Category: BLOG

(NBC News) – The agency plays a key role in tracking disease spread and vaccination rates. Last year, it seemed to back away from some of that work, according to new research.

Nearly half of the databases that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention used to update regularly — surveillance systems that tracked public health information like Covid vaccination rates and hospitalizations for respiratory syncytial virus — have been paused without explanation, according to new research.

The findings, published Monday in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine, indicate that at the start of 2025, the CDC maintained 82 databases that were updated at least monthly. But by the end of October, the study found, 38 had gone stale, with 34 showing no new entries at all in the previous six months. (Read More)

(NBC News) – The agency plays a key role in tracking disease spread and vaccination rates. Last year, it seemed to back away from some of that work, according to new research.

Nearly half of the databases that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention used to update regularly — surveillance systems that tracked public health information like Covid vaccination rates and hospitalizations for respiratory syncytial virus — have been paused without explanation, according to new research.

The findings, published Monday in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine, indicate that at the start of 2025, the CDC maintained 82 databases that were updated at least monthly. But by the end of October, the study found, 38 had gone stale, with 34 showing no new entries at all in the previous six months. (Read More)

(New York Times) – Dozens of doctors and therapists said chatbots had led their patients to psychosis, isolation and unhealthy habits.

Mental health workers across the country are navigating how to treat problems caused or exacerbated by A.I. chatbots, according to more than 100 therapists and psychiatrists who told The New York Times about their experiences.

While many mentioned positive effects of the bots — like helping patients understand their diagnoses — they also said the conversations deepened their patients’ feelings of isolation or anxiety. More than 30 described cases resulting in dangerous emergencies like psychosis or suicidal thoughts. One California psychiatrist who often evaluates people in the legal system said she had seen two cases of violent crimes influenced by A.I. (Read More)

(Washington Post via MSN) – Safety standards have improved since the industry’s early days in China, when botched surgeries and unlicensed aesthetic products were commonplace. But the combination of social media, cosmetic clinics trawling for business in a competitive market and practitioners without proper qualifications is creating a dangerous underbelly in the industry, according to interviews with plastic surgeons, clinic owners, influencers, patients and industry experts in China. (Read More)

(Wired) – More and more Chinese adoptees in the US are trying to reunite with their birth parents. For Youxue, it took more than a decade, and a remarkable coincidence.

Decades earlier, the conditions that shaped this family’s life were set in motion by China’s one-child policy. The government’s population control program, enacted in the late 1970s, turned family planning into state-mandated decisions about which children were allowed to exist. In the ’80s, rural parents were allowed to have a second child only if the first was a daughter. Families who violated the policy received large fines and other penalties, sometimes sterilization and physical violence.

Today, there are more than 82,000 Chinese adoptees in the United States, most adopted between 1999 and 2016. More than 60 percent of the children adopted in that period were girls. The majority of adoptive parents are white, wealthy, and well educated. Because child abandonment is illegal in China, very little documentation connects Chinese adoptees with their birth families. (Read More)

(Washington Post via Yahoo!) – For years, parents alleged that top social media companies had gotten teens hooked on their products with addictive design features, arguing in legal filings these choices led to depression, anxiety, eating disorders – and in some tragic circumstances – death.

These stories helped spur a sweeping regulatory movement that led states and governments around the world to pass laws restricting teens’ use of social media and forced tech companies to take bolder actions to protect young people.

Now, those concerned parents will make their argument in court this week when the first of several high-profile social media addiction lawsuits against Meta, TikTok and YouTube goes to trial. These suits will test the proposition of whether social media causes psychological harm, which could have profound implications for the industry along with ordinary consumers. (Read More)

(CNN) – Beware of the AI chatbot that becomes more than just a friend, or worse, an emotional crutch. Pope Leo XIV has warned about overly “affectionate” chatbots, urging regulation to prevent humans from forming serious emotional bonds with their AI companions.

The US-born pontiff, writing in a message ahead of the Catholic Church’s annual World Day of Social Communications, said artificial intelligence risked diluting human creativity and decision-making. (Read More)

(SF Gate) – Nearly six years later, a generation of first-year college students is still feeling the fallout, shaped by years of online high school, isolation and disrupted learning during some of their most formative years. Even as college life is back to business as usual, educators say the pandemic’s academic and emotional aftershocks remain. The students in the “COVID cohort,” or those who graduated high school after 2020, are starting college with noticeable learning gaps and deep anxiety about belonging, effects that experts warn could linger for years. (Read More)

(New York Times) – A crackdown on problems with fairness and safety is achieving results, including a big drop in the number of sick patients being passed over for transplants.

For years, the nonprofit groups that coordinate transplants in the United States regularly ignored federal rules — skipping patients at the top of waiting lists and sending organs to those who weren’t as sick and hadn’t waited as long.

But new federal data shows that the rate of skipped patients has dropped by more than half in recent months, a change that reflects a far-reaching effort to make the transplant system fairer and safer. (Read More)

(Plough) – Our son Yusang has Down syndrome. He saved another child’s life.

My wife and I had just learned that a couple from our church were wrestling with grief and confusion, so that cold Sunday evening, I set out to visit them. They were expecting their third child, and initially they’d been overjoyed, but the baby did not seem to be developing normally, and the mother underwent a number of tests over several weeks. Now their doctor had diagnosed a genetic disorder called Trisomy 18. He told the parents that children with this condition are frequently stillborn or die soon after birth. If they do survive, the doctor went on to say, they almost certainly carry multiple physical and mental disabilities. He advised terminating the pregnancy, and they’d agreed to act on his advice. (Read More)