Health Care Quality in Cuba

Many people who claim the U.S. healthcare system is broken point to Cuba as a country that spends little on health but gets high returns.  Michael Moore’s documentary Sicko even visited Cuba and claimed that it could be a model for a single payer system in the U.S.  As the Economist reports: “Until recently, Cubans…

Employers Pushing Healthier Living

“This isn’t about big brother telling people what to do,” says John Rice, GE’s vice-chairman, “but helping them make better choices.” The Economist reviews large employers efforts to improve employee health and thus decrease their own health care costs.  Some of these efforts include: Prohibiting smoking on company premises Handing our healthy recipes Building on-site…

Drinking in College is “Largely Positive”?

According to Marshall Poe, drinking in college has more positives than negatives. “Rowdy drinking is not the problem. It is an essential, ineradicable, and largely positive element of American college culture. The problem is students who cannot or will not engage in rowdy drinking safely, for they often harm themselves and others.” How is drinking a…

End of the War on Drugs?

According to Businessweek: President Barack Obama’s plan to fight drug abuse and trafficking proposes spending $15.5 billion next year and shifting the emphasis from fighting a war on drugs to treating the problem as a national health issue, the administration’s top drug-policy adviser said in an interview. “It’s a disease, it’s diagnosable and it’s certainly…

Flushed

I just finished reading an interesting book on plumbing.  I can just see that I lost half my readers with that last sentence.  How can plumbing be interesting? It turns out that if you are interested in health, you must be interested in plumbing.  Disposing of human waste is one of the biggest health problems,…

Flu Surveillance

Google searches as a public health resource: Google.org has released Flu Trends, an online reporting tool for flu-related search activity. It’s long been theorized that Google’s search data would be useful to predict epidemics. This is the first time they’ve released a tool like this to the public. As they say on the main page: We have found a…

Poor housing market increases incidence of West Nile

California has been one of the states that have been hardest hit by the “housing crisis.” According to the May 2008 Case/Shiller Index, home prices in San Diego and Los Angeles Counties have fallen 23% and 25% respectively over the past year. Foreclosures are rising and many houses are now left empty. The Economist reports…

Violence as a Public Health Issue

Can we think of issues related to violent crime as basically similar to that of a contagious disease?  This is the question an article in the N.Y. Times Magazine (“Blocking the Transmission of Violence“) attempts to answer. Violence may spread like an epidemic; murders lead to revenge killings, which lead to more revenge killings.  Stopping…