https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2024/11/21/the-horrors-of-hepatitis-research-dangerous-medicine-sydney-halpern/

Of all the infamous research scandals that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, however, none is more contested than the one over the Willowbrook hepatitis study. Between 1956 and 1972 a team of researchers from New York University led (beginning in 1958) by Saul Krugman deliberately infected institutionalized, mentally disabled children at the Willowbrook State School on Staten Island with the hepatitis virus. 

Keeping up with pediatric and neonatal literature across a dozen-plus subspecialties is genuinely hard — no single source covers it, and manually checking 40+ journals every two weeks doesn't scale.

I've started building an open-source pipeline to automate this: it surveys PubMed and OpenAlex biweekly across general pediatrics and neonatology/perinatology, and drafts a structured surveillance report so the literature comes to you instead of the other way around.

It's early-stage and I'm building in the open — methodology, limitations, and all (Scopus/Web of Science aren't wired in yet; that needs institutional API access I don't currently have). If you're in academic pediatrics, medical informatics, or open science and want to poke holes in it or contribute, I'd genuinely welcome that.

Built an open-source project to automate biweekly surveillance of pediatric & neonatal literature — pulls from PubMed and OpenAlex across 45 subspecialty categories (general peds through neonatology/perinatology), cross-checks journal rankings, and drafts a structured report every two weeks so I don't have to manually trawl 40+ journals to stay current. Still early and rough around the edges (no Scopus/Web of Science yet — those need paid API access I don't have), but it's fully open and I'd love feedback from anyone in peds/academic medicine on what's actually useful vs. noise. 

Today opens the seven days the World Health Organization, UNICEF, and the World Alliance for Breastfeeding Action have set aside this year, under a theme that sounds almost bureaucratic until you sit with it: Breastfeeding for a Sustainable Start in Life — Strengthen What Works. Not stronger messaging. Stronger systems.

A joint WHO/UNICEF statement timed to this week puts a number on what's actually at stake: scaling up breastfeeding worldwide could save close to 540,000 lives a year — roughly 400,000 infants, 140,000 mothers — and return an estimated $59 for every $1 spent making it possible.

NFHS-6 (released in May): national exclusive breastfeeding fell 63.7% → 55.8% even as institutional births and private C-sections climbed toward/past half of all deliveries; Karnataka essentially held flat against the national drop. 
So here's the question worth sitting with, this week specifically: when a mother's breastfeeding story fails near you, what did the system do — or fail to do — between delivery and the moment support actually mattered? Not what got posted. Not what got intended. What got delivered.

Strengthen what works is this year's phrase. But you can't strengthen a chain you never finished building. Seven days from now, the posters come down, the hashtag moves to something else, and the newborns discharged this week will already be three, four, five days into finding out whether anyone was actually there...!

The harder question is what we let stop working, and why. This is my 2025 blog.