Longer Looks: Interesting Reads You Might Have Missed

ProPublica: A Crisis Of Undiagnosed Cancers Is Emerging In The Pandemic’s Second Year 
In the shadows of COVID-19, another crisis has emerged. With the pandemic in its second year and hope intermittently arriving along with vaccine vials, it’s as if a violent flood has begun to recede, exposing the wreckage left in its wake. Amid the damage is an untold number of cancers that went undiagnosed or untreated as patients postponed annual screenings, and as cancer clinics and hospitals suspended biopsies and chemotherapy and radiation treatments. (Eldeib and Gallardo, 5/4)

The Washington Post: The Worst Coronavirus Predictions 
An emerging target is a difficult one to hit. When something like the coronavirus comes on the scene, there’s plenty of (hopefully informed) guesswork involved. We saw that repeatedly in the early days of the pandemic, with some health officials downplaying the threat, warning people against using masks and generally giving advice that, even within a few months, became rather dated. But while some have criticized such comments and used them to question the advice of officials such as top federal infectious-disease expert Anthony S. Fauci, most of the worst punditry on this issue came later on, after the gravity of the situation became clear to those officials. (Blake, 5/4)

NBC News: Once A Covid Hotspot, Italian Village Now Intrigues Researchers With 'Super-Immune' Cases
Paola Bezzon thought her sniffles in December were just a seasonal cold until a serology test months later found coronavirus antibodies in her blood. And not just normal levels of antibodies. Researchers say she is "super-immune" — a person whose body seems to make more antibodies than normal. "I don't know why I have all these antibodies, but they are such a lifeline for me," she said. "They make me feel safe even though I haven't had the vaccine yet." (Vitalone, 4/29)

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PBS NewsHour: Biden’s Infrastructure Plan Targets Lead Pipes That Threaten Public Health Across The U.S.
President Joe Biden’s infrastructure plan includes a proposal to upgrade the U.S. drinking water distribution system by removing and replacing dangerous lead pipes. As a geochemist and environmental health researcher who has studied the heartbreaking impacts of lead poisoning in children for decades, I am happy to see due attention paid to this silent killer, which disproportionately affects poor communities of color. Biden’s proposal includes US$45 billion to eliminate all lead pipes and service lines nationwide. The funding would go to programs administered by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. (Filippelli, 5/4)

USA Today: Embryo Research: 14-Day Rule Under Review, Raising Ethical Questions
For more than 30 years, scientists have followed a rule they imposed on themselves to avoid growing a human embryo in a lab dish for more than 14 days. Until recently, the "14-day rule" was largely academic. Scientists couldn't grow them for that long if they wanted to. But in 2016, two teams of researchers reached 12 days, and in 2019, another group grew monkey embryos for 19 days. These advances have spurred some scientists to argue in two recent papers that the 14-day rule should be modified or dropped. There's a lot to be learned by pushing embryos out to 28 days, they say. (Weintraub, 5/2)

The Washington Post: Book Review: A Blow-By-Blow History Of The Obamacare Wars
President Barack Obama had just been inaugurated when he began gathering aides in the White House’s Roosevelt Room for conversations about whether to try for health-care reform right away. On one of those winter days in 2009, his vice president, Joe Biden, unleashed what one person in the room called a tirade against giving immediate priority to health care. This treacherous policy terrain had been undermining presidencies for decades, Biden argued, and Obama shouldn’t jeopardize his time in office so soon.The scene, less than a paragraph long, is one of the most intriguing in “The Ten Year War,” an account by journalist Jonathan Cohn of the forces that gave birth to the Affordable Care Act and the forces that have tried to get rid of the law ever since. It is a striking image and not well known: the new second-in-command talking down the idea of attempting the very health-care changes that would, barely a decade later, become a central tenet of his own successful presidential campaign. (Goldstein, 4/30)

