Morning Briefing
Summaries of health policy coverage from major news organizations
More Police Turn To Ketamine To Help Calm People Under Arrest
AP: Ketamine That's Injected During Arrests Draws New Scrutiny
Police stopped Elijah McClain on the street in suburban Denver last year after deeming the young Black man suspicious. He was thrown into a chokehold, threatened with a dog and stun gun, then subjected to another law enforcement tool before he died: a drug called ketamine. Paramedics inject it into people like McClain as a sedative, often at the behest of police who believe suspects are out of control. Officially, ketamine is used in emergencies when there’s a safety concern for medical staff or the patient. But it’s increasingly found in arrests and has become another flashpoint in the debate over law enforcement policies and brutality against people of color. (Nieberg, 8/22)
The Washington Post: Scientists Often Use Their Own Blood To Study Mosquitoes And The Diseases They Spread
Turn off the lights. Put your arms or legs on top of a cage holding hundreds of mosquitoes. Listen to news or call your mom while the critters chow down on your blood. This was researcher Sam Rund’s routine when he used a colony of Anopheles gambiae mosquitoes, a species known for infecting humans with malaria, for research on disease transmission. A staff scientist at the University of Notre Dame, Rund studies how factors such as circadian rhythms and light affect the feeding habits of different mosquito species, which is important for understanding how they spread pathogens to humans. (Landau, 8/23)
CNN: Stuttering 101: A Biological Condition No One Should Make Fun Of
Stuttering, or stammering, occurs when a person repeats or stumbles over a sound, syllable or word. Certain syllables may be repeated or prolonged, words escape in fits and starts, and can at times be accompanied by involuntary facial tics, fist clenching and rapid blinking. Many saw an example of that on the final night of the Democratic National Convention when a 13-year-old boy shared with the world the support he has gotten from the party's 2020 presidential nominee, Joe Biden. (LaMotte, 8/21)
The New York Times: What To Know About Stuttering
The basic numbers are known: About one in 10 children will exhibit some evidence of a stutter — it usually starts between ages 2 and 7 — and 90 percent of them will grow out of it before adulthood. Around 1 percent of the population carries the speech problem for much of their lives. For reasons not understood, boys are twice as likely to stutter, and nearly four times as likely to continue doing so into adulthood. And it is often anxiety that triggers bursts of verbal stumbling — which, in turn, create a flood of self-conscious stress. (Carey, 8/21)
Houston Chronicle: Clinic Hopes To Thwart Declining Breast Cancer Screenings Due To High Unemployment, Coronavirus
While the country is grappling with record levels of unemployment causing people to lose their healthcare insurance, thousands of Houston women are delaying their regularly scheduled mammograms. (Nickerson, 8/23)
AP: Paralympic Documentary: 'None Of The Bodies Look The Same'
Matt Stutzman was born without arms — just stumps at the shoulders. Ellie Cole’s right leg was amputated when she was 3, lost to cancer. Bebe Vio had parts of all four limbs amputated after she contacted meningitis as an adolescent. Doctors were able to save her life but not her arms and legs.If your mood is being dragged down by the pandemic, you’ll be uplifted by these three Paralympic athletes — and many others like them — who are profiled in the Nexflix documentary “Rising Phoenix,” which will be released in 190 countries on Wednesday. “In the Paralympic sport, everybody has a story,” Xavi Gonzalez, the former CEO of the International Paralympic Committee, says in the film. “It comes from them breaking barriers to be able to achieve what they want to achieve; move on and live life even if all of us may think that you cannot.” (Wade, 8/24)
