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People across the country are mourning the death this weekend of actor Chadwick Boseman, who died from colon cancer at the age of 43. An actor best known for the title role of T’Challa in Marvel’s “Black Panther,” Boseman died on this year’s Jackie Robinson Day, a day celebrating the legendary Black baseball player that Boseman portrayed in a 2013 film. Boseman kept his battle with colon cancer private. Several of his movies, including “Black Panther,” were filmed after he was diagnosed with stage 3 colon cancer in 2016. (Lydia A. Flier, Gabriela Rico and Yamicia D. Connor, 8/31)

The Black community needed (Chadwick) Boseman, not just because he portrayed T’Challa, but because he represented so much more to us. He represented what it meant to be young, Black, and creative. And he will continue to do so even after his passing. White people who read this cannot understand the pain that people of color are going through right now, because they can always see themselves portrayed strong and true, especially in the superhero film genre.The grief of losing this man I never knew is real. I know that we have to keep going, but man, is it hard. As a Black person, I can tell you that we are so tired of being in so much pain. We are truly losing a lot this year. We’ve lost so many great Black men these past few years from violence, racism, and disease. George Floyd, Philando Castile, Alton Sterling, the list goes on. (Peak Johnson, 8/31)

Large companies and organizations exist in an era of evidence-based decisionmaking, fueled by digital data and analytics. Yet the U.S. public health system lacks the data needed to manage the current pandemic. Modern data science, were it put to use, could both serve public health needs and also make our healthcare delivery system more efficient. Real-time information about who is harboring disease, who has been exposed to infection, and where clusters of cases occur would enable effective contact tracing and isolation strategies. In this pandemic, we could have avoided closing down all businesses and all schools by targeting interventions to where the risk of illness was high, not keeping every restaurant and every school shuttered and throwing the country into a recession. (Christine Cassel, Susan L. Graham and William H. Press, 8/29)

This week, the Trump administration caused alarm by touting convalescent plasma from the blood of recovered covid-19 patients as an effective therapeutic before studies robustly supported that claim. But even if convalescent plasma turns out to be an effective therapy, under current guidelines one group of recovered covid-19 patients will be effectively banned from donating: gay and bisexual men. Food and Drug Administration policies regulating blood donations from “men who have sex with men” (MSM) originated during the AIDS epidemic. In the early 1980s, as HIV/AIDS ravaged the gay community, doctors could neither reliably detect nor treat the disease, and they feared that donations from HIV-positive donors could threaten the blood supply. The agency enacted a “lifetime deferral” (or lifelong ban) for MSM who sought to donate. (8/29)

Beginning this week, 68,345 Texans who work in 10 health care-related professions regulated by the state will be trained to spot warning signs of human trafficking. The new requirement affects license renewals for dietitians, midwives, massage therapists, athletic trainers, behavior analysts and others. It stems from House Bill 2059, authored by Rep. César Blanco of El Paso which passed last year and applies to health care practitioners subject to the authority of the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation. (9/1)