Longer Looks: Interesting Reads You Might Have Missed – Kaiser Health News

The Atlantic: The Full Story Of Nancy Reagan And The AIDS Crisis
In mid-1981 the U.S. Centers for Disease Control noticed a set of medical curiosities: an alert from Los Angeles that five previously healthy young men had come down with a rare, fatal lung infection; almost simultaneously, a dermatologist in New York saying that he had seen a cluster of unusually aggressive cases of Kaposi’s sarcoma, an obscure skin cancer. These seemingly unconnected occurrences had two things in common. First, all of the victims were sexually active gay men. Second, their maladies pointed to a catastrophically compromised immune system. (Tumulty, 4/12)

ABC News: The Disabled Hope Their Oscar Moment Can Become A Movement 
Right down to its production design, the Oscars have not always felt like the most welcoming place for the disabled. “I’ve always seen that stage with its stairs as a symbol that they don’t expect people who had mobility issues to be nominated or to win an award,” said Jim LeBrecht, the co-director and co-star of the Oscar-nominated documentary “ Crip Camp.” “It’s always been this kind of negative tacit statement.” (Dalton, 4/14)

The Washington Post: Memorial To Gun Violence Points To How We Should Remember Victims Of The Pandemic 
The coronavirus epidemic has made the gun violence memorial even more powerful today than in 2019. It points toward a new generation of memorials that are fundamentally open, memorials not just to past traumas, but to present ones that seem to be expanding, and perhaps permanent. The pandemic has taught us that it is in the nature of America to stagger, not stride; to bleed, not heal. We are self-destructive and unwilling to make the basic changes necessary to get better. And our memorials must reflect that. They must be open-ended, expandable and dynamic, like our propensity to violence and death. (Kennicott, 4/9)

NPR: Being Mentored Helps Black Medical Students Face Isolation, Racial Microaggressions
Jamel Hill, 30, describes his first few months in medical school in 2016 as a “rude awakening.” With few people looking like him in the lecture hall, he felt isolated. But it was some conversations being had in the classroom and the hospital that left him the most uncomfortable. “I’ve had patients tell nurses that they don’t want Black physicians,” Hill says. “You know, we’re in the 2020s, and you would think that doesn’t happen, but it very much so does.” (Yousry, 4/15)

Bloomberg: ‘Shrink Next Door’ Psychiatrist Is Ordered To Give Up New York License 
The psychiatrist who was the focus of Bloomberg’s “The Shrink Next Door” podcast was ordered to surrender his license to practice in New York after violating professional standards in dealings with several patients. A five-member hearing committee convened by the state’s Department of Health determined that the psychiatrist, Isaac “Ike” Herschkopf, violated “minimal acceptable standards of care in the psychotherapeutic relationship.” In an order filed Tuesday, the committee said it had found Herschkopf guilty of all counts of professional lapses alleged by the state including gross negligence, incompetence, exercising undue influence, fraudulent practice and moral unfitness. (Nocera, 4/13)

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Undark: Growing Pains: Why Covid’s Disruptions Take A Heavy Toll On Teens
For 16-year-old Zuri Arreola, life today differs in almost every way since the Covid-19 pandemic began more than a year ago. Last year, she was a gregarious high school sophomore, passionate about acting and dancing. Today, Arreola rarely if ever sees her friends and has no time for hobbies. “I was so social, and now I feel so — I don’t know, introverted, awkward,” she says. Her public school in Los Angeles has been remote since last March. The online classes, which she finds exhausting, sometimes give her throbbing headaches. (Moyer, 4/14)

PBS NewsHour: Veterinarians, Teachers, And Students Are Stepping Up To Form America’s Volunteer Vaccinator Workforce 
When the coronavirus pandemic hit last year, Ellen Wormser’s work as a nurse-midwife for Fair Haven Community Health Care, a Federally Qualified Health Center in Connecticut, changed significantly. Gone were the sort of family scenes that Wormser said she was accustomed to seeing in delivery rooms before COVID-19, when women giving birth often had a number of people cheering them on. Wormser said she saw many of her colleagues don PPE to assist COVID-positive women in labor, often spending hours face-to-face with them. “I was scared for all of us but everybody went and did their job,” Wormser said. “We were so anxiously awaiting a vaccine because we knew that that would turn the corner in allowing patients to come in and get the care that they need.” (Vinopal, 4/15)

The Washington Post: Essential, Invisible: Covid Has 200,000 Merchant Sailors Stuck At Sea
Brian Mossman says he has read “Moby Dick” nearly 200 times. The 61-year-old captain of the container ship Maersk Sentosa says he revisits the Melville classic nearly every voyage, because each time reveals something new about the people who take to the sea: people like him and the two dozen merchant mariners on his crew. Sentosa means “a place of peace and tranquility” in Malay, but Mossman says the 1,048-foot super carrier is more of a “floating industrial plant.” It runs around-the-clock hauling cargo to 14 ports in eight countries, from the eastern United States to the Middle East, supplying embassies and military bases and delivering humanitarian aid. (Telford and Bogage, 4/9)

The Washington Post: Mexican Consulates In U.S. Repatriate Remains Of Coronavirus Migrant Dead 
The calls keep coming. A farmworker from Oaxaca dead in Florida. A construction worker from Zacatecas in Los Angeles. A housekeeper from Puebla in New York. For more than a year, Mexican consulates across the United States have catalogued the toll the coronavirus has taken on America’s migrant workforce, one desperate phone conversation at a time. Thousands of Mexicans in the United States, most of them undocumented immigrants deemed “essential workers” by state labor departments, have died of covid-19. By one measure, the community’s death rate soared by nearly 70 percent. Even in death, their immigration status haunted them. That’s where the Mexican diplomats came in: It was their job to repatriate the bodies of the pandemic dead. (Sieff, 4/11)

The Wall Street Journal: Italy’s Covid-19 Vaccinations Bypassed The Elderly, And More Are Dying 
Thousands of people have been dying each week of Covid-19 in Italy, one of the highest numbers and per-capita death rates in the West. One factor, according to Italy’s own government: For many weeks, Italy was slow to vaccinate the elderly. While national authorities gave priority to older people and those in nursing homes alongside front-line healthcare workers, regional authorities have given numerous shots to younger workers. (Legorano, 4/14)

Politico: ‘They Weren’t Supposed To Be Heroes’ — Italy’s Lost Doctors 
At the height of the first wave of the coronavirus pandemic last year, the Italian province of Bergamo had to call in military trucks to haul away hundreds of coffins because the city’s crematoriums were already over capacity. Among the first victims of the virus were general practitioners who, as a result of decades of health care cuts and the closure of small provincial hospitals, had become many Italians’ sole recourse for care. (Privitera, 4/15)