Alex Marquardt reported on ABC World News (4/1, story 3, 1:55, Muir) that in the wake of revelations that Lufthansa executives are “under fire after admitting Lufthansa hired Andreas Lubitz even after he told them he had suffered a serious depressive episode.” Allen Pizzey reported on the CBS Evening News (4/1, story 6, 1:50, Pelley) that on Wednesday, CEO Carsten Spohr “ducked all questions about the co-pilot.” NBC Nightly News (4/1, story 6, 2:00, Holt) also covered the story.

Reuters (3/28, Lehman) reported that a study (3/30) published online March 2 in the British Journal of Ophthalmology suggests that people with vision loss were often prone to suffer psycho-social issues and were more likely to have suicidal thoughts and make suicide attempts compared to those with normal vision. The study, which included nearly 30,000 adults followed between 2008-2012, also revealed that deteriorating vision was tied to a worsening in quality of life.

Related Links:

— “Vision loss increases risk for thoughts of suicide,” Shereen Lehman, Reuters, March 27, 2015.

On its front page, the New York Times (3/29, A1, Goode, Mouawad, Subscription Publication) reported in continuing coverage that last week’s crash of Germanwings Fight 9525 raises the question of whether or not “regulators are doing enough to detect pilots who are too mentally ill to fly.” Current programs in use “by airlines and regulators on either side of the Atlantic, aviation experts and psychiatrists said, leave much to be desired.” Yearly screening examinations “often merely nod to mental health issues, including only a few questions about depression or other illnesses,” and quite often, such “exams are often conducted by general practitioners with no psychiatric expertise.” The programs also rely on pilots to voluntarily report any problems they are experiencing, and pilots will conceal problems from their airline for fear of stigma or not being allowed to fly. Yearly screenings may fail to detect stress placed on a pilot who has undergone a major life stressor, such as relationship or financial problems.

The Washington Post (3/27, Keating) “Wonkblog” reported that the “relatively new National Violent Death Reporting System [NVDRS] maintained by the” CDC reveals that “more than three-quarters of murder suicides involve a crisis within two weeks of the incident, and more than 70 percent of cases involve problems with intimate partners.” Those two factors “are by far the most closely associated experience with murder suicide.”

Bloomberg News (3/28, Tozzi) reported that even outside the airline industry, employees as well as employers “have incentives to keep discussions of mental health out of the workplace.” Managers are afraid that “learning about an employee’s depression, for example, could open the door to discrimination suits if the employee is later disciplined,” while “workers fear being ostracized, held back from promotions, and even fired.”

Related Links:

— “Germanwings Crash Raises Questions About Shifting Ideas of Pilot Fitness,” Erica Goode and Jad Mouawad, New York Times, March 28, 2015.

The New York Times (3/26, A6, Zimmer, Subscription Publication) reports that researchers “in Iceland have produced an unprecedented snapshot of a nation’s genetic makeup, discovering a host of previously unknown gene mutations that may play roles” in diverse diseases. In four articles published March 25 in the journal Nature Genetics, scientists “at deCODE, an Icelandic genetics firm owned by Amgen, described sequencing the genomes – the complete DNA – of 2,636 Icelanders, the largest collection ever analyzed in a single human population.” From this “genetic information, the scientists were able to accurately infer the genomes of more than 100,000 other Icelanders, or almost a third of the entire country.”

Related Links:

— “In Iceland’s DNA, New Clues to Disease-Causing Genes,”Carl Zimmer, The New York Times, March 25, 2015.

Medscape (3/26, Keller) reports that research presented March 19 at the International Conference on Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s Diseases suggests that “higher consumption of green tea was associated with a lower risk for dementia or mild cognitive impairment (MCI),” but “black tea or coffee did not show the same effect.” Japanese researchers arrived at that conclusion after conducting “a population-based, prospective study of residents of Nakajima older than age 60 years, starting with participants with normal cognitive function in 2007-2008 as evaluated by using the Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) and the Clinical Dementia Rating (CDR) scale.”

Related Links:

— Medscape (requires login and subscription)