Morning Briefing
Summaries of health policy coverage from major news organizations
Viewpoints: The Opioid Epidemic Needs Presidential Focus; Drinking Water Shouldn't Be Dangerous
Salon: Despite All His Promises, Trump Has Done Nothing About The Devastating Opioid Epidemic
Lost in the morass of the Trump presidency is the country’s opioid epidemic. With the administration now fully embroiled in its mounting self-created crises, the public health calamity is unlikely to find space within the president’s tweets. Given the Republican plans to savage Obamacare — now at least temporarily defeated — the crisis only promises to fester. The numbers emerging from the epidemic are grim. According to the American Society of Addiction Medicine, drug overdose is the leading cause of accidental death in the United States, with opioid addiction contributing greatly to these figures. Further, drug overdoses are now the leading cause of death for Americans under 50. (Jalal Baig, 7/30)
Mother Jones: Simply Drinking Water Shouldn’t Be This Dangerous
Health officials in a major American city downplayed dangers of lead contamination in water even as officials connected to the Flint, Michigan, crisis faced a criminal investigation, according to a report obtained by the Guardian. (Jessica Glenza, 7/30)
The New York Times: If Americans Love Moms, Why Do We Let Them Die?
We love mothers, or at least we say we do, and we claim that motherhood is as American as apple pie. We’re lying. In fact, we’ve structured health care so that motherhood is far more deadly in the United States than in other advanced countries. An American woman is about five times as likely to die in pregnancy or childbirth as a British woman — partly because Britain makes a determined effort to save mothers’ lives, and we don’t. (Nicholas Kristof, 7/29)
Cleveland Plain Dealer: Social Factors Contribute To Infant Mortality
The release of a three-year strategic plan by First Year Cleveland, a city-county collaborative to reduce the high infant mortality rate in Cleveland, brings new focus to the issue. Although fewer infants died In Cuyahoga County in 2016 than in 2015, the infant mortality rate of 8.6 deaths per 1,000 births is still one-third higher than the national average. (Joseph Ahern, 7/30)
STAT: A Midwife Is Changing How Women Give Birth In Mexico, One Baby At A Time
Helping women avoid unnecessary caesarean sections is work I am proud to do. By observing women in labor and listening to them, I grow more and more convinced that empowering women to have natural births is best for both mother and baby. (Carolina Menchu and Alice Proujansky, 7/31)
Boston Globe: When Babies Felt No Pain
Physicians have good reasons to suspect their patients’ self-reports of pain, especially in the midst of an opioid crisis fueled by rampant over-prescription of pain-killers. But more often, humans misunderstand others’ pain because of inaccurate preconceived ideas about what pain responses look like. (Linda Rodriguez McRobbie, 7/29)
St. Louis Post-Dispatch: Gov. Eric Greitens Sets Up Expensive Legal Showdown Over New Abortion Law
Asserting the absurd claim of protecting women’s health and safety, Gov. Eric Greitens approved a law last week tightening abortion regulations. An expensive legal showdown is almost certain to follow, all so the governor can burnish his political credentials at taxpayers’ expense. The Supreme Court has struck down similar laws in other states, saying abortions are medically safe and criticizing such laws as a ruse to chip away at access to legal abortions. (7/29)
Lexington Herald Leader: Shoddy Research, Deadly Results
China recently announced that research fraud may be considered a capital crime, punishable by death, when it leads to approval of dangerous drugs that result in the deaths of patients. This news was all but dismissed by journal editors on medical listserves as a sign of an oppressive totalitarian regime. But is it unethical for any government institution to recommend the death penalty for someone who knowingly, for profit or job advancement, promotes a gambit which needlessly results in fatalities, sometimes in the thousands? (Kevin Kavanagh, 7/29)
Chicago Sun-Times: As CTE Rocks Football, I’m Donating My Brain To Science
So it wasn’t a great leap to pledge even that ultimate thing that makes me human — my brain — to researchers at the Concussion Legacy Foundation in Boston. That is the organization that took the earliest data — some from independent pathologist Bennet Omalu, who examined deceased Hall of Fame center Mike Webster’s brain and found it terribly riddled with the disease now known as chronic traumatic encephalopathy — and has led the way in football-concussion research. (Rick Telander, 7/31)
