Morning Briefing
Summaries of health policy coverage from major news organizations
Longer Looks: Interesting Reads You Might Have Missed
A JetBlue pilot鈥檚 illness looked like food poisoning, but it was actually an increasingly common tick-borne meat allergy that can be fatal. (Goldstein, 11/20)
Patients with 鈥榣ow T鈥 complain they often can鈥檛 get prescriptions from their own doctors. (Merelli, 11/21)
鈥淢y year of unraveling鈥 is how a despairing Christy Morrill described nightmarish months when his immune system hijacked his brain. What鈥檚 called autoimmune encephalitis attacks the organ that makes us 鈥渦s,鈥 and it can appear out of the blue. (Neergaard and Lum, 11/20)
For the brain organoids in Lena Smirnova鈥檚 lab at Johns Hopkins University, there comes a time in their short lives when they must graduate from the cozy bath of the bioreactor, leave the warm salty broth behind and be plopped onto a silicon chip laced with microelectrodes. From there, these tiny white spheres of human tissue can simultaneously send and receive electrical signals that, once decoded by a computer, will show how the cells inside them are communicating with each other as they respond to their new environments. (Molteni, 11/17)
An emerging area of research is uncovering hidden links between nature and human health. (Grandoni and Mara, 11/14)