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Daily Rounds: The Cost Of Anguish; Rationing Flu Shots; Species Count Finds 8.7M; Faults Cracking

In Stillbirth Malpractice Cases, Courts Try to Put Price on Mother’s Anguish - NYTimes.com "These two cases are among the first to move through the legal system after New York’s highest court changed state law in 2004 and allowed mothers to sue for their emotional suffering when they claim that medical carelessness caused a stillbirth. With their different price tags on elemental maternal loss, the cases offer a rare view of the legal system’s first computations to set a new value on this singular type of suffering. They also shed light on the often macabre computations that lawyers make in trying to fix a dollar figure. As these cases represent uncharted territory in the state, the grim comparisons have gone especially far afield. Lawyers sought, among other analogies, to compare the trauma of a stillbirth to that of being attacked by a dog or to a passenger’s spending nine minutes of anguish knowing a plane is going down." (nytimes.com)

Worcester Telegram & Gazette - telegram.com - State cuts back on free flu shots "The state Department of Public Health has ended free flu shots to insured adults as part of a major shift of the service from public to private health providers. “Unfortunately, because of budget cuts across all departments, the Massachusetts Department of Public Health is no longer able to provide vaccines, including influenza vaccine, for insured adults 19 years of age and older,” wrote John Auerbach, commissioner of the state DPH."  (telegram.com) 8.7 million species exist on Earth, study estimates - The Washington Post "For centuries scientists have pondered a central question: How many species exist on Earth? Now, a group of researchers has offered an answer: 8.7 million." (The Washington Post)

Why A Quake In Virginia Isn't As Rare As It Sounds : The Two-Way : NPR "Out in the Atlantic, the ocean floor is essentially spreading out from a crack in the Earth called the mid-Atlantic ridge. Christopher Bailey, chairman of the geology department at the College of William and Mary, says scientists think this activity is pushing on the North Atlantic plate, shoving it up and back, toward the northwest. "So in essence, we're re-breaking old faults," he told NPR.
And there are a number of those old faults all along the East Coast."(npr.org)

This program aired on August 24, 2011. The audio for this program is not available.

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