Morning Briefing
Summaries of health policy coverage from major news organizations
Viewpoints: Polio Is Back, Thanks To Low Vaccination Rates; We Are Failing To Control Monkeypox
CNN: How A Virus Seemingly Returned From The Dead
Polio is a vaccine preventable disease and these latest developments should be a warning to us all. Unfortunately, places like Rockland County have an incredibly low polio vaccination rate; 60.5% of two-year-olds are vaccinated compared with the statewide average of 79.1%. (Syra Madad, 8/15)
The Boston Globe: The US Response To Monkeypox Has Not Worked. Here’s How To Fix It.
Surprisingly, public health officials and political leaders have responded to monkeypox by repeating nearly every mistake they made in 2020 with COVID-19: limited access to testing, inefficient management of vaccines, administrative roadblocks to accessing treatment, and poor communication with the public. (Sean Cahill and Kenneth H. Mayer, 8/15)
USA Today: WHO And World Leaders: How We're Building Better, More Equitable Vaccine Systems
Inequity has plagued the responses to harmful pathogens. Take COVID-19: An unprecedented 12.45 billion vaccine doses have been administered worldwide in the last 18 months, helping many countries turn the tide on the pandemic. Yet three-quarters of people in Africa have not received one dose. As long as this gap exists, we can’t protect the world against new virus variants and end the acute stage of this pandemic. (Paul Kagame, Emmanuel Macron, Cyril Ramaphosa, Macky Sall, Olaf Scholz and Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, 8/16)
Modern Healthcare: Health Systems Can Use Their ‘Unique Voice’ To Lead Conversations On Social Determinants
Plenty of conversations are underway in the healthcare industry’s boardrooms and executive offices about issues that have been brought into sharper focus and the opportunities to do better. Social determinants of health—understanding them, coming to grips with decades of miscommunication and prejudice about them, and addressing them—are certainly high on the list of topics to tackle. (Mary Ellen Podmolik, 8/16)
Stat: FDA's Office Of Neuroscience Isn't Helping People With ALS
Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), as I have unfortunately come to learn, is a terrible disease with no cure. Some exciting treatments are on the horizon, but the Food and Drug Administration’s Office of Neuroscience, which has the task of overseeing the development of new ALS drugs in the U.S., has repeatedly failed to take aggressive steps to greenlight these experimental therapies. (William G. Woods, 8/16)
The New York Times: I’m Going Blind. This Is What I Want You To See.
Ms. Shortt has retinitis pigmentosa, a disease that causes progressive loss of sight. She can see some things some of the time, depending on various factors, including the amount of ambient light, her distance from the object and the object’s location in her field of vision. (James Robinson, 8/16)
