Longer Looks: Whistle-Blowing; Measles; And Missing Health Data

The New Yorker: The Personal Toll Of Whistle-Blowing
In the morning of September 17, 2009, Darren Sewell left his office at Freedom Health, the Tampa health-insurance company where he was a vice-president, and climbed into his Chevy Tahoe. He drove to Sonny’s BBQ, a restaurant nearby, where he picked up barbecue sauce for the sandwich he had brought for lunch. Then he continued on until he reached a drab stretch of road lined with gas stations and scraggly palm trees, where he pulled into a parking lot and waited, as discreetly as possible, to meet his F.B.I. handler. (Sheelah Kolhatkar, 1/28)

Vox: Washington Declared A Public Health Emergency Over Measles. Thank Vaccine-Refusing Parents.
An ongoing outbreak of measles — one of the most infectious diseases known to man — in Washington state has prompted the governor to declare a public health emergency. (Julia Belluz, 1/27)

Wired: A Controversial Fertility Treatment Gets Its First Big Test
More than 5 million people across the world started out life as a sperm and an egg in a petri dish. Yet for every in vitro fertilization success story, there have been at least as many failures. Today the procedure works about 40 percent of the time for women under 35; it gets worse the older you get. But researchers and companies are hoping that a set of more experimental methods will improve those odds by hacking biology itself. (Megan Molteni, 1/28)

The Toronto Globe and Mail: In The Dark: The Cost Of Canada’s Data Deficit
At a time when distorted numbers ricochet around the Internet at the speed of a 4G connection, reliable, accessible data about our society is more valuable than ever. And yet, in fields ranging from public health to energy economics to the labour force to the status of children with disabilities, there’s a lot that Canada simply doesn’t know about itself. (Eric Andrew-Gee and Tavia Grant, 1/26)