Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
The before-and-after pictures of the tsunami in Japan are heart-wrenching. And things look to be getting worse. From the New York Times: “With hydrogen gas bubbling up from chemical reactions set off by the hot fuel rods, the storage pond produced a fire and powerful explosion on Tuesday morning that blew a 26-foot-wide hole in…
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…
HIV is a huge health issue around the world and especially in sub-Saharan Africa. Many American NGOs have promoted abstinence programs as a way to prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS. However, most evidence finds that this approach has been ineffective. An NBER working paper by Dupas (2009) adds more support that abstinence programs do not…
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,…
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…
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…
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…