With Purchase Of PillPack, Amazon Will Have Access To Shoppers’ Personal Health Data
“Prescription drug information is highly personal information—it can tell if someone has cancer, if they have a sexually transmitted disease,” said Julie Roth, a health care regulatory attorney.
The Wall Street Journal:
Amazon’s PillPack Deal Gives It Access To Sensitive Health Data
Amazon.com Inc. knows more about consumers’ online-shopping habits than any other retailer. Now it is about to get its hands on the most intimate of personal data: people’s health conditions. Last week’s acquisition of online pharmacy startup PillPack will give Amazon insight into people’s prescriptions, putting the tech company into the highly regulated realm of health information with more restrictions than it is accustomed to on data-mining. (Stevens and Terlep, 7/1)
In other national health care news —
Los Angeles Times:
'We Beg You To Help Us.' Immigrant Women In Detention Describe Their Treatment, Share Fears About Their Children
The words appear on a scrap of paper, scrawled in pencil by an immigrant mother held at a detention center: “We beg you to help us, return our children. Our children are very desperate. My son asks me to get him out and I’m powerless here.” In another letter, childish print on notebook paper, a mother spoke of her son: “It’s been a month since they snatched him away and there are moments when I can’t go on.… If they are going to deport me, let them do it — but with my child. Without him, I am not going to leave here.” (Hennessy-Fiske, 7/2)
The New York Times:
Parents And Children Remain Separated By Miles And Bureaucracy
Yeni González emerged into the warm evening air in Eloy, Ariz., her hair braided by the other women in the detention center. We’re braiding up all your strength, they had told her in Spanish. You can do it. Ms. González, who had been released on a bond, was meeting her lawyer on Thursday and would soon join the volunteers who were driving her to New York City to find her three young children — Lester, Jamelin and Deyuin — who had been taken away from her more than a month before at the southern border. (Correal, 6/30)
The Associated Press:
Separations At The Border Didn’t Worry Some Trump Officials
The government’s top health official could barely conceal his discomfort. As Health and Human Services secretary, Alex Azar was responsible for caring for migrant children taken from their parents at the border. Now a Democratic senator was asking him at a hearing whether his agency had a role in designing the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy that caused these separations. The answer was no. (Long and Alonso-Zaldivar, 7/2)
The New York Times:
Emergency Rooms Run Out Of Vital Drugs, And Patients Are Feeling It
George Vander Linde tapped a code into the emergency room’s automated medicine cabinet. A drawer slid open and he flipped the lid, but found nothing inside. Mr. Vander Linde, a nurse, tried three other compartments that would normally contain vials of morphine or another painkiller, hydromorphone. Empty. Empty. Empty. The staff was bracing for a busy weekend. Temperatures were forecast for the 90s and summer is a busy time for hospital emergency departments — the time of year when injuries rise from bike accidents, car crashes, broken bottles and gunshots. (Thomas, 7/1)
Stat:
Congress Presses For Transparency At Groups Supporting NIH, CDC
The National Institutes of Health has hit a series of ethical snags in recent years, with questions about whether work funded by nonprofit groups has come with too many conditions attached or otherwise failed to meet certain ethical standards. Congress has taken notice. In what amounts to a written warning from Capitol Hill, a House committee last week included language in a spending agreement that emphasizes existing requirements on funding from the Foundation for the NIH and the CDC Foundation. (Facher, 7/2)
The Washington Post:
Opioid Addiction And Overdoses In Children Devastate Parents
“Brian has been dead for 136 days,” says his mother, Vicki Bishop. “I watched him die over many years, and it was a long, slow, horrible death.” Her son’s decades-long battle with opioids blotted out the sun in her own life, says Bishop, 65, of Clarksburg, Md. It held her in the clenched fist of shock and anticipation shared by millions of American parents who are traumatized by a child’s substance use. “I spent so many years in stages of anxiety and depression,” Bishop says. “I worried about Brian 24/7. His disease took over my life.” (Fleming, 6/30)
The New York Times:
More Americans Evacuated From China Over Mysterious Ailments
The State Department has evacuated at least 11 Americans from China after abnormal sounds or sensations were reported by government employees at the United States Consulate in the southern city of Guangzhou, officials said, deepening a mystery that has so far confounded investigators. At least eight Americans associated with the consulate in Guangzhou have now been evacuated, according to one official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter. (Myers, 6/30)