|
EVERYTHING
When Public Health Isn’t Simply Good or Bad
What: Emily Oster of “Expecting Better” fame has an op-ed calling for public health officials to acknowledge that there can be a spectrum of risks when it comes to public health, and not *everything* is necessarily 100% good or 100% bad. She looks at three hot topic items—vaccines, fluoride, and raw milk—to make her case. (For the record, she has vaccines in the all good category.)
Key line: “My suggestion is that when asked about these topics, health experts provide this level of detail. Simply saying that vaccines are good and raw milk is bad misses specifics that people find important. People often do their research, and if they feel the risks of raw milk have been exaggerated, it can erode their trust. Now perhaps that person is more likely to distrust the vaccine messaging, too.”
Source: New York Times
PREGNANCY + POSTPARTUM
A Top Killer of Pregnant Women and New Moms? Murder.
What: Pregnant women or those who have given birth in the past year are more likely to be murdered than die from conditions like pre-eclampsia or a hemorrhage, according to research from JAMA Network Open. And its more likely to happen in states that restrict divorce during pregnancy.
Key line: “Using violent death reports compiled by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from 2018 to 2021, the researchers found there was a significant risk ratio for being murdered by an intimate partner in states with barriers to finalizing divorce while pregnant. Arkansas, Missouri and Texas currently have such restrictions. … The available data didn’t cover the period after Roe v. Wade was overturned, when states that already restricted access to reproductive care implemented total or near-total bans.”
Source: Axios
ABORTION ACCESS
Maryland Starts Program to Expand Abortion Care
What: As demand for abortion services increase in states that don’t have bans, KFF Health News profiles a program in Maryland that is working to train providers across the health care spectrum, especially in rural areas.
Key line: “Expanding the pool of health care providers with reproductive health care skills outside of the state’s urban centers is vital, said Mary Jo Bondy, associate dean of the School of Graduate Studies at the University of Maryland-Baltimore. She helped create the new training program. In 2022, Maryland lawmakers passed the Abortion Care Access Act, expanding the type of medical care nurse practitioners, physician assistants, and certified nurse-midwives could offer, including abortion, and the training program ‘prioritized that group,’ Bondy said.”
Source: KFF Health News
MENOPAUSE
What Is Happening with Menopause Legislation?
What: Roll Call, a publication covering Capitol Hill, reviews where menopause legislation currently stands in Washington, an issue in women’s health that even after a tough election season remains bipartisan. One fix? Something as simple *seeming* as coding menopause research across the government.
Key line: Kathryn Schubert, the CEO of the Society for Women’s Health Research, “said a key issue hindering research on menopause is the inability to track it to begin with. Unlike other chronic or debilitating health conditions, menopause lacks Research, Condition and Disease Categorization codes at the National Institutes of Health. The codes are the system that sort NIH-funded projects into scientific categories for reporting to the public. The Senate bill would, among other provisions, establish new codes for chronic or debilitating conditions among women related to menopause and midlife women’s health.”
Source: Roll Call
WELLNESS + BEAUTY
Should Your Put Vaginal Estrogen Creams on Your Face?
What: The Washington Post talks to doctors about the latest skincare trend – putting vaginal estrogen creams on your face. Verdict? Not great.
Key line: “The skin of the face is less absorbent than the mucosal surface of the vagina, so, theoretically, even less estrogen would make it into the blood through facial application, said Elizabeth Suh-Burgmann, chair of gynecologic oncology for Kaiser Permanente’s Northern California region. But Scott Isaacs, president-elect of the American Association of Clinical Endocrinology, said, ‘where to draw that line of where it’s safe and where it’s unsafe is going to vary in the individual person and their individual risk.’ Women with a history of hormone-sensitive breast cancer, for instance, should exercise caution and first speak with their health-care provider, experts said.”
Source: Washington Post
|