Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
Some positive news as reported in The Economist: On August 21st Nigeria marked three years since its last documented case of wild polio. That means the country is set to be declared polio-free by the World Health Organisation-backed Global Polio Eradication Initiative. If that happens, probably next year, all of Africa will be officially free…
That is what is proposed by Dana Goldman in his article in The Hill. He uses the case of Louisiana’s approach to pay for treatments for the hepatitis C virus (HCV) to make the point. The [Louisiana] Department of Health is working on a new strategy to expand access—one that involves a licensing deal. The state…
O’Neill Commission has identified a number of recommendations to tackling drug-resistant infections. Seth Seabury and Neeraj Sood have their own thoughts on how to incentivize the development of antibiotics to fight antimicrobial resistance (AMR) which they describe in an interesting article in the Health Affairs blog. They write: The US patent system incentivizes innovation by…
Good news reported from the NY Times: In a scientific triumph that will change the way the world fights a terrifying killer, an experimental Ebola vaccine tested on humans in the waning days of the West African epidemic has been shown to provide 100 percent protection against the lethal disease. The vaccine has not yet…
The American Journal of Managed Care has an interesting special issue on treatment for the hepatitus C virus (HCV). Jay Bhattacharya provides the introductory commentary, and starts off with the following. Although the medical prospects facing patients with hepatitis C virus (HCV) have never been better, the prospect of gaining access to a cure is another…
Treatments for the hepatitis C virus (HCV) are expensive. At one point they cost over $80,000 per year, although costs have decreased since then. To prevent moral hazard, should insurance companies rely on cost sharing to decrease utilization? An article by Lakdawalla, Linthicum, and Vanderpuye-Orgle (2016) argues that they shouldn’t. Cost sharing appears even less efficient when…
Antibiotics are one of the greatest inventions. They rank in ABC News’s top 10 health advances of all time. However, bacteria are not static. They can change and mutate to become anti-biotic resistant. In this constant battle against disease, new antibiotics are needed. Harvard’s Mega-Plate Petri Dish experiment shows in vivid detail why the development of…
The man, Donal Ainslie (DA) Anderson, whole help eliminate smallpox died on August 19. The Economist has an obituary to the man. This crowd of helpers, which delighted him, meant that no Nobel prize could be given for wiping out smallpox. If it had been, he might have shared it with William Foege, who first devised…
An interesting post by Nicolas Bagley at the Incidental Economist provides a brief overview of a class he taught on infectious diseases and the law. Looking at diseases ranging from cholera, Spanish flu, polio, AIDS, SARS, and Ebola, Bagley claims that ten key themes emerged: Governments are typically unprepared, disorganized, and resistant to taking steps…
Wired reports: Today, independent teams reported inScience and Nature Medicine how they’ve tinkered with a piece of viral protein so it can teach immune systems—in this case, in mice, ferrets, and monkeys—to fight whole groups of viruses rather than just a single strain. “It’s a great first step in the road for generating a universal…