Dr. Christopher Perkins just started his job as director of Dallas County Health and Human Services in 2012 when an emerging disease took root in Texas. The West Nile virus, spreading across the United States on the wings of mosquitoes, infected hundreds of people in Dallas county — more than…
Dallas County Health and Human Services Director Zachary Thompson confirmed Thursday that four additional individuals were being tested for the Zika virus, following Dallas County’s first two cases of the mosquito-borne virus being discovered Tuesday. The two confirmed cases include one person who recently traveled to Venezuela and another person…
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has confirmed the first case of the Zika virus, contracted through sex, in a Dallas County resident in 2016. The virus, which causes a relatively minor illness in adults, has tentatively been linked to birth defects in the children of infected women. At…
The Center for Medical Progress’ David Daleiden and Sandra Merritt, the two “reporters” who filmed a video that they said showed a Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast official talking about selling baby parts but actually didn’t, have been indicted in Harris County. Both Daleiden and Merritt are charged with tampering with…
Ryan Mills snaps black surgical gloves on his hands and plucks a syringe off a paper-shrouded tray. Its 10-gauge needle gleams under the fluorescent lights. Hidden inside the tip is a half-inch long electronic implant. Mills prepares for the procedure with professional quickness and ease that come with experience. He’s…
In Texas, 2016 is going to be the biggest year for reproductive rights since 2013. Following three years of stops and starts, contradictory court rulings and healthcare clinics closing their doors only to reopen them days or weeks later, the U.S. Supreme Court will finally decide the fate of 2013’s…
In 2012, after two decades of steadily marching skyward, Texas’ obesity rate dropped, from 30.4 percent to 29.2 percent. That hardly made Texas thin, to be sure; the state was still the 19th fattest state in the chubbiest country in human history, but the drop theoretically meant that there were…
Demonstrating the frontier spirit of self-reliance so praised by Texas’ conservative lawmakers, at least 100,000 women have escaped an abortion industry reeling from a law that closed about half the state’s abortion clinics. House Bill 2, the tough anti-abortion bill the Legislature passed in 2013, has left large swaths of the…
It’s Open Enrollment Season, which is like Christmas time for Obama-lovers who don’t have room for real Christmas in their hearts. Last season, the imaginary place people call “Dallas-Fort Worth” had more people signing up for insurance under the Affordable Care Act than any other region in Texas. All in…
Texas has not, as it turns out, completely ended taxpayer funding for Planned Parenthood. According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, it might not be able to, either. Last week, Texas Governor Greg Abbott hopped on his Twitter account to crow about his belief that Texas health…
It’s hard to understand what the state of Texas did to Planned Parenthood Thursday as anything but a raid aimed at intimidating the healthcare provider. Thursday morning, Texas Office of the Inspector General personnel showed up at a Planned Parenthood in Dallas and demanded documents from at least 10 different…
At a certain point, perhaps after they defund the roads and utility lines leading to its clinics, Texas politicians and policymakers are going to run out of ammunition in their jihad against Planned Parenthood. But that hasn’t happened yet. Last week, Texas’ Health and Human Services Commission promulgated rules banning…
The state of Texas does a terrible job of providing sex education to its teenage residents. Ninety-four percent of the state’s school districts, according to the Texas Freedom Network, only educate kids about sex by telling them not to have it. Arguments against sex are often built around religious notions…
This week, Ken Paxton took time out from fighting his multiple felony indictments to send a set of directives to Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick outlining the attorney general’s priorities for the period leading up to the Texas Legislature’s next session in 2017. If you’re a woman, someone who thinks…
Let me state one thing clearly for you at the top. I am not anti-baby. If anything, I may be the biggest fan of babies you know, especially other people’s babies. In fact at this point in life I think I could say I am a fan only of other…
House Bill 2, the deeply controversial anti-abortion law passed by the Texas Legislature in 2013, still isn’t fully effective. The U.S. Supreme Court has stayed perhaps the most onerous provision of the law, the one that essentially requires any facility performing abortions to be a mini-hospital, until it decides whether…
Last Wednesday brought a dose of positive news for anyone concerned about Texas’ sky-high teen birth rate, which given that it costs the state an estimated $1.1 billion per year and puts Texas in the company of such bastions of progressive public-health policy as Mississippi, Arkansas and Oklahoma, should be everyone. According…
For all his claims about being fiscally conservative, Ted Cruz sure isn’t acting like it in his wild-eyed quest to keep every single government penny away from Planned Parenthood. Cruz, along with a number of his farthest right compatriots in Congress, have made it very clear over the past month…
Texans, a lot of them, are getting medical insurance thanks to the Affordable Care Act. Some 700,000 in 2014, according to numbers released by the Census Bureau and collated by the left-leaning Center for Public Policy Priorities. That’s good. Three percent more Texans had insurance in 2014 than 2013. That’s…
Last week, a group of forensic video researchers strongly suggested that the videos shot at a variety of Planned Parenthood facilities by a group called the Center for Medical Progress were “substantially manipulated.” A video filmed at a Houston clinic that’s served as the fuel for a storm of conservative…
Since the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, the percentage of Texans without health insurance has dropped dramatically, from 27 percent in 2013 to 20.8 percent this year, according to Gallup. This is good news, as it means that a couple of million more people in the state have greater…
The sliver of ground Ken Paxton and the state of Texas are fighting over is so small as to be absurd. That’s not a surprise, of course. So far this year, setting aside the big fights over things like saving the planet, he’s taken a brave stand against same-sex spouses…
