Morning Briefing
Summaries of health policy coverage from major news organizations
Longer Looks: Nullifying Pain, Zika, Anti-Abortion Activists
Fresh Air: How Meditation, Placebos And Virtual Reality Help Power 'Mind Over Body'
While researching the book Cure, science writer Jo Marchant wanted to understand how distraction could be used to nullify pain, so she participated in a virtual reality experiment. Podcast. (1/26)
Vox: Zika Virus, Explained In 6 Charts And Maps
On January 15, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued a first-of-its-kind travel alert: American women of childbearing age, whether pregnant or not, were told to avoid countries where the Zika virus has been circulating. At the same time, women in countries that already have Zika outbreaks have been told to avoid getting pregnant. That's because Zika, a tropical disease carried from person to person by mosquitoes, has been linked to birth defects and deaths in newborns in Brazil. (Julia Belluz, Javier Zarracina and Matt Moore, 1/25)
FiveThirtyEight: What Do Anti-Abortion Demonstrators Want (Besides An End To Abortion)?
Last Friday, Washington, D.C.’s blizzard began sometime after the anti-abortion March for Life began, but before protesters reached the Supreme Court. The snow couldn’t stop a Franciscan friar, though. He kept on walking, barefoot, down the streets, singing hymns with other marchers. A long column of students, all in yellow, chanted a few choruses of “Pro-choice, that’s a lie! Babies never choose to die!” and then started up a call-and-response rosary with a bullhorn. (Leah Libresco, 1/25)
The New Yorker: Baby Doe
The overwhelming majority of children who die from abuse or neglect are under the age of four; roughly half are less than a year old. In September, 2015, the New England Center for Investigative Reporting, a “Spotlight”-style nonprofit, released a story called “Out of the Shadows: Shining Light on State Failures to Learn from Rising Child Abuse and Neglect Deaths,” reporting that a hundred and ten Massachusetts children died between 2009 and 2013 in circumstances suggesting abuse or neglect, and that a third of them had been under the care of the D.C.F. (Jill Lepore, 1/24)
The Atlantic: My Experience With Lymphoma
Until the end of 2014 I thought that I was a healthy 66-year-old: normal blood pressure, not overweight, no prescription medications. I worked out at the gym regularly, and had missed hardly a day of work in over 35 years of teaching at Harvard. I loved my work and was obsessed, probably too obsessed, with it. (Steven Kelman, 1/23)
Pacific Standard: The Medicaid Coverage Gap Persists
While middle-class Americans without employer-provided health care have enjoyed significant improvements in health care since the ACA's implementation, the 2.9 million poor Americans in the Medicaid coverage gap have been left behind and continue to have limited access to the health and economic benefits conferred by health insurance coverage. (Dwyer Gunn, 1/26)
