and unwelcome—gift: rinderpest, a viral cattle disease with a death rate close to 100 percent. The Belgian outbreak was a catalyst for the formation of Office International des Epizooties (OIE), an international body that established itself four years later to regulate animal health in international trade. Rinderpest was formally eradicated in 2011, but the OIE—which kept its original acronym through a name change to the World Organization for Animal Health—has since expanded the scope of its monitoring. Today, the group keeps a running list of “notifiable” diseases, requiring its member states to report all animal cases of infections both familiar (anthrax, West Nile) and obscure (goat pox, rabbit hemorrhagic disease). (Cari Romm, 8/13)
