Morning Briefing
Summaries of health policy coverage from major news organizations
Longer Looks: The Trauma Of Family Separation; Nutrition Science; And Hiding Mental Illness
Vox: Family Separation At The Border: The Psychological Impact Is Well-Documented
The thought of being separated from one’s child is horrifying to any parent. But it pales in comparison to the potential for lifelong harm that forcible family separation will produce for the children subjected to it. (Dylan Gee, 6/20)
The New York Times: Should Statutes Of Limitations For Rape Be Abolished?
Around 1 a.m. on a Saturday in 1993, a man sneaked into Donna and John Palomba’s house in Waterbury, Conn. John was away for a long weekend, and Donna and her two young children were asleep when she awoke to the sound of heavy footsteps. She remembers seeing a masked man and screaming. An instant later, he was on her, threatening to hurt her if she didn’t comply. He covered her head with a pillowcase, wrapped nylon stockings around her mouth and eyes, bound her hands behind her back, cut open her underpants and raped her. Right before he fled, she recalls him saying: “If you call the pigs, I’ll come back and kill you.” (Ruth Padawer, 6/19)
Wired: The Collapse Of A $40 Million Nutrition Science Crusade
NuSI (pronounced new-see) launched in September 2012 with much fanfare, including in the pages of WIRED. It quickly raised more than $40 million from big-name donors to facilitate expensive, high-risk studies intended to illuminate the root causes of obesity. [Gary] Taubes and his cofounder, physician-researcher Peter Attia, contended that nutritional science was so inconsistent because it was so expensive to do right. With a goal of raising an additional $190 million, they wanted to fund science that would help cut the prevalence of obesity in the US by more than half—and diabetes by 75 percent—by 2025. Rehabilitating the entire field of nutrition research was always a long shot. But six years in, NuSI is nowhere near achieving its lofty ambitions. In fact, the once-flush organization is broke, president-less, and all but gone. (Megan Molteni, 6/18)
Vox: Hiding My Mental Illness From My Asian Family Almost Killed Me
For the first 27 years of my life, I kept my deteriorating mental health under lock and key for one straightforward reason: I was scared of embarrassing my mother. I believed I would be seen as broken or defective and bring shame on my family. (Amanda Rosenberg, 6/18)
The New York Times: The Search For Cancer Treatment That Is Personal And Useful
On my way to a meeting on cancer and personalized medicine a few weeks ago, I found myself thinking, improbably, of the Saul Steinberg New Yorker cover illustration “View From Ninth Avenue.” Steinberg’s drawing (yes, you’ve seen it — in undergraduate dorm rooms, in subway ads) depicts a mental map of the world viewed through the eyes of a typical New Yorker. We’re somewhere on Ninth Avenue, looking out toward the water. Tenth Avenue looms large, thrumming with pedestrians and traffic. The Hudson is a band of gray-blue. But the rest of the world is gone — irrelevant, inconsequential, specks of sesame falling off a bagel. Kansas City, Chicago, Las Vegas and Los Angeles are blips on the horizon. There’s a strip of water denoting the Pacific Ocean, and faraway blobs of rising land: Japan, China, Russia. The whole thing is a wry joke on self-obsession and navel gazing: A New Yorker’s world begins and ends in New York. (Mukherjee, 6/13)
