Smallpox can be personally devastating. After a 14-day incubation period, patients experience high fevers, headaches, and sometimes severe abdominal pain. A rash resembling chicken pox appears in the mouth and throat, face, and forearms, and spreads to the trunk and legs. As patients recover, scabs break and pitted scars appear.
Smallpox can be personally devastating. After a 14-day incubation period, patients experience high fevers, headaches, and sometimes severe abdominal pain. A rash resembling chicken pox appears in the mouth and throat, face, and forearms, and spreads to the trunk and legs. As patients recover, scabs break and pitted scars appear.
The ability of working class Americans to bargain for health coverage at work gave them access to the same basic packages of benefits as executive management teams.
Many inherited disorders can perpetuate poverty by leading to disabilities that disrupt people's ability to work. In turn, someone's capacity to secure an effective new cure for these diseases can mean the difference between a life led productively, or one plagued by infirmity.
In fast moving fields like cancer, where doctors tailor treatments based on evidence that's constantly evolving, two years can be an eternity of waiting to learn about important science. For some patients, that interval can be fatal.
Zika is an addressable threat. While it falls outside of the regular routine of public health preparedness, we shouldn't be scrambling for new resources each time a threat like Zika starts to emerge.
Confronting a dangerous pandemic requires containing spread wherever it is reasonably possible. Sensible measures such as universal masking, testing and widespread and rapid contact tracing can help. The best way to protect the vulnerable is to try to protect everyone.
In 'Pox: An American History,' Michael Willrich meticulously traces the story of how the smallpox vaccine was pressed into service during a major outbreak.
It's important to protect the old and the vulnerable, who are at the highest risk of severe illness and bad outcomes. But like most issues of medicine, it isn't a binary choice. Given the uncertainties of how this virus spreads and its high risk of infirmities, it would be unwise to abandon efforts to limit Covid spread wherever possible.
Patients would be better off if states were able to tailor the benefits that Medicaid covers - targeting resources to sicker people and giving healthy adults cheaper, basic coverage.
The fact is that Medicaid doesn't even serve well the medical needs of people who should be its principal focus - Americans who are poor in large part because their chronic health problems leave them unable to earn a stable income.
Printing novel DNA might open the way to achievements once only conceivable in science fiction: designer bacteria that can produce new chemicals, such as more efficient fuels, or synthetic versions of our cells that make us resistant to the effects of radiation.
We've been scared from using antibiotics and antivirals out of some kind of weird sense of communal responsibility to keep bugs naive to our powerful weapons.
In the U.S, Zika outbreaks are hopefully going to be easy to isolate. The biggest threat is likely to be from the fear Zika sows, especially among expectant moms.
While faulty information from a digital health tool can influence people to make bad decisions, the risks are far lower than those posed by the usual products FDA subjects to pre-market review.