Morning Briefing
Summaries of health policy coverage from major news organizations
Longer Looks: New Stroke Drugs' Risk; Buffett's IUD Efforts; Adding Taste To Healthy Eating
The Milwaukee Sentinel-Journal: Risk/Reward: New Anticoagulant Drugs Provide Stroke Prevention With Dose Of Danger
Since 2010, at least 8,000 deaths have been linked to ... [three] new anticoagulant drugs, compared to 700 for warfarin, a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel/MedPage Today investigation found. By contrast, last year warfarin accounted for roughly three times as many prescriptions. While the three drugs accounted for less than 10% of all anticoagulant prescriptions, they are linked to more than 90% of deaths reported to the FDA since 2010, the analysis found. The numbers are drawn from the agency's adverse events reporting system, which is largely voluntary. (Part one of a three-part series.) (John Fauber and Coulter Jones, 8/1)
Bloomberg Businessweek: Warren Buffett’s Family Secretly Funded A Birth Control Revolution
Named for [Warren] Buffett’s first wife, the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation is the third-largest family foundation in the country, behind only the Bill & Melinda Gates and Ford foundations. In 2013, the most recent year for which tax filings are available, it gave away almost half a billion dollars, largely to organizations dedicated to reproductive health. It barely maintains a website, studiously avoids press, and has about 20 people on staff. ... In the past decade, the Buffett Foundation has become, by far, the most influential supporter of research on IUDs and expanding access to the contraceptive. (Karen Weise, 7/30)
Vox: Defund Planned Parenthood Vote Fails In Senate
The abortion-defunding fight wasn’t always waged this way. In fact, Republicans used to have a more ambitious line of attack, one that aimed to take on all providers of the procedure. But since 2011, they’ve shifted strategy. Instead of focusing on a hazy notion of abortion providers, they created a clear enemy in Planned Parenthood. The chief outcome of this strategy was success in states, where local legislators have followed up and voted to defund Planned Parenthood. At the same time, anti-abortion outside groups have kept up the same cause, focusing on the nonprofit as a prime target in the fight to end abortion. (Sarah Kliff, 8/2)
NPR: No Shame, No Euphemism: Suicide Isn’t A Natural Cause Of Death
Beware the mention of natural causes, as in my mother's obituary: "Norita Wyse Berman, a writer, stockbroker and artist ... died at home Friday of natural causes. She was 60." Sixty-year-olds don't die of natural causes anymore. The truth was too hard to admit. Fifteen years on, I'm ashamed of my family's shame. Those attending her funeral and paying shiva calls knew the truth anyway. People talk. (John Henning Schumann, 8/1)
The Atlantic: Coping With Bad News
Nancy Hutton, an associate professor at the medical school of Johns Hopkins University, has one of the hardest jobs in medicine: She specializes in pediatric hospice and palliative care. She sees the sickest children—the ones with severe neurological problems that cause profound developmental delays, or with cancers slowly ravaging their bodies, or severe organ failures. … Sometimes her job is to keep her patients comfortable: helping them keep food down without vomiting or easing their physical pain. But other times, the child is dying. In those cases, it falls on Hutton to counsel the family. She has years of experience, but the weight of it all can be too much even for her. (Olga Khazan, 8/3)
Vox: The Dorito Effect: Healthy Food Is Blander Than Ever – And It’s Making Us Fat
We talk a lot these days about the impact Big Food has had on our collective waistline: too much salt, sugar, and fat. Rarely, however, do we talk about the corollary of this: that at the same time food companies mastered the art of engineering flavors to make things like soda and chips irresistible, "real foods" like meats and produce have become increasingly bland. Journalist Mark Schatzker tracks the unfortunate parallel rise of these events in his fascinating new book, The Dorito Effect. He makes the case that the conversation about obesity is missing any discussion of flavor. (Julia Belluz, 7/30)
The Atlantic: Why Depression Needs A New Definition
In his Aphorisms, Hippocrates defined melancholia, an early understanding of depression, as a state of “fears and despondencies, if they last a long time.” It was caused, he believed, by an excess of bile in the body (the word “melancholia” is ancient Greek for “black bile”). Ever since then, doctors have struggled to create a more precise and accurate definition of the illness that still isn’t well understood. (Jenny Chen, 8/4)
