Morning Briefing
Summaries of health policy coverage from major news organizations
Viewpoints: Decimating US Preventive Services Task Force Would Curtail Doctors' Evidence-Based Guidance
The Washington Post: RFK Jr. May Be On The Verge Of Dismantling U.S. Preventive Health Care
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s recent takeover of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s vaccine advisory committee was alarming enough. Now the health and human services secretary is reportedly considering something with potentially even greater impact: Upending the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, the panel of independent experts that guides everything from chronic disease screenings to mental health wellness. (Leana S. Wen, 8/5)
CNN: HHS: How We’re Fixing The Organ Transplant System That Betrayed America
Organ donation can be a profound last gift of life. I think about the future my grandson will inherit, especially when it comes to something as urgent and deeply personal as organ donation or transplant. If he or someone he loves needs an organ transplant, I want him to know the system is safe, fair and worthy of his trust. (Thomas Engels, 8/3)
Stat: It’s Past Time For The U.S. To Embrace Reciprocal Drug Approval
Domperidone is an important medication used primarily to treat nausea and to stimulate a sluggish gastrointestinal tract. Clinicians consider it the “gold standard” for treating gastrointestinal symptoms in Parkinson’s patients because it has fewer side effects in them than other drugs. It even helps with breastfeeding. Sadly, in America, you can’t get your hands (or hooves) on it unless you are a quadruped. The Food and Drug Administration will only let you receive it if you are a horse suffering from fescue toxicosis, a grass fungus infection. (Jeffrey Singer and Bautista Vivanco, 8/5)
Stat: Health Care Administrators Are Overly Enthusiastic About AI
On a hot day in the summer of 1993, my academic supervisor handed me the seminal paper by David Rumelhart and Geoffrey Hinton and simply said, “Implement this!” At the time, we used programming languages like Modulo-2, Pascal, and occasionally ANSI C. But hardly anyone had heard of “backpropagation” — a learning mechanism for AI that, to this day, remains foundational for training artificial neural networks on complex tasks. (Hamid Tizhoosh, 8/5)
The CT Mirror: Grant Discontinuation Threatens CT Student Well-Being
Preserving student mental health is critical to the welfare of our state as a whole, as well as being indispensable at a personal level to individuals and communities. Worsened student mental health directly contributes to devastating acts of school violence, including school shootings, or student suicide. (Ari Shukla, 8/1)
