VANCOUVER, Wash. — Amber Gorrow is afraid to leave her house with her infant son because she lives at the epicenter of Washington state’s worst measles outbreak in more than two decades. Born eight weeks ago, Leon is too young to get his first measles shot, putting him at risk for the highly contagious respiratory virus, which can be fatal in small children.
Tag: public health
📑 Read Write Respond #037 | Read Write Collect | Aaron Davis
Aaron Davis (Read Write Collect)This a harrowing story made even sadder by the grim reality of the statistics. ❧
I’m almost losing count of how many racial health disparity stories I’ve been seeing lately. It’s so common I’ve got tags for it on my site now.
https://boffosocko.com/2019/01/09/i-was-pregnant-and-in-crisis-all-the-doctors-and-nurses-saw-was-an-incompetent-black-woman-time/
👓 Stress From Racism May Be Causing African-American Babies To Die More Often | NPR
African-American women are more likely to lose a baby in the first year of life than women of any other race. Scientists think that stress from racism makes their bodies and babies more vulnerable.
👓 Zuckerberg San Francisco General’s aggressive tactics leave patients with big bills | Vox
I spent a year writing about ER bills. Zuckerberg San Francisco General has the most surprising billing practices I’ve seen.
🎧 Before the Flood:The Mesopotamian Enuma Elish and Atrahasis | The Literature and History Podcast
BCE 1700-1500
The Enuma Elish and the Atrahasis, in circulation 3,800 years ago, were Mesopotamia's creation and flood epics, making them 1,000 years older than Genesis.
There are a few sections of these ancient texts which indicate that thousands (or more) were wiped out due to illness and disease that sound like a flu, a virus, or some other local pandemic. Gives pause to think about what the state of public health was at the time.
Enuma Elish and Atrahasis are indeed not well known, but I’ve actually seen quite a bit about them as the result of reading within the area of Big History.
I’ll have to do some digging but I’m curious if any researcher(s) have done synoptic analyses of these books and the Book of Genesis from the Old Testament. I’m sure there aren’t as many as there are of the synoptic gospels from the New Testament, but it might be interesting to take a look at them.
The obvious quote of the day:
The gods became distraught at the destruction they had unleashed. The midwife goddess, Mami, who helped raise the first generations of mankind, was particularly saddened, and “The gods joined her in weeping for the vanished country / She was overcome with heartache, but could find no beer”. Yes, it really says that.
As a side note, fermented beverages like beer were more popular throughout history than they are in modern America, because unlike now, prior generations of humans didn’t have the public health ideals or levels of clean drinking water that we do today. Thus beer and other alcoholic drinks were more par for the course because they were less likely to make you sick or kill you to drink them. Naturally the Mesopotamian gods must have been healthier for drinking them as a result too!
👓 Progress on eradicating polio has stalled – Infectious disease | The Economist
Cases caused by viruses derived from the vaccine are a growing worry
👓 Side-effect: Vaccine-derived polio | Economist Espresso
The steady countdown to zero new cases of polio has stopped, and last year even went into reverse,
👓 What I learned at work this year | Bill Gates
A few thoughts about what went well and what didn’t in Alzheimer’s, climate change, polio, and more.
👓 Your Vagina Is Terrific (and Everyone Else’s Opinions Still Are Not) | New York Times
One year ago I wrote about my vagina and men’s opinions of it. Things have not improved.
👓 Why suicide is falling around the world, and how to bring it down more | The Economist
Urbanisation, fewer forced marriages and more curbs on the means of self-destruction
Attending the weekly Innovate Pasadena Friday Coffee Meetup to hear about The Future of Healthcare: Digital Health Becomes Personal.
Update after the talk
The presentation was interesting, but awfully dull. There was nothing I wasn’t aware of and nothing truly groundbreaking on the tech side. It’s actually a bit more of the same from the perspective of someone trying to use an app to improve public health. The futility of the process reminds me a lot of the issues that the edtech sector faces with people trying to innovate in education. Everyone seems to be falling into the same old traps and ultimately not making the massive difference they’re looking to effect.
It rarely, if ever, happens, but the presenters literally jammed out of the room before the event was completely over. Many were shocked by it.
🎧 ‘The Daily’: Assigning Blame in the Opioid Epidemic | New York Times
U.S. prosecutors are looking to hold people criminally accountable for overdose deaths. They’re settling on unexpected targets: other users.
👓 How Not to Report on an Earthquake | New York Times
What I got wrong in Haiti in 2010, and why it matters.
I’m not quite surprised at several of these at all. I am surprised that there are so many that are regularly and poorly reported however. People are too focused on the “story” and the expected narrative to get parts of the reporting right.
🎧 Summer Series Episode 4: Tectonic Edition | WNYC | On The Media
This summer we are revisiting some of our favorite Breaking News Consumer Handbooks. Episode 4 in this mini-series is Tectonic Edition.
After an earthquake struck Nepal in April of 2015, the post-disaster media coverage followed a trajectory we'd seen repeated after other earth-shaking events. We put together a template to help a discerning news consumer look for the real story. It's our Breaking News Consumer's Handbook: Tectonic Edition. Brooke spoke to Jonathan M. Katz, who wrote "How Not to Report on an Earthquake" for the New York Times Magazine.
Understanding how news is reported and the good and bad of it can certainly help one be a better consumer of it. This episode was quite enlightening about how disaster reporting is often done wrong.
👓 It’s time to reconsider low-dairy diets, new study suggests | NBC
Cheese and yogurt were found to protect against death from any cause, and also against death from cerebrovascular causes, like stroke.