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For most of us, local public health officers in Maryland have always presented as a knowledgeable and caring presence in their communities. Who reminds people to get their flu shots? Who gently recommends annual checkups and blood pressure screening, or weight loss and smoking cessation programs? That would be the individuals running the county health departments. They fight addiction, heart disease, cancer and other killers with a fervor, but they also spearhead basic outreach campaigns that seek to bring preventive medicine to families who may lack traditional health resources. They’re hardly controversial. That is until they became the targets of antagonism, conspiracy theories, ridicule and worse. (11/2)

A long time ago, soon after I arrived in the Soviet Union as a young wire service reporter and became acutely aware that I was being followed, my eye began to twitch. It became hard to work, so I flew to Paris to have it checked out. By the time I landed the twitching had stopped, and the doctor who checked it out found nothing wrong. (Serge Schmemann, 11/3)

It started in November of 2016, with a young U.S. undercover agent in Havana hearing a piercing noise, then realizing that his ears wouldn’t stop ringing and that he’d lost some of his hearing. He told colleagues who remembered hearing weird noises, too. Soon, more than a dozen American diplomats and intelligence agents were reporting distressing symptoms — difficulty concentrating, headaches, insomnia, dizziness. Some heard weird noises, some didn’t. (Faye Flam, 11/3)

Staffing issues continue to challenge all healthcare sectors, especially demand for nurses, as the COVID-19 pandemic has led to burnout and is driving more workers into early retirement. From a provider perspective, what do you think should be some top priorities for strengthening the healthcare workforce? (Dr. David Gifford and Darryl Robinson, 11/2)

Tennessee’s CHOICES program was designed by TennCare over a decade years ago to rebalance long-term care delivery in our state to offer services and help eligible seniors (age 65 and older) and adults (age 21 and older) with a physical disability remain in their own homes as they age, rather than moving into a nursing home. (Thom Mills, 11/3)

The drug overdose crisis continues to worsen in the United States. While COVID-19 fatalities have eclipsed U.S. drug overdose deaths, there were more than 93,000 of the latter in 2020 — an increase of more than 20,000 from the previous year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Journalist and author Sam Quinones has documented this scourge for years and famously wrote "Dreamland" about the opioid crisis in 2015. (David Plazas, 11/3)

After Donald Trump took office in 2017, there was a surge of interest among the intellectual left in “1984,” George Orwell’s classic novel about statist repression. So it’s ironic that, in this first year of the Biden administration, those same leftists are set on coopting the language in a distinctly Orwellian way. Sign up.The latest entry in this category comes from the American Medical Association and the Association of American Medical Colleges, which last week issued a manifesto titled “Advancing Health Equity: A Guide to Language, Narrative and Concepts.” (Matt Bai, 11/3)