Sarah Fentem
Sarah Fentem reports on sickness and health as part of St. Louis Public Radio’s news team. She previously spent five years reporting for different NPR stations in Indiana, immersing herself deep, deep into an insurance policy beat from which she may never fully recover. A longitme NPR listener, she grew up hearing WQUB in Quincy, Illinois, which is now owned by STLPR. She lives in the Kingshighway Hills neighborhood, and in her spare time likes to watch old sitcoms, meticulously clean and organize her home and go on outdoor adventures with her fiancé Elliot. She has a cat, Lil Rock, and a dog, Ginger.
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Total solar eclipses occur every year or two, but it is exceedingly rare for the paths of two of them to intersect only a handful of years apart, as it has in a swath of southern Missouri and Illinois.
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Missouri was one of only four states, along with Georgia, Iowa and Texas, that saw an increase in infant mortality between 2021 and 2022, according to federal data. And Black women are dying at much higher rates than their white counterparts.
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Since 2017, the percentage of Missouri's kindergarten-age children who have received the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine has dropped from 95% to around 90%, according to state health officials.
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EMS workers across Missouri are receiving training on how to give overdose victims a dose of buprenorphine, which manages cravings and withdrawal symptoms, after reviving them from an overdose with the overdose reversal drug naloxone.
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A Missouri Foundation for Health report finds both planned and unexpected costs of medical care create financial, physical and emotional burdens for the state’s residents. “It's a system where even insured folks struggle,” one analyst says.
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A family-owned funeral home in Missouri purchased the 19th-century building and converted it into an operation for performing alkaline hydrolysis — a water-based alternative to traditional cremation.
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More than 300,000 Missourians have signed up for plans on Healthcare.gov, the federal health insurance marketplace. At the same time, Medicaid enrollment has dropped by more than 100,000 since Missouri's Medicaid purge began in June.
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BJC Healthcare has formally closed the deal that merges the St. Louis-based company with Saint Luke's Health System in Kansas City, officials announced Monday. The $10 billion merger creates a system that comprises 28 hospitals across Kansas, Illinois and Missouri.
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Missouri's prescription drug monitoring database went online last week. Health workers will now need to enter patient information into a statewide database when they dispense opioids and other controlled substances.
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St. Luke's, a Kansas City-based health system that operates 14 hospitals in Kansas and Missouri, has finalized plans to merge with BJC Healthcare in St. Louis. The two systems expect to complete the $10 billion deal by Jan. 1.