Catching up on the health blogosphere

Maybe all of you keep up better than I do with the health care sector of the blogosphere and this is a useless exercise, but here's the thing: sometime during my 6-week hiatus from blogging, my feed reader went dead, and I had stopped looking at it anyway. Today, though, I fixed it, and found a bunch of good stuff that seemed worth sharing. Here are some highlights (most of them, in fact, current).

At the Health Affairs Blog, a UK doctor writes about the ups and downs of pay-for-performance in the National Health System.

I didn't know, but I had wondered, what role the U.S. government might be playing in keeping China manufacturer-friendly; the Pump Handle blog today points to a McClatchy newspaper article alleging that the Bush administration has fought inspection rules that might have prevented recent lead poisonings from toys made in China. I found the article itself a little skimpy on facts, but I imagine - hope? - it's just the beginning of investigation on this issue.

This sounds like something I should be writing more about: the idea that a virus causes obesity, and the viral spread of the idea in the news. Read Knight Science Journalism Tracker's take on news coverage here.

Here's an obesity story I liked better, from Nature Newsblog, about how chimps practice dietary self-control; it's good to remember that, in the end, we are all apes. (Yes, even you, unless you happen to be that rare gerbil or komodo dragon who reads blogs.)

Thanks also to the KSJ Tracker for this cool science story (not about health, but I couldn't resist) about a juvenile sooty shearwater - a wide-ranging seabird, photo above - in New Zealand that had picked up a tiny tracking device implanted in a salmon in the Pacific Northwest of the U.S.

White Coat Notes, from the Boston Globe, reports that Harvard researcher and patient safety guru Lucian Leape approves of the new Medicare non-reimbursement rules, because, in Leape's words,

We’ve got a lot of solutions out there and the thing that is so frustrating is they haven’t been implemented.

Finally, Gary Schwitzer wrote about the increasing infomercialization of health segments on local TV news station. Scary.