insight
For hours, John Pernorio repeatedly mashed the call button at his bedside in the Heritage Hills nursing home in Rhode Island. A retired truck driver, he had injured his spine in a fall on the job decades earlier and could no longer walk. The antibiotics he was taking made him need to go to the bathroom frequently. But he could get there only if someone helped him into his wheelchair. By the time an aide finally responded, he’d been lying in soiled briefs for hours, he said. It happened time and again. “It was degrading,” said Pernorio, 79. “I spent 21 hours a day in bed.” Payroll records show ...
California Healthline
As bird flu spreads among dairy cattle in the U.S., veterinarians and researchers have taken note of Finland’s move to vaccinate farmworkers at risk of infection. They wonder why their government doesn’t do the same. “Farmworkers, veterinarians, and producers are handling large volumes of milk that can contain high levels of bird flu virus,” said Kay Russo, a livestock and poultry veterinarian in Fort Collins, Colorado. “If a vaccine seems to provide some immunity, I think it should be offered to them.” Among a dozen virology and outbreak experts interviewed by California Healthline, most agre...
California Healthline
PHILADELPHIA — Zarinah Lomax is an uncommon documentarian of our times. She has designed dresses from yellow crime-scene tape and styled jackets with hand-painted demands like “Don’t Shoot” in purple, black, and gold script. Every few months, she hauls dozens of portraits of Philadelphians — vibrant, bold, bigger-than-life faces — to pop-up galleries to raise an alarm about gun violence in her hometown and America. In a storage unit, Lomax has a thousand canvasses, she estimates, mostly of young people who died from gunfire, and others of the mothers, sisters, friends, and mourners left to ask...
California Healthline
With the Environmental Protection Agency’s latest — and strictest — plan to minimize the risk of Americans drinking lead-contaminated water on the horizon, the debate over whether the rules go too far or not nearly far enough is reaching a tipping point. Although lead was banned from new water service lines in 1986, it’s estimated that more than 9 million such lines still carry drinking water to homes and businesses throughout the country. Under the EPA’s Lead and Copper Rule Improvements proposal, water utilities would be required to replace all lead-containing lines within 10 years. The prop...
California Healthline
In 2013, the FDA approved an implantable device to treat leaky heart valves. Among its inventors was Mehmet Oz, the former television personality and former U.S. Senate candidate widely known as “Dr. Oz.” In online videos, Oz has called the process that brought the MitraClip device to market an example of American medicine firing “on all cylinders,” and he has compared it to “landing a man on the moon.” MitraClip was designed to spare patients from open-heart surgery by snaking hardware into the heart through a major vein. Its manufacturer, Abbott, said it offered new hope for people severely ...
California Healthline
More than a dozen states are weighing abortion-related ballot measures to be decided this fall, most of which would protect abortion rights if passed. KFF Health News’ Julie Rovner and Rachana Pradhan explain what’s at stake in the 2024 election, both at the national and state levels. Find more of our abortion coverage here. Credits Hannah NormanVideo producer & animatorOona TempestArt director & illustrator KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy researc...
California Healthline
The Host Julie RovnerKFF Health News @jrovner Read Julie's stories. Julie Rovner is chief Washington correspondent and host of KFF Health News’ weekly health policy news podcast, “What the Health?” A noted expert on health policy issues, Julie is the author of the critically praised reference book “Health Care Politics and Policy A to Z,” now in its third edition. It was a busy year for health-related cases at the Supreme Court. Among other issues, the justices grappled with two abortion cases, a separate case touching on the opioid epidemic, and a case challenging whether localities can bar h...
California Healthline
What weighs most heavily on older adults’ minds when it comes to health care? The cost of services and therapies, and their ability to pay. “It’s on our minds a whole lot because of our age and because everything keeps getting more expensive,” said Connie Colyer, 68, of Pleasureville, Kentucky. She’s a retired forklift operator who has lung disease and high blood pressure. Her husband, James, 70, drives a dump truck and has a potentially dangerous irregular heart rhythm. Tens of millions of seniors are similarly anxious about being able to afford health care because of its expense and rising c...
California Healthline
If you or someone you know may be experiencing a mental health crisis, contact the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline by dialing or texting “988.” For the most part, Cori Lint was happy. She worked days as a software engineer and nights as a part-time cellist, filling her free hours with inline skating and gardening and long talks with friends. But a few days a month, Lint’s mood would tank. Panic attacks came on suddenly. Suicidal thoughts did, too. She had been diagnosed with anxiety and depression, but Lint, 34, who splits her time between St. Petersburg, Florida, and Tulsa, Oklahoma, struggled ...
California Healthline
Over the past two years, a simple but baffling request has preceded most of my encounters with medical professionals: “Rate your pain on a scale of zero to 10.” I trained as a physician and have asked patients the very same question thousands of times, so I think hard about how to quantify the sum of the sore hips, the prickly thighs, and the numbing, itchy pain near my left shoulder blade. I pause and then, mostly arbitrarily, choose a number. “Three or four?” I venture, knowing the real answer is long, complicated, and not measurable in this one-dimensional way. Pain is a squirrely thing. It...
California Healthline
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