Author: paige laevy

A sore throat is the first symptom. It’s just sandpaper and mild annoyance wrong, not drastically wrong or knock you off your feet. It’s the season, you suppose. You pick up a lozenge. You leave for work. That’s likely the most dangerous aspect of BA.3.2, the new COVID subvariant that has spread to at least 25 states in the United States and more than 20 countries worldwide. It doesn’t make a lot of noise. Unlike COVID, it doesn’t announce itself with a sudden fever and the unique fear of having to cancel everything. It disguises itself as something commonplace. Perhaps…

Rain is falling somewhere above the Tibetan Plateau, where the closest factory is hundreds of miles away and the air is thin. And in that rain, in one of the world’s most isolated locations, as far away from a nonstick skillet or an airport fire drill as it gets, Stockholm University researchers discovered PFAS. The interior of fast-food containers is coated with the same artificial chemicals. the same substances found in military bases’ firefighting foam. Rainwater floating over a mountain range that most people will never see is a measurable manifestation of this. “You can’t live anywhere on the planet…

Rosa Rivas was unaware of Santa Rosa’s location. She’d never needed to. Her world, including her job, her family, and her daughter’s medical history, was in Salinas, on the Central Coast of California. However, Natividad Medical Center did not have any beds available when her 35-year-old daughter, who suffers from schizophrenia, required hospitalization four years ago. No options in the area. A facility located more than 150 miles north was discovered by hospital staff. Since there is only one possible response, Rivas responded in the affirmative. When she could, she went every other day. There, she observed shackled inmates whose…

In 2022 or 2023, employees of the state attorney general’s office in New York took a seat and began making phone calls. The directories of over a dozen health insurance plans in the state contained a list of mental health professionals, including psychiatrists, therapists, and counselors. Patients enrolled in those plans were supposed to be able to access these providers without having to pay out-of-pocket costs because they were supposed to be in-network providers. The employees pretended to be worried relatives, parents of troubled teenagers, or people in need of assistance when they called. They discovered dead ends, silence, and…

Imagine a typical Tuesday morning in the holding area outside a cardiac surgery suite at the Mayo Clinic’s Rochester campus. fluorescent lighting. Somewhere down the hall, there was a low mechanical hum of hospital equipment. IV lines, gowns, and the unique silence of a room filled with people waiting to have their chests opened. Imagine one of those patients putting on a virtual reality headset and, ten minutes before surgery, standing next to a waterfront while the surrounding trees subtly change from summer green to autumn red and gold, with a soothing voice directing their breathing. A lower pulse is…

Adam Searing, a health researcher at Georgetown University, grew up dividing his time between these communities if you drive far enough east across North Carolina, past the towns where the main street hardware store closed ten years ago and no one replaced it, and past the point where the interstate gives way to two-lane roads lined with pine and scrub oak. Locals refer to it as “down east.” There, the accent is so old that it can be traced back to Elizabethan English. The health problems—too few hospitals, too few doctors, and too far away from everything—are also ancient. More…

Data from a man or woman who sat in front of a screen in the early 2010s, watched a triangle slowly emerge from a field of shifting dots, and pressed a button a fraction of a second slower than most of the other participants can be found somewhere in a research archive in Norfolk, England. They, the researchers recording the results, and everyone else at the time didn’t care about that delay. They returned home and carried on with their lives. They received a dementia diagnosis about ten years later. As it happened, that small hesitancy was already a warning.…

Around the third hour of a night shift, you’ll notice something in the hallway of any busy intensive care unit that isn’t mentioned in any clinical report. The nurses work quickly to check vital signs, adjust drips, and respond to alarms, but some of them have a flat expression on their faces that is unrelated to fatigue. It’s not quite indifference. It is more akin to being absent. Something that was once clearly visible has become silent. The healthcare sector has been reluctant to name that silence for decades. When a person spends months or years absorbing the grief, fear,…

Imagine a late 1990s hospital room. A young Black girl witnesses her father’s body becoming more and more absent from the room as it disappears behind a maze of wires and machinery, his kidneys failing. Long after her father’s passing, Daphna Fertil continued to think about that picture. Her mother, a recent immigrant who had sacrificed her health in order to work and support the family, eventually lost significant vision due to glaucoma and required injections to treat early-onset osteoarthritis. These conditions could have been detected earlier and treated more effectively if access had not been such a stubborn barrier.…

There’s a part of the study that stops you cold, right between the statistical averages and the clinical data. A single injection is given to the inner ear of a seven-year-old girl who was born deaf. She is speaking with her mother on a daily basis four months later. Not by means of sign language. Not by means of a cochlear implant that converts electrical pulses into roughly audible sounds. Hearing her mother’s voice in real time is something that most of us would never consider being thankful for. It sounds like a scene from an early 2000s science fiction…