Morning Briefing
Summaries of health policy coverage from major news organizations
Longer Looks: Interesting Reads You Might Have Missed
The Washington Post: These Are The Parents Who Stared Down Mark Zuckerberg
Todd Minor understood why the ropes were necessary when the titans of social media strode in and took their seats — within striking distance of him and all the other grieving parents holding portraits of their dead kids — in a walnut-paneled Senate hearing room. “The moment I saw them,” Minor said, “it took all my energy to keep, you know, to stay civilized.” Minor’s dimple-cheeked boy was 12 when he died trying to replicate the TikTok “blackout challenge.” (Dvorak, 2/1)
The New York Times: When The Biggest Student Mental Health Advocates Are The Students
Last October, to commemorate Mental Health Awareness Week, a group of students at Sacopee Valley High School in Hiram, Maine, created the annual Hope Board. Shaped like an enormous tulip and displayed in the lobby, the board was covered with anonymous teenage aspirations. Some students hoped to pass driver’s education or have a successful playoff season. Others expressed more complicated desires. “To be more happy than angry,” wrote one student. Another wrote, “I hope people are kinder and more mature.” (Miller, 2/6)
The Wall Street Journal: The Working Woman’s Newest Life Hack: Magic Mushrooms
For a select group of moms in high-powered jobs, psilocybin has become the answer to a packed social and professional calendar with no time for hangovers. (Lieber, 2/6)
The New Yorker: A Safe Haven For Late Abortions: Photos From A Late-Stage Abortion Clinic
Partners in Abortion Care, which opened in College Park, Maryland, after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, helps women terminate pregnancies even if they come from states where abortion is illegal. (Talbot and Shannon, 2/5)
The New York Times: When A Spouse Goes To The Nursing Home
Even as the signals of approaching dementia became impossible to ignore, Joseph Drolet dreaded the prospect of moving his partner into a long-term care facility. Mr. Drolet, 79, and his beloved Rebecca, 71, both retired lawyers and prosecutors in Atlanta, had been a couple for 33 years, though they retained separate homes. ... But serving as her round-the-clock caregiver, as she needed help with every daily task, became exhausting and untenable. (Span, 2/3)
Modern Healthcare: How AI-Enabled Speech Analysis Could Diagnose, Treat Diseases
Combining artificial intelligence with the sound of someone’s voice may eventually help diagnose patients with potential heart failure or Parkinson's disease. As AI fever grips healthcare, some providers and digital health companies are using the technology to analyze people's speech patterns so they can detect future heart attacks or better understand a patient's social needs. The concept is promising enough that the National Institutes of Health has budgeted $14 million to create a database of 30,000 voices by 2026 that could be used to train AI for the diagnosis of diseases. (Perna, 2/2)
CIDRAP: Vaccine-Makers Seek A Role In The Fight Against Antibiotic Resistance
In the offices of a biotech incubator hub just off University Avenue in St. Paul, Minnesota, the seeds of a vaccine that could prevent a common bacterial infection that affects millions of women and reduce infant deaths in low-resource countries are being carefully tended. That's where Syntiron Managing Director Lisa Herron-Olson, PhD, and her colleagues are working on developing a vaccine that targets the iron receptor proteins of Escherichia coli and Klebsiella pneumoniae, two bacterial pathogens that cause most urinary tract infections (UTIs). (Dall, 2/7)
The Wall Street Journal: Are Ultra-Processed Foods Fattening? They Are For Company Profits
There is polyglycerol polyricinoleate in Hershey bars and tripotassium phosphate in Cheerios breakfast cereal. Growing scrutiny of the peculiar ingredients in popular snack foods might be bad news for their makers. “Ultra-processed foods” are informally considered those that contain ingredients that aren’t normally found in a domestic kitchen—protein isolates or emulsifiers, for example. The term comes from a way of classifying foods, called Nova, that emerged in Brazil over a decade ago. (Ryan, 2/3)
The Washington Post: Your Plant-Based Meat Could Soon Have Animal Fat
Plant-based meats — think the Impossible Burger or Quorn “chicken” nuggets — are generally filled with a long list of strange-sounding ingredients: pea protein, potato starch, coconut oil, mycoproteins and more. Those ingredients have turned off some consumers and sparked concerns about the highly processed nature of the average veggie burger or faux slice of bacon. But now, a few start-ups are planning on adding one more component to the mix: animal fat. (Osaka and Lytton, 2/5)
The Wall Street Journal: Women In Gaza Give Birth In Tents And Public Bathrooms
Expectant mothers who make it to hospitals in Gaza rarely get the level of care they need, according to the U.N. and healthcare workers. With only 13 of the enclave’s 36 hospitals functioning, and those only partially, the facilities are short-staffed and overwhelmed by the number of war-wounded. Maternity services are low on the list of priorities for hospitals, and women in labor are often turned away, the workers and the U.N. say. (Stancati and Ayyoub, 2/6)
The Washington Post: Two Men Wanted To Start A Family. Soon, They Could Be Outlaws
The Italian government is trying to criminalize having children using surrogates abroad, a move that critics say targets same-sex couples. (Faiola and Pitrelli, 2/5)
