Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
There is an increasing awareness of how air pollution is affecting health. As McHardy et al. (2020) report in the Health Affairs blog: Ambient air pollution is a key risk factor for preventable noncommunicable diseases (NCDs): It kills more than four million people every year globally. Worldwide, air pollution is responsible for 29 percent of all deaths and disease…
Antibiotics are valuable drugs. Being able to quickly combat infections if very important. However, overuse of antibiotics is problematic as the infecting organism may mutate more rapidly, leading to antibiotic resistant strains of the disease. Thus, when there is evidence of an infection, we should prescribe antibiotics; when there is no evidence, we should not.…
Section 8 housing vouchers uses government funds to subsidize low-income households when paying rent to private landlords. While the program may drive up rent somewhat, it does allow low-income households (that are lucky enough to get the voucher) to afford higher quality, more stable housing. But the Section 8 program was not the idea of…
Tuberculosis (TB) kills the most people in the world of any other pathogen. While treatments are available to fight TB, there are a number of challenges. First, many individuals may have latent TB where the disease may be contagious before symptoms are apparent. Second, the spread of HIV has also been problematic for controlling TB,…
Andrew Yang, Democratic candidate for President, is running largely on a platform of the “Freedom Dividend“. The Freedom Dividend is a $1000 monthly payment to ever American adult. The goal is to reduce inequality and provide some liquidity for low-income individuals to start a business, or have more work-life flexibility. This approach–a form of Universal…
The answer is ‘yes’ according to a paper by Probst, Eberth, and Crouch (2019). The reason they cite is “structural urbanism”. Economists may be to blame. Consider a typical economist’s perspective. One wants to balance costs and benefits. If one wants ‘fair’ allocation per person, then of course equal funding will give more funding to…
You may know that pollution is bad for your health, but how bad is it? Patrick Collison has a nice blog post summarizing the evidence. Chess players make more mistakes on polluted days. – Künn et al 2019. An increase in pollution is associated with increased risk of Alzheimers (Fu et al 2019) and dementia…
This week is the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Antibiotics Awareness Week. Although antibiotics are inexpensive, but are among the most valuable treatments around for fighting infection. Unfortunately, antibiotic resistance is on the rise. While antibiotic resistance has existed since ancient times, in the modern world antibiotic resistance may costs the world economy…
FDA is encouraging the development of abuse-deterrent formulations of opioids. What are abuse-deterrent formulations (ADF)? FDA explains: Abuse-deterrent formulations target the known or expected routes of abuse, such as crushing in order to snort or dissolving in order to inject, for the specific opioid drug substance. The good news is that ADF opioids reduce the…
In the past I have written about the limited evidence that wellness program work. So we should see that employers are abandoning these programs or at least scaling back? According to one recent study, however employers are actually increasing investments in wellness programs. The study surveys employers from over 500 companies with more than 100…