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More than 13 percent of girls will suffer symptoms of disordered eating by age 20. Only about half of anorexics and bulimics who receive treatment will ever fully recover (often after multiple relapses), and at least 20 percent will develop chronic illnesses or die. A recent report estimated the annual death count in the United States alone at more than 10,000. (Emmeline Clein, 2/26)

Last month, New York Mayor Eric Adams (D) announced a plan to spend $18 million to buy and forgive about $2 billion in medical debt over three years, relieving as many as half a million people. He’s not the only government leader to try out this tactic. City leaders in New Orleans and Washington have announced similar plans, as have the governors of Pennsylvania, Illinois and Connecticut. (Luke Messac and Astra Taylor, 2/26)

Every winter, we at medical schools across the nation anticipate the release of research rankings that show how we measure up to our peers. Based on funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Blue Ridge Institute for Medical Research crunches the numbers and compares how much funding we competitively earned through grants. (Jakub Tolar, 2/25)

That didn’t take long. On Feb. 16, Alabama’s state Supreme Court ruled, 8-1, that frozen embryos are children, entitled to protection under an 1872 state law that allows parents to sue over the wrongful death of a minor child. Within a week, members of the state’s Republican-majority legislature and the GOP governor were promising to enact laws protecting in vitro fertilization, a fertility procedure that involves creating and freezing embryos in a lab. (2/25)

It’s not yet spring, but think ahead to June. Kids will be out of school, and we’ll mark the second anniversary of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, which ended guaranteed access to abortion nationwide. Those two facts — kids on vacation and post-Dobbs realities — may seem unconnected. But there is a link, and it’s a sorry one. Let me explain. (Jackie Calmes, 2/26)

For the first time in my 42 years of life, I feel like an endangered species. Back in 1981, I was born the first in vitro fertilization (IVF) baby in the United States, thanks to the foresight of Drs. Howard and Georgeanna Jones at the Jones Institute in Norfolk, Virginia, who brought the then-groundbreaking procedure of IVF to this country. I was born in Virginia because at that time, IVF was unavailable in my parents’ home state of  Massachusetts. (Elizabeth Carr, 2/26)