Longer Looks: Interesting Reads You Might Have Missed

ProPublica: Kidney Failure, Emergency Rooms And Medical Debt. The Unseen Costs Of Food Poisoning
On a cloudy day in November 2019, family and friends gathered in Austin, Texas, to mourn the passing of Lovey Jean Carter. Carter, who had heart trouble and other ailments, had died at 67.After the burial, many of the mourners returned to Rising Star Baptist Church to share a meal. The brisket was home cooked, but everything else — rotisserie chicken, potato salad and fried chicken — was bought ready to eat from local grocery stores. One of Carter’s brothers, James Monroe, had picked up 15 rotisserie chickens ordered from the Sam’s Club on the south end of Austin. It was all simple. And it was all supposed to be safe. (Jameel, 1/19)

ProPublica: How A Powerful Company Convinced Georgia To Let It Bury Toxic Waste In Groundwater 
For the past several years, Georgia Power has gone to great lengths to skirt the federal rule requiring coal-fired power plants to safely dispose of massive amounts of toxic waste they produced. But previously unreported documents obtained by ProPublica show that the company’s efforts were more extensive than publicly known. Thousands of pages of internal government correspondence and corporate filings show how Georgia Power made an elaborate argument as to why it should be allowed to store waste produced before 2020 in a way that wouldn’t fully protect surrounding communities’ water supplies from contamination — and that would save the company potentially billions of dollars in cleanup costs. (Blau, 1/18)

The New York Times: When Dementia Strikes At An Early Age 
Many people aren’t overly concerned when an octogenarian occasionally forgets the best route to a favorite store, can’t remember a friend’s name or dents the car while trying to parallel park on a crowded city street. Even healthy brains work less efficiently with age, and memory, sensory perceptions and physical abilities become less reliable. But what if the person is not in their 80s but in their 30s, 40s or 50s and forgets the way home from their own street corner? That’s far more concerning. (Brody, 1/17)

The New York Times: Menstruation Gets a Gen Z Makeover
When Sapna Palep was younger, she was mortified by conversations about menstruation. “It was like, ‘Let’s not talk about this, I need to leave the room,’” said the 43-year-old mother of two. The mere mention of periods evoked “pure embarrassment and fear.”Ms. Palep’s 9-year-old daughter, Aviana Campello-Palep, in contrast, approaches the topic with zero self-consciousness or hesitation. “When my friends talk about getting their period, they just talk about it,” Aviana said. “It’s just normal in a girl’s life.” (Makhijani, 1/20)

The Washington Post: Zinc Helps Fight Infections, But Many People Are Deficient In This Vital Mineral 
Walk down the cold-remedy aisle of a pharmacy and you’ll see a shelf full of zinc supplements. Clearly, people must be worried that they’re not getting enough zinc, a nutrient often touted for its ability to quash the common cold and other respiratory illnesses. But do many of us really need more zinc? And if so, what good does it do? As researchers learn more about how our bodies use zinc, they’re finding that the element plays a surprisingly key role, particularly within the immune system. (Kwon, 1/16)

The New York Times: Is It Better to Exercise in the Morning or Evening?
Morning exercise has very different effects on metabolism than the same workout later in the day, according to an ambitious new animal study of exercise timing. The study, which involved healthy lab mice jogging on tiny treadmills, mapped hundreds of disparities in the numbers and activities of molecules and genes throughout the rodents’ bodies, depending on whether they ran first thing in the morning or deeper in the evening. (Reynolds, 1/19)

The Washington Post: What An Interventional Radiologist Does In A Workday 
A kyphoplasty, a working lunch and a thankful patient are all part of a typical workday for this vascular and interventional radiologist. (Baheti, 1/18)

In covid news —

The Washington Post: Life, Death And ‘Hugs And Prayers’: A Story Of Covid In Rural Michigan 
The conversation at the card table inside the Lewiston 50 Plus Club turned one recent afternoon to the coronavirus pandemic, as it had so many times the past two years.Just days earlier, the club’s president — and one of its most devoted euchre players, Danny Burtch — died of covid-19 after a weeks-long bout with the virus. Burtch was the 40th person claimed by covid-19 in sparsely populated Montmorency County, in the backwoods of northern Michigan. The grief has hit particularly hard at the 50 Plus Club, knocked down in so many ways during the pandemic. Members falling ill. Shutdowns causing the club to shutter. Staff run ragged keeping the center safe for the vulnerable people who congregate inside its walls. (Ruble, 1/18)

The New York Times: How The MRNA Vaccines Were Made: Halting Progress And Happy Accidents 
Thousands of miles from Dr. Barney Graham’s lab in Bethesda, Md., a frightening new coronavirus had jumped from camels to humans in the Middle East, killing one out of every three people infected. An expert on the world’s most intractable viruses, Dr. Graham had been working for months to develop a vaccine, but had gotten nowhere. Now he was terrified that the virus, Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, or MERS, had infected one of his lab’s own scientists, who was sick with a fever and a cough in the fall of 2013 after a pilgrimage to the holy city of Mecca. A nose swab came back positive for a coronavirus, seeming to confirm Dr. Graham’s worst fears, only for a second test to deliver relief. It was a mild coronavirus, causing a common cold, not MERS. (Kolata and Mueller, 1/15)

The Atlantic: The Silent, Vaccinated, Impatient Majority
For all of the attention that has been paid to the growing political cleavage between the jabbed and the jabless, getting vaccinated is extremely popular in countries where vaccines are widely available. Countries such as the United Arab Emirates, Spain, and Canada have vaccination rates as high as 94 percent, 81 percent, and 79 percent, respectively, without blanket vaccine mandates. To put this popularity into perspective: More Britons have gotten vaccinated (47 million) than watched the Euro 2020 final between England and Italy (31 million). In the United States, being vaccinated is more common than drinking coffee, owning a television, or even watching the Super Bowl. (Serhan, 1/17)