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The Food and Drug Administration is finally giving millions of adults with mild to moderate hearing loss what they want and need — access to hearing aids without having to get a pricey, often uncomfortable medical exam. Eliminating this requirement will enable people across the U.S. to purchase these lifesaving devices online or at their local drugstore. (Helene Rosenthal, 8/22)

No sweat, we’ve got this. That’s what we thought when the monkeypox outbreak emerged in May. After all, as an orthopoxvirus, it’s similar to smallpox and so we already have a vaccine — two, in fact. There is also a treatment, it’s generally not deadly, and, as a DNA virus (as opposed to an RNA one like SARS-CoV-2), it’s unlikely to mutate much. (Therese Raphael and Sam Fazeli, 8/23)

Last week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced it will overhaul itself in response to pandemic mistakes. The first thing the CDC should do is to clarify what those mistakes were. (Faye Flam, 8/22)

One in five Americans will experience a mental health illness episode in any given year. It should also be noted that one in five children — either currently or at some point during their life — have had a seriously debilitating mental illness experience. (Spencer Wiggins, 8/22)

We in psychiatry have known, without exception and for decades, how to promote the recovery of our patients with serious mental illness. (Steven Madonick, MD, 8/23)

I contracted polio 25 years after the world already had Dr. Jonas Salk’s vaccine. I was living in poverty in India in 1980 in the Southern state of Tamil Nadu, and my birth mother hadn’t heard anything about the polio vaccine. (Ramesh Ferris and Hannah Docter-Loeb, 8/21)

I think Fauci will be remembered for the twin infectious disease outbreaks that have, in a sense, served as bookends to his public-service career: AIDS and the coronavirus pandemic. Both times, he became controversial. But they turned out very differently for him. During the early days of the AIDS epidemic, as so many gay men were dying, they were also protesting Fauci, calling him a murderer and a killer. He brought them into his fold and befriended many of them. He would be the first to tell you that it changed him; it made him more sensitive to the patient’s point of view. (Blake Hounshell and Sheryl Gay Stolberg, 8/22)