Federal health advisors say women can now consider three options when it's time for their cervical cancer screening tests. The influential group, the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF), has expanded its recommendations for this potentially life-saving exam.

The new recommendations were published in the latest issue of JAMA.

Pap smears have saved many lives since they became available decades ago. Inspecting samples of cervical tissue for pre-cancerous changes is effective at catching possible cancer, and is still the go-to test for women aged 21 to 29, according to the USPSTF guidelines. But there's another option. 

"Most cervical cancer is caused by what's called the human papilloma virus, or HPV," says Stanford Health Policy's Dr. Douglas Owens, a professor of medicine at Stanford Medicine and vice-chair of the USPSTF. "And we now have tests for HPV and that's an important step forward."

Read the full NPR story

"If you want some notion of the problem, just try uttering the words “public administration” before a roomful of students and watch them look at their phones or start to fall asleep. Nonetheless, the classic field of public administration is one of the most important today, and its decline (at least in the United States) is one of the reasons why we get poor service from government," writes CDDRL Director Francis Fukuyama. Read the article here.

"The idea that the big internet platforms are not media companies has never really been tenable, and the contradictions in their public protestations of neutrality have become ever more apparent over time," writes Francis Fukuyama in The American Interest. Read the article here. 

The Trump administration's immigration crackdown may be leading to an unintended consequence: a drop-off in benefits enrollment among legal Hispanic immigrants, according to new research by Stanford Health Policy's Marcella Alsan.

This CBS News story about her work notes that an immigration program called Secure Communities, which was rolled out during the Obama administration, is linked to a lower take-up of benefits such as food stamps and health care enrollment.

In a new paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, Alsan and Crystal Yang of Harvard Law School found Hispanic households were particularly hard-hit, even those with legal immigration status.

"We find evidence that our results may be driven by deportation fear rather than lack of benefit information or stigma," the researchers wrote.  "Though not at personal risk of deportation, Hispanic citizens may fear their participation could expose non-citizens in their network to immigration authorities. We find significant declines in SNAP and ACA enrollment, particularly among mixed-citizenship status households and in areas where deportation fear is highest."

Read the CBS News story.

"What is different today is the speed and extraterritorial reach of disinformation. Over-restriction on content undermines our democratic values, but understanding the mechanisms of manipulation opens up the solutions." Our Eileen Donahoe, Executive Director of CDDRL's Global Digital Policy Incubator, said in the podcast "Digital Media: Combatting Threats in the Era of Fake News." Listen here.

On May 30, Congressional Representative Steve Russell spoke to Stanford students enrolled in Technology and Security (MS&E 193/293) about the role of Congress in national security.