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The federal government acknowledged for the first time last week that gun violence is an urgent public health crisis. You already knew that, of course. We all knew it. But thanks to the gun lobby‘s stranglehold on our political class, it’s been nearly impossible to focus the federal government’s attention — and money — on this shameful and uniquely American problem. That’s why the “Surgeon General’s Advisory on Firearm Violence” is so encouraging. In fed-speak, an advisory is the equivalent of sending up a flare; it is reserved for a situation that, as Surgeon General Vivek Murthy put it, requires “the nation’s immediate awareness and action.” About damn time. (Robin Abcarian, 7/3)

The allegations against Rachel Levine, assistant secretary for health at the Department of Health and Human Services, need to be investigated, and if they are true, she needs to be replaced — not only because she will have endangered children, but also to send the message that, when it comes to figuring out the proper medical treatment of children, politics never comes before science. (Megan McArdle, 7/2)

As an internal medicine physician, I am chillingly familiar with the health consequences of intimate partner violence, which affects 10 million Americans each year. I often see patients hospitalized with complications of chronic disease, but as their cases unfold, it comes to light that the underlying cause of symptoms or injuries is abuse. It breaks my heart every time but there’s not much I can do except give them a referral to a social worker and verbal validation that the way they have been treated is not OK. Why? Because doctors are not trained to do anything more than that. (Amrapali Maitra, 7/2)

The disproportionate number of Black children in Los Angeles’ child welfare system has been scrutinized since the late 1980s, the height of Los Angeles’ heroin and crack epidemics. The drugs, then largely addressed as a criminal issue through heavy-handed policing and prosecution, consigned a generation of young and middle-aged Black Angelenos, both users and dealers, to premature death and incarceration. Many of their children wound up in the city’s fragmented child welfare system and, all too often, on a similar path toward addiction and entanglement with the legal system. (Jerel Ezell, 7/2)

Few federal agencies have enjoyed a more sterling reputation on Capitol Hill over the past several decades than the National Institutes of Health. But a bevy of challenges are spurring calls for reform on Capitol Hill that may be difficult for the agency to fend off without making some concessions. (Nick Manetto, 7/3)