Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
An interesting article by Ciancio et al. (2025) which examines the impact of learning one has HIV when no treatment is available. When there is no treatment available for a life-threatening disease, providing personal health information could lead to despair or fatalistic behaviors resulting in negative health outcomes. We document this possibility utilizing an experiment…
The Economist last week had in hopeful article on ways to break the cycle of HIV transmission, particularly among young woman who have sex with older men. Much of the discussion is on PrEP A more promising idea is to prevent girls and young women from becoming infected, ideally using methods which do not require…
Antibiotic resistance is an increasing problem. My own research shows that when infections are antibiotic resistance, the risk of complications rises as does the cost to treat the infection. According to the CDC, antimicrobial resistance is a major public health problem: …killing at least 1.27 million people worldwide and associated with nearly 5 million deaths…
COVID-19 vaccines have had a huge beneficial impact on patient health. One study found that between December 2020 and June 2021, COVID-19 vaccines saved 240,000 lives (Vilches et al. 2022). The figure below shows that as the Delta and Omicron variants spread in the fall of 2021, COVID-19 vaccines prevented significant number of deaths according…
An interesting discussion from This American Life (“The Herd“, transcript) talking about the origin of the term “communicable disease” with respect to public health monitoring for the 1918 flu pandemic. Ira Glass: Howard says [St. Louis Commissioner of Health] Dr. Starkloff had all kinds of messages, telling people to wash their hands, don’t cough on…
We have heard much about how COVID-19 has created a paradigm shift in the use of telemedicine. A paper by Patel et al. (2021) uses claims data between January 1, 2020, to June 16, 2020 to measure this trend quantitatively. They find that in a largely commercially-insured population: In the COVID-19 period, 30.1 percent of…
Looks like more good news on the COVID-19 vaccine front. Dr. Fauci’s prediction that the Pfizer/BioNTech foreshadowed positive news for future vaccines appears to have come true. Stat News reports: The Moderna vaccine reduced the risk of Covid-19 infection by 94.5%. There were 95 cases of infection among patients who received placebo in the company’s…
Interesting findings from an NBER working paper by Cronin and Evans (2020): Higher-quality nursing homes, as measured by inspection ratings, have substantially lower COVID-19 mortality. Quality does not predict the ability to prevent any COVID-19 resident or staff cases, but higher-quality establishments prevent the spread of resident infections conditional on having one. Preventing COVID-19 cases…
Great news on progress for a COVID-19 vaccine from Pfizer. From their press release: Vaccine candidate was found to be more than 90% effective in preventing COVID-19 in participants without evidence of prior SARS-CoV-2 infection in the first interim efficacy analysis Analysis evaluated 94 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in trial participants Study enrolled 43,538 participants,…
That is the key question explored in a recent article from The Economist titled “Masked up, ready to battle bugs“. As individuals in developing nations leave crowded cities for fear of COVID, they may be at more risk for malaria due to the presence of more standing water (which attracts malarial mosquitos) used for irrigation…