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The Peace Corps says its top priorities are the health, safety and the security of its volunteers. But a new internal report acknowledges that some volunteers who come home sick or injured have been waiting years — even decades — for adequate medical care and have fallen deeply through the cracks of a federal insurance bureaucracy. The report, by a task force set up by the agency in March, is a particularly candid assessment by top Peace Corps officials of government failure to provide top-notch health-care access to thousands of young people who serve in far-flung developing countries. (Rein, 12/23)

Forty years ago, the U.S. outlawed the sale of small turtles as pets because they harbor salmonella, a bacterium that causes a highly unpleasant and occasionally deadly illness in humans. Now salmonella infections tied to the tiny critters are back, public health officials reported Wednesday in the journal Pediatrics. From May 2011 through September 2013, turtle-associated salmonella was linked to eight outbreaks across 41 states, Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico, covering 473 illnesses. Some 28 percent of those sickened had to be hospitalized. (Hobson, 12/23)

For a long time, Gary Carmack of Waynesville watched his 25-year-old son James battle a heroin addiction. “He would look at me with these big, sad eyes, and he wanted so bad to get off of it,” Carmack said. “Everyone would be saying, ‘you just have to tell him to quit.’ And of course that’s virtually impossible without the right kind of help.” As a paramedic, Carmack had seen countless overdoses. The family tried desperately to get James into treatment. But in 2013, his son was one of 258 Missourians who died after using heroin that year. (Bouscaren, 12/23)