Helen Epstein, in an aside in her fine piece on public-health innovator Sara Josephine Baker, suggests it rises partly from the excellent healthcare, daycare, and social services we give our military: [T]here is one group of Americans that receives high-quality government-subsidized child-care services, including day care, preschool, home-visiting programs, and health care: the US military. […]
Continue reading →The latest in the 23andme versus FDA saga, in which the FDA halted 23andme from offering health-risk analyses of the genotyping service the company sells, comes in a commentary published yesterday in Nature. The commentary’s authors, Robert Green of Harvard Medical School and Nita Farahany of Duke Law School, address a key question raised by the FDA’s […]
Continue reading →The company announced today that in reaction to the FDA’s order to marketing health-related information based on its genetic testing, it will cease providing that information to anyone who signed on after the FDA sent its letter on November 22, 2013. MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–23andMe Inc., the leading personal genetics company, today announced that it […]
Continue reading →One of the key issues in the dust-up over the FDA’s insistence on regulating 23andMe’s service is the question of how 23andMe’s health-risk results differ from other forms of health-risk information. Today, geneticist Joe Pickrell offers a sharp post that unpacks this a bit. He asks Should the FDA regulate the interpretation of traditional epidemiology? It’s a damned good question. Many online […]
Continue reading →Below find my ever-growing annotated collection of online responses to the FDA’s recent shot across the bow of 23andMe, the consumer genetics company. Until today, I was adding these links to the bottom of my own first reaction to the FDA’s stern letter. (I published my broader, more studied take, How 23andMe Broke the Rules: The F.D.A. […]
Continue reading →I’ve a piece up at The New Yorker on 23andMe’s clash with the FDA: Here’s the opening: The United States Food and Drug Administration is not known for its prose. So the warning letter that it sent to 23andMe, the direct-to-consumer genetic-testing company, on November 22nd, was a surprise in more ways than one. “It reads like […]
Continue reading →I’ve a new feature, “The Social Life of Genes,” in Pacific Standard. It involves bees, birds, monkeys, and how our social life and our genes constantly converse, reshaping us (and our social life) as they go. One of the main characters is a young UCLA psychoneuroimmunologist named Steve Cole, who in the 1990s, reviewing the health […]
Continue reading →It is surprising that it was not until 2006 that the first epidemiological study comparing England and the United States found a social health gradient in both. What was unanticipated was that America as a whole was sicker than England (10). Even those at the top of the U.S. social ladder, despite their access to […]
Continue reading →The good folk at Nautilus, the luscious new(ish) online science magazine, asked me to write something for their issue on uncertainty. The vague mystification over the call for an autopsy of James Gandolfini, may he RIP, gave me my cue: When Italian authorities confirmed Wednesday that James Gandolfini had just died in Rome of an […]
Continue reading →A while back I wrote about my experience being shaken down for over $4,000 when I had to take my daughter for a simple x-ray after she hurt her foot while we were vacationing. The x-ray was negative, but the charges — for a simple 3-view x-ray, an Ace bandage, and a pair of crutches […]
Continue reading →