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christian briggs

Health Care 2020 - Reason Magazine - 0 views

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    Since 2010, insurance companies had been turned essentially into public utilities with the feds setting strict minimum benefits requirements. The health reform bill also limited the administrative costs of insurers, which has ended up basically guaranteeing their profits. With competition all but outlawed, the increasingly consolidated insurance industry has had very little incentive to pay for new treatment regimens outside those specified by government standard-setting agencies. Federal government health agencies have been reluctant to authorize newer treatments because they often lead to higher insurance premiums that then must be subsidized by higher taxes. The seen aspect of health care reform is that it has had some success in providing more Americans with access to vintage 2010 medical therapies. The unseen aspect is that more people are suffering from and dying of diseases that might well have been cured had the Obama version of health care reform never been enacted. As a result of health care reform, Americans forfeited 2020 medicine in favor of more equal access to 2010 treatments.
Kevin Makice

Study links social environment to high attempted suicide rates among gay youth - 0 views

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    In the wake of several highly publicized suicides by gay teenagers, a new study finds that a negative social environment surrounding gay youth is associated with high rates of suicide attempts by lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) youth. The study, "The Social Environment and Suicide Attempts in a Population-Based Sample of LGB Youth," appears in the April 18 issue of Pediatrics. It was conducted by by Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health & Society Scholar Mark L. Hatzenbuehler at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health.
Kevin Makice

CO2 capture: Health effects of amines and their derivatives - 0 views

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    CO2 capture by means of amines is considered to be the most appropriate method to quickly begin with CO2 removal. During this capture process, some of the amines escaping the recycling process will be emitted into the air and will also form other compounds such as nitrosamines and nitramines. The Norwegian Institute of Public Health (NIPH) was commissioned by the Climate and Pollution Agency (Klif) to assess whether these new emissions are harmful to health - particularly in terms of the cancer risk to the general population. The results of the risk assessments were submitted recently.
Kevin Makice

2020 vision of vaccines for malaria, TB and HIV/AIDS - 0 views

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    Collectively, malaria, TB & HIV/AIDS cause more than five million deaths per year - nearly the entire population of the state of Washington - and represent one of the world's major public health challenges as we move into the second decade of the 21st century. In the May 26, 2011, edition of scientific journal Nature, Seattle BioMed Director Alan Aderem, Ph.D., along with Rino Rappuoli, Ph.D., Global Head of Vaccines Research for Novartis Vaccines & Diagnostics, discuss recent advances in vaccine development, along with new tools including systems biology and structure-based antigen design that could lead to a deeper understanding of mechanisms of protection. This, in turn, will illuminate the path to rational vaccine development to lift the burden of the world's most devastating infectious diseases.
Kevin Makice

Study finds air pollution linked to diabetes and hypertension in African-American women - 0 views

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    The incidence of type 2 diabetes and hypertension increases with cumulative levels of exposure to nitrogen oxides, according to a new study led by researchers from the Slone Epidemiology Center (SEC) at Boston University. The study, which appears online in the journal Circulation, was led by Patricia Coogan, D.Sc., associate professor of epidemiology at the Boston University School of Public Health and the SEC.
Kevin Makice

Large differences in mortality between urban and isolated rural areas - 1 views

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    In urban communities, less than 1 in 100 inhabitants died from Spanish flu in 1918, but in isolated communities up to 9 out of 10 died. An important explanation for the differences is due to different exposure to influenza in the decades before the Spanish flu came. Those living in urban communities probably had a higher degree of pre-existing immunity that protected against illness and death in 1918 than those living in very isolated rural areas. This is shown in a new study from the Norwegian Institute of Public Health.
Kevin Makice

Environmental pollutants lurk long after they 'disappear' - 0 views

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    The health implications of polluting the environment weigh increasingly on our public consciousness, and pharmaceutical wastes continue to be a main culprit. Now a Tel Aviv University researcher says that current testing for these dangerous contaminants isn't going far enough.
Kevin Makice

Amazon forest and the price of gold - 0 views

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    Ellen Silbergeld keeps the price of gold posted on the door to her office at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore. The price is now at a record high (better than $1,500 an ounce) and Silbergeld, professor at Hopkins and editor-in-chief of the journal Environmental Research knows that is really bad news for the Amazon.
Kevin Makice

New database to help track quality of medicines in global markets - 0 views

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    In the growing global battle against substandard and counterfeit medicines, the Promoting the Quality of Medicines (PQM) program has launched a new, public database of medicines collected and analyzed in collaboration with stakeholders from countries in Africa, South America and Southeast Asia. Free of charge and available to anyone with access to the internet, the Medicines Quality Database (MQDB) includes information on the quality of medicines collected from a variety of sources. To date, more than 8700 records of tested samples collected from Ghana, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, the Philippines, Thailand, Peru, Guyana and Colombia have been entered into the database.
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