Slate Magazine - Medical Examiner

Is protecting consumers from uncooked oysters a rotten plan?

Arthur Allen — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 13:00:02 EST

Since the Food and Drug Administration announced last month that it plans to ban the sale of unprocessed Gulf of Mexico oysters from April through October, people in New Orleans have been gobbling the things down as if there's no tomorrow. That's the Big Easy for you. Risky as it is just to live there, you think dey go worry about itty-bitty bacteria?

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The financial and personal ramifications of a doctor apologizing to a patient.

Rahul Parikh — Fri, 6 Nov 2009 07:15:22 EST

When you're a doctor, you sometimes have to come to terms with making a mistake: giving a patient the wrong diagnosis or the wrong treatment, causing an injury, or perhaps something worse.

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What we can learn from the shortage of H1N1 vaccine.

Marc Siegel — Mon, 2 Nov 2009 14:35:55 EST

The current shortage of the H1N1 swine flu vaccine was both predictable and largely avoidable. But it's not too late to remedy the situation. The last three pandemics—in 1968, 1957, and 1918—each lasted for more than three years, and this one is not going away any time soon. Now we must refocus public health priorities going forward, so we can apply the lessons of the swine flu to future outbreaks.

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My son has cancer. He can't go into day care because of unvaccinated children.

Stephanie Tatel — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 12:06:09 EST

Current public opinion about childhood vaccinations sometimes seems to be influenced less by science and more by Jenny McCarthy. But here's something that rarely gets discussed: the threat posed by the nonvaccinated to children who are immunosuppressed. Last year, while searching for child care for our 2-and-a-half-year-old son, my husband and I thought we had we found the perfect arrangement: an experienced home day care provider whose house was an inviting den of toddler industriousness. Under her magical hand, children drifted calmly and happily from the bubble station to the fairy garden to the bunnies and the trucks, an orchestrated preschool utopia. But when I asked: "Are any of the children here unvaccinated?" the hope of my son's perfect day care experience burnt to a little crisp. As it turned out, one child had a philosophical or religious exemption—a convenient, cover-all exemption that many doctors grant, no questions asked, when a parent requests one. (I still do not understand how the state can allow one to attribute his or her fear of vaccines and their unproven dangers to religion or philosophy. But that's a question for another day.)

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Creating a better way to diagnose swine flu and other ailments.

Amanda Schaffer — Wed, 7 Oct 2009 12:17:13 EST

Crude methods of detecting swine flu have so far provoked hand-wringing and no small amount of ridicule. Planeloads of travelers to China have had laser beams aimed at their foreheads, landing some under quarantine (and spurring a YouTube minifest of airport videos). This summer, Slate reported on a camp that tried to prescreen kids for flu by checking campers for fevers—and failed to detect a sick child whose physician parent brought his temperature down with Tylenol, fueling an outbreak. Meanwhile, people infected with the virus can pass it on before they develop symptoms; others never develop fever at all.

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