Regardless of how hearty your constitution is, you are going to want to gear up for 2016’s mosquito season. The threats that have hovered around North Texas in previous years — the West Nile and Chikungunya viruses — are back and Zika virus, the birth defect-inducing, mosquito-borne illness currently running…
This week, misaligned federal priorities and warnings at the Texas Capitol made it clear that the Zika virus is going to pose a very real threat to Texas during the 2016 mosquito season. As temperatures rise and mosquitoes gather, both the state and Dallas County are going to need money…
Early last week, the state of Texas got a bit of good news. Despite Governor Greg Abbott’s categorical refusal to take federal funds to expand Medicaid in the state of Texas — leaving thousands of Texans without the coverage to which they were supposed to be entitled after the passage…
Most of Dallas major hospitals look pretty good in the Hospital Safety Score Survey released this week by the Leapfrog Group, a patient safety watchdog organization. Methodist Charlton Medical Center, Methodist Dallas Medical Center, Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Dallas and UT Southwestern University Hospital all got A’s on their report cards…
The official count of Zika cases in Dallas County now stands at six, the county’s health and human services department announced Friday, not long after the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirmed that the mosquito-borne virus is capable of causing microcephaly and other birth defects. Friday’s confirmed infection…
The last thing the state of Texas’ Republican leadership wants to do is give in and accept the Medicaid expansion mandated by the Affordable Care Act. Texas has the highest uninsured population in the country, but no matter how many Texans might receive access to healthcare if the state would…
Since the Affordable Care Act became effective, nearly a million previously uninsured Texans have acquired health insurance. That’s good, but despite the gains, Texas still has the highest rate of uninsured residents in the country and the highest raw number of uninsured residents. Gains in Texas have come at a…
Last Friday, The New York Times, hit the NFL hard, reporting that the NFL’s research into player concussions was “was deeply flawed and incomplete” and that the league hired attorneys and other personnel affiliated with the tobacco industry to help oversee that research. The implication made by the Times was clear,…
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s decision to update the recommended dosage for women taking the abortion drug mifepristone may give Texas women easier access to abortions in the state. The FDA changed the label on the drug, bringing it in line with the way doctors in other states have…
So far, no one has caught the Zika virus in Texas from a mosquito. The virus has only been transmitted once in the state, and that happened when a man returning to the Lone Star State from a trip to South America had sex with an uninfected woman. As mosquito…
The lack of hard data available to help predict the effects of Texas’ anti-abortion House Bill 2 came up again and again earlier this month when the Supreme Court heard arguments about whether to strike down portions of the law. The most contentious regulation, the one that requires any abortion…
Wednesday, Tarrant County announced that it’s identified its second and third Zika virus cases of the winter. One patient traveled recently to Puerto Rico, the other to El Salvador, both of which are currently in the midst of a Zika outbreak. No other identifying information about the patients has been…
A 55-year-old “non-pregnant” patient from DeSoto who traveled recently to El Salvador is the fourth person to test positively for infection with the Zika virus in Dallas County, the county’s Health and Human Services Department said Tuesday. Of the four Dallas cases so far confirmed by the Centers for Disease…
Starting Monday, the waiting will no longer be the hardest part. Thanks in part to lab equipment installed during the fall 2014 Ebola scare, Dallas County will be able to test for the Zika virus at its facilities. Results will be available in as little as 24 hours, rather than…
Dr. Christopher Perkins just started his job as director of Dallas County Health and Human Services in 2012 when an emerging disease took root in Texas. The West Nile virus, spreading across the United States on the wings of mosquitoes, infected hundreds of people in Dallas county — more than…
Dallas County Health and Human Services Director Zachary Thompson confirmed Thursday that four additional individuals were being tested for the Zika virus, following Dallas County’s first two cases of the mosquito-borne virus being discovered Tuesday. The two confirmed cases include one person who recently traveled to Venezuela and another person…
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has confirmed the first case of the Zika virus, contracted through sex, in a Dallas County resident in 2016. The virus, which causes a relatively minor illness in adults, has tentatively been linked to birth defects in the children of infected women. At…
The Center for Medical Progress’ David Daleiden and Sandra Merritt, the two “reporters” who filmed a video that they said showed a Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast official talking about selling baby parts but actually didn’t, have been indicted in Harris County. Both Daleiden and Merritt are charged with tampering with…
Ryan Mills snaps black surgical gloves on his hands and plucks a syringe off a paper-shrouded tray. Its 10-gauge needle gleams under the fluorescent lights. Hidden inside the tip is a half-inch long electronic implant. Mills prepares for the procedure with professional quickness and ease that come with experience. He’s…
In Texas, 2016 is going to be the biggest year for reproductive rights since 2013. Following three years of stops and starts, contradictory court rulings and healthcare clinics closing their doors only to reopen them days or weeks later, the U.S. Supreme Court will finally decide the fate of 2013’s…
In 2012, after two decades of steadily marching skyward, Texas’ obesity rate dropped, from 30.4 percent to 29.2 percent. That hardly made Texas thin, to be sure; the state was still the 19th fattest state in the chubbiest country in human history, but the drop theoretically meant that there were…
Demonstrating the frontier spirit of self-reliance so praised by Texas’ conservative lawmakers, at least 100,000 women have escaped an abortion industry reeling from a law that closed about half the state’s abortion clinics. House Bill 2, the tough anti-abortion bill the Legislature passed in 2013, has left large swaths of the…