Miami Herald: Parents Want Justice For Birth Injuries. Hospitals Want To Strip Them Of The Right To Make That Decision
Ashley Lamendola was still a teen when medical staff at St. Petersburg General Hospital delivered the awful news that would change her life forever: Her newborn son, Hunter, had suffered profound brain damage and would do little more than breathe without help. “It was like an atomic bomb went off in my life,” she said. Lamendola believed the hospital was partly responsible for Hunter’s birth injuries. But Florida is one of two states that shield doctors and hospitals from most legal actions arising from births that go catastrophically wrong. Lamendola filed a lawsuit against St. Petersburg General anyway, and when it appeared she was gaining traction, the hospital advanced an extraordinary argument. (Marbin Miller and Chang, 4/29)

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The New York Times: Operating Rooms Go Under The Knife 
If you ask Dr. Scott T. Reeves, operating rooms resemble an airplane cockpit. There is sophisticated equipment, tight spaces, blinking lights and a cacophony of sound. On top of that, “they’re often cluttered, people can trip, surgeons and nurses can stick themselves with needles, and side infections from dust and other contaminations are a growing problem,” said Dr. Reeves, chair of the department of anesthesia and perioperative medicine at the Medical University of South Carolina. (Rosen, 5/5)

The New York Times: The Robot Surgeon Will See You Now 
Sitting on a stool several feet from a long-armed robot, Dr. Danyal Fer wrapped his fingers around two metal handles near his chest. As he moved the handles — up and down, left and right — the robot mimicked each small motion with its own two arms. Then, when he pinched his thumb and forefinger together, one of the robot’s tiny claws did much the same. This is how surgeons like Dr. Fer have long used robots when operating on patients. They can remove a prostate from a patient while sitting at a computer console across the room. (Metz, 4/30)

The New York Times: How To Forget Something 
Memory relies on what cognitive scientists call retrieval cues. Say you’re trying not to think about a painful breakup, but then the same type of blue Prius your ex drove pulls up next to you at a red light. Memories flood in. If you’re trying to forget something, become attuned to that memory’s retrieval cues so you can reshape the way your brain responds to them. You can try to avoid such triggers, but that strategy rarely works. A Vietnam War veteran might take care to shun anything reminiscent of warfare and still get yanked back into combat imagery while trying to order dinner at a restaurant. “How could you anticipate that a bamboo place mat would remind you of war?” says Michael Anderson, a professor of cognitive neuroscience at the University of Cambridge who studies memory. (Wollan, 5/4)

The New York Times: The Biology Of Grief 
In 1987, when my 18-year-old son was killed in a train accident, a chaplain and two detectives came to my house to notify me. I didn’t cry then, but a wall came down in my mind and I could do nothing except be polite and make the necessary decisions. When friends and relatives showed up, I was still polite, but the wall had now become an infinite darkness and I was obviously in shock, so they took over, helping me to eat and notify people and write death notices. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the more than 565,000 people who have died from Covid-19 in the United States. Each of them has left, on average, nine people grieving. That’s more than five million people going through the long process of grief. (Finkbeiner, 4/22)

The Washington Post: Why BMI Is A Flawed Health Standard, Especially For People Of Color
BMI has long been controversial among obesity experts, dietitians and the public. Many experts debate its effectiveness for people of all races and ethnicities — and criticize how it has become overinterpreted as a catchall proxy for body fat, nutritional status and health risk. (Stern, 5/5)

The New York Times: Psychiatry Confronts Its Racist Past, And Tries To Make Amends 
Dr. Benjamin Rush, the 18th-century doctor who is often called the “father” of American psychiatry, held the racist belief that Black skin was the result of a mild form of leprosy. He called the condition “negritude.” His onetime apprentice, Dr. Samuel Cartwright, spread the falsehood throughout the antebellum South that enslaved people who experienced an unyielding desire to be free were in the grip of a mental illness he called “drapetomania,” or “the disease causing Negroes to run away.” (Warner, 4/30)

The New York Times: Researchers Discover A Pregnant Egyptian Mummy 
An Egyptian mummy that for decades was thought to be a male priest was recently discovered to have been a pregnant woman, making it the first known case of its kind, scientists said. Scientists in Poland made the discovery while conducting a comprehensive study, which started in 2015, of more than 40 mummies at the National Museum in Warsaw, said Wojciech Ejsmond, an archaeologist and a director of the Warsaw Mummy Project, which led the research. (Waller, 5/2)