�������ýҕ�l

“Stop dieting: Get life-long results.” That claim from the Noom app — that it isn’t a diet, yet can achieve long-lasting weight loss — surely encouraged some of its 45 million downloads in the first five years since it was launched. The app saw its popularity soar during the pandemic as house-bound Americans who were rapidly gaining weight were attracted to Noom’s virtual coaching and other Covid-safe approaches to shedding pounds. But despite this enthusiasm, the company laid off 495 health and wellness coaches this spring, according to Business Insider. (Dr. Hasan Merali, 6/6)

Although nearly all heat-related deaths are preventable, heat waves kill thousands of people worldwide every year. At this moment, an extreme heat wave in India and Pakistan, affecting about 1 billion people, is “testing the limits of human survivability,” warns Chandni Singh, a lead author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Sixth Assessment Report. In April, the average maximum temperature for northwestern and central India was the highest in 122 years. (Kristie L. Ebi, 6/5)

Pathogens have a way of shining a light on the darker facets of society. SARS-CoV-2 has certainly done that with Covid-19, and the monkeypox virus is doing it again. Pathogens don’t discriminate like humans do — they have no innate capability of discerning race, sexual orientation, religion, or nationality. This isn’t to say their effects are equal across different populations. Pathogens capitalize on individual vulnerabilities, exposures, and behaviors. They also hijack structural inequities embedded within societies. (Vinay Kampalath, 6/5)

Special Olympics Inc., the parent organization of the Orlando games, could have used this opportunity to reiterate why vaccination is especially important for those in the intellectual disabilities community, and why it imposed the vaccine mandate in the first place. It did not. Instead, the group handed [Gov. Ron] DeSantis a victory over good sense and sound public health policy, and DeSantis ran with it. ... Several questions need to be answered about this decision, and several lessons to be drawn from it. The latter all point to the sheer thuggishness of the DeSantis administration, but also to why the Special Olympics organization caved to DeSantis so meekly. (Michael Hiltzik, 6/6)

The Colorado General Assembly has taken a historic, exemplary step to protect the interests of donor-conceived persons with the near-unanimous passage of SB 22-224, which received Gov. Jared Polis’ signature. For decades, the fertility industry has existed as a global, largely unregulated multi-billion dollar market which, according to one friend who works in the equine and bovine fertility business, makes the sale and implantation of human gametes look like the Wild West. Was it coincidence or a cosmic exclamation point that the bill’s passage coincided with the release of the horrifying documentary Our Father and a $8.75 million judgment against a Grand Junction doctor for fertility fraud? (Richard Uhrlaub, 6/5)

The latest trend in American politics is to encourage snitching. Last week in Ohio, this nasty-minded moment reached a new nadir: If a measure passed by Republican state legislators becomes law, anyone could force girls and young women to submit to invasive gender-verification tests if they want to stay on their high school and college sports teams. (Alyssa Rosenberg, 6/6)

Every October, I receive dozens of messages commemorating the victims of the Tree of Life massacre in Pittsburgh, where 11 of my neighbors were murdered while they worshiped at the synagogue across the street from my home. It's the synagogue where my kids went to Hebrew school, and where my wife and I were married—the spiritual lodestar to Pittsburgh's Jewish community. (Dr. Jeffery Cohen, 6/3)