Morning Briefing
Summaries of health policy coverage from major news organizations
Snapchat Tries To Limit Kids Buying Drugs Through Its App
NBC News: Snapchat Makes It Harder For Kids To Buy Drugs
Snapchat’s parent company announced Tuesday that it was taking more steps to curb drug dealing on the app, including making it harder for users to find the accounts of minors under age 17. It is making the change as drug overdoses are spiking across the U.S., partly because of the proliferation of the potent opioid fentanyl. An NBC News investigation published in October found that Snapchat was linked to the sale of fentanyl-laced pills that killed teenagers and young adults in over a dozen states. (Matsakis and Snow, 1/18)
Axios: Snapchat Making It Harder For Strangers To Find Users Under 18
Snapchat is adding a new safeguard meant to ensure that young users only connect with people on the social network that they know in real life. How it works: Snapchat is changing its "Quick Add" friends suggestion so that it is impossible to add users under 18 unless there are a certain number of friends in common, a spokesperson told Axios. (Fischer, 1/18)
In other public health news —
Bloomberg: Airlines Step Up Plane Hygiene And Safety Measures To Keep Covid Out
These days, hygiene is the most important factor in choosing a travel company for almost 60% of Americans, according to a survey by aerospace products manufacturer Honeywell International Inc. That tracks with International Air Transport Association data showing that passengers worry about boarding planes, with 42% of them uncomfortable using lavatories and more than a third concerned about breathing recirculated cabin air. “We know that our customers are more conscious than ever about hygiene,” says Anil Jain, engineering chief at Air India Express, which has introduced robots to clean its planes. “We need to be proactive.” (Ha and Park, 1/19)
Stat: What Types Of Mental Health Apps Work? New Study Examines The Evidence
Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have spent years making sure that their meditation app, called the Healthy Minds Program, passes clinical muster and delivers positive outcomes. Designing studies to test the app’s efficacy led Simon Goldberg, an assistant professor at UW, to confront the mountain of thousands of studies of different mobile mental health tools, including apps, text-message based support, and other interventions. Researchers had taken the time to synthesize some of the studies, but it was hard, even for someone steeped in the science like Goldberg, to draw definitive conclusions about what works and what doesn’t. So Goldberg teamed up with a few other researchers and took a step back to see if they could put order to the work collected in these meta-analyses — a kind of deep meditation on the existing research inspired by UW’s meditation app. (Aguilar, 1/19)
