Daily Rounds: Public Health Cuts; Hep C Transplant; 'A Place To Die;' Blame '50s Moms For Obesity?

Report: Cuts in federal funding put public health preparedness at risk (NPR - Shots) - "The public health system's readiness for emergencies is at risk, he said. The sobering report was released earlier this week by the nonprofits Trust for America's Health and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, which also provides funding to NPR. Their verdict? We're far better prepared for public health emergencies since the Sept. 11 attacks and anthrax mailings in 2001, but budget cuts are chipping away at those gains." (NPR)

1 donor, missteps, three infected patients (The Boston Globe) - "A child treated at Children’s Hospital Boston was infected with hepatitis C by a piece of a blood vessel that was transplanted in September from a donor who was infected. Two people in Kentucky who received kidneys from the same donor also were infected, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported today. The agency traced the transmission in Massachusetts to an error in tissue testing and delays in communication between the Kentucky transplant center and public health officials." (The Boston Globe)

Looking for a place to die (The New York Times) - "No one could say for sure how long she would live, but continued hospital care was clearly pointless. Nor could she go home: she needed more attention than her family could provide. Everyone — her physician, the husband, the palliative care team, we nurses — agreed she needed inpatient hospice care, and that it should be provided close to home. The problem was, she had no place to go. There was a hospice facility near her house, but it would accept her only if she would die within six days." (The New York Times)

Obesity epidemic may have roots in 1950s (Los Angeles Times) - "The obesity epidemic has multiple causes, Sothern acknowledges. Food has changed in the last five decades. Americans have become much more sedentary. But she thinks that obesity rates soared just when they did — in the 1980s — because a generation of young women decades earlier smoked, spurned breast-feeding and restricted their weight during numerous, closely spaced pregnancies. "It was the evil '50s. A perfect recipe for obesity," she says." (The Los Angeles Times)