Morning Briefing
Summaries of health policy coverage from major news organizations
Viewpoints: Lessons On Infectious Diseases And Global Warming's Danger To Public Health; Ketamine Is A Godsend For Suicidal Patients
Los Angeles Times: As The World Warms, Deadly And Disfiguring Tropical Diseases Are Inching Their Way Toward The U.S.
Although the environmental costs of global warming may still seem distant to some Americans, there is a growing threat that many may find harder to ignore: infectious disease. As another new report, the Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change, makes clear, warming poses a great diversity of risks for human health. More and more, hot summers will increase mortality and limit our capacity for outdoor labor. Superstorms in some regions will cause flooding of sewage systems and thereby spread gastrointestinal disease, while severe droughts in other regions will increase rates of asthma. Food production will be severely reduced in many countries. Many regions will see increased risks of infection. Although environmental destruction may not scare us in an immediate way, infectious diseases very well could. (Fred Cohan and Isaac Klimasmith, 11/30)
The New York Times: Can We Stop Suicides?
The suicide rate has been rising in the United States since the beginning of the century, and is now the 10th leading cause of death, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. ...The trend most likely has social causes — lack of access to mental health care, economic stress, loneliness and despair, the opioid epidemic, and the unique difficulties facing small-town America. These are serious problems that need long-term solutions. But in the meantime, the field of psychiatry desperately needs new treatment options for patients who show up with a stomach full of pills. Now, scientists think that they may have found one — an old anesthetic called ketamine that, at low doses, can halt suicidal thoughts almost immediately. (Moises Velasquez-Manoff, 11/30)
USA Today: With More Stressors And Less Support, Doctors Are Stalked By Suicide
Many colleagues in health care drive themselves beyond exhaustion and into depression, putting them at increased risk of suicide. Celebrity suicides sparked a national conversation about the complex causes that put people at risk. Meanwhile, health care is undergoing an all-but-silent epidemic: physician suicides. An estimated 300-400 physicians in the United States take their own lives each year. Suicides among male physicians are 40 percent higher than the general population, and among female physicians a staggering 130 percent higher. (Edward M. Ellison, 11/30)
The Hill: Government Dietary Guidelines Are Plain Wrong: Avoid Carbs, Not Fat
The latest edition — released in 2015 — continues this theme. It recommends people eat relatively large servings of grains, including three to five servings of refined grains daily. And it lumps fats in with sugars as "empty calories." It advises Americans to limit their saturated fat intake to just 10 percent of daily calories — without presenting evidence to support this figure. This guideline advice contradicts modern nutrition science which shows that fats, including saturated fats, aren't unhealthy. A dozen major literature reviews demonstrate that fat intake has little to no effect on death from cardiovascular disease. (Sarah Hallberg, 11/29)
The Wall Street Journal: Lettuce Try Not To Panic
The way the CDC identifies a food-safety outbreak is by interviewing sick people and healthy people. If there is a big difference in their answers, the CDC zeroes in on a cause. There are 43 people known to be infected with the outbreak strain of E. coli 0157:H7. The CDC interviewed 25 of them. Eighty-eight percent of those 25 people, as opposed to 47% of the general population, said they ate romaine lettuce in the week before they got sick. So it probably was romaine that got those people sick—16 severely enough to be hospitalized. But what rational people should do with this information is much less certain. (Jim Prevor, 11/29)
Los Angeles Times: Take A Holiday From Your Cellphone
As the whirlwind of the holidays descends, you may find yourself wishing that you could slow down time. Here’s the thing: You can.You just need to put down your cellphone. I first discovered this myself a few years ago when, as an experiment, my husband and I took a 24-hour break from all our screens starting at sundown Friday. Saturday morning we accomplished more by 11 a.m. than we’d normally get done in an entire day. We cooked. We talked. We cleaned. We read. I practiced guitar. We played with our daughter. I felt like I’d unlocked a time-stretching superpower that I hadn’t known I possessed. (Catherine Price, 11/30)
The New York Times: Trump’s New Wall To Keep Out The Disabled
At the signing ceremony for the 1990 Americans With Disabilities Act, President George Bush observed that the legislation had much in common with the fall of the Berlin Wall the year prior. The new law “takes a sledgehammer to another wall,” Bush remarked, “one which has for too many generations separated Americans with disabilities from the freedom they could glimpse, but not grasp.” Our current president, infamous for mocking Americans with disabilities and unraveling the social safety net, plans to rebuild that wall, putting America’s promise of freedom again further out of reach for people with disabilities. (Elena Hung and Katherine Perez, 11/29)
The New York Times: How Twitter’s Ban On ‘Deadnaming’ Promotes Free Speech
As a transgender woman, I find it degrading to be constantly reminded that I am trans and that large segments of the population will forever see me as a delusional freak. Things like deadnaming, or purposely referring to a trans person by their former name, and misgendering — calling someone by a pronoun they don’t use — are used to express disagreement with the legitimacy of trans lives and identities. Defenders of these practices claim that they’re doing this not out of malice but out of honesty and, perhaps, even a twisted sort of love. ...If we want more and better speech on this topic, even among trans critics, Twitter’s policy gives us the framework we need to reset our thinking. To date, we’ve put semantics over substance. (Parker Molloy, 11/29)
Harvard Business Review: How A U.S. Health Care System Uses 15-Minute Huddles To Keep 23 Hospitals Aligned
A core challenge of management is to ensure that the organization’s priorities, strategies, and metrics are consistently embraced and that any impediments are identified and addressed quickly. At Salt Lake City-based Intermountain Healthcare, ensuring the alignment of all these things to provide extraordinary care requires a constant regimented focus across our 23 hospitals, 170 clinics, and 850,000-member health insurance plan. To achieve that, we have implemented a model of daily huddles on an extensive scale. In this article, I’d like to share the insights we’ve gleaned from the model’s first full year of operation, which hopefully organizations in health care and many other industries will find useful. (Marc Harrison, 11/29)
San Jose Mercury News: How California Can Model Caring For The Mentally Ill
Too few individuals with a mental health issue get the care they need. Consider that in 2016 only one in 10 people needing substance use treatment were able to gain access to a specialty facility. California’s health care system — like the rest of the country — remains fragmented, with mental health being seen as a separate and distinct element from physical care. (Norris and Miller, 11/29)
