Recently, several members from my extended family have fallen victim to the H1N1 Flu Virus, resulting in hospitalization. I’m linking my readers to the CDC’s H1N1 Flu reports so they can be aware of trends and any changes that may come about.
Pursuing national health care reform remains a priority for the President, Congress and the public. Policymakers have committed to passing comprehensive legislation by the end of the year. Expanding coverage to the uninsured as well as addressing health care cost and quality issues have emerged as the dominant drivers for systematic reform. Leading health reform proposals rely on a combination of public and private approaches to expand coverage, control costs and improve quality with shared responsibilities across employees, employers, government, consumers and insurers.
This meta-analytic review summarizes obesity prevention programs and their effects and investigates participant, intervention, delivery, and design features associated with larger effects. A literature search identified 64 prevention programs seeking to produce weight gain prevention effects, of which 21% produced significant prevention effects that were typically pre to post effects. Larger effects emerged for programs targeting children and adolescents (versus preadolescents) and females, programs that were relatively brief, programs solely targeting weight control versus other health behaviors (e.g., smoking), programs evaluated in pilot trials, and programs wherein participants must self-select into the intervention. Other factors, including mandated improvements in diet and exercise, sedentary behavior reduction, delivery by trained interventionists, and parental involvement, were not associated with significantly larger effects.
House lawmakers resumed work Thursday on a sweeping health-care overhaul after reaching a deal Wednesday to cut costs, trying to hasten a vote on President Barack Obama’s top domestic priority even as polls showed rising uneasiness about the plan.
After a delay on Wednesday night, members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee got back to debating a bill that would extend insurance coverage to nearly all Americans. It would set up a public plan to compete with private insurers and also require individuals to have coverage. Read a summary.
Posted July 30, 2009 by Ali Al-Rajhi under Health Policy
The man who helped usher in the environmental movement in the 1960s and ’70s has been rethinking his positions on cities, nuclear power, genetic modification and geo-engineering. This talk at the US State Department is a foretaste of his major new book, sure to provoke widespread debate.
About Stewart Brand
(source: TED)
Founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, cofounder of the Well and the Long Now Foundation, writer, editor and game designer, Stewart Brand has helped to define the collaborative, data-sharing, forward-thinking world we live in now.
Since the 1960s, he has maintained that — given access to the information we need — humanity can make the world a better place. One of his early accomplishments: helping to persuade NASA to release the first photo of the Earth from space. The iconic Big Blue Marble became the cover for his Whole Earth Catalog, a massive compendium of resources and facts he thought people might like to know. And we did: the 1972 edition sold 1.5 million copies. In 1987, he wrote The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT; in 1994, How Buildings Learn.
Currently Brand is working with computer scientist Danny Hillis to build the Clock of the Long Now, a 10,000-year timepiece; his Long Now Foundation also runs a number of spinoff projects, including the Rosetta Project, cataloguing the world’s languages, and the Long Bets website. He’s also busy with the Global Business Network (part of the Monitor Group), helping businesses plan for the near and way-far future.
But the authors of a widely-cited study linking the consumption of red meat to colorectal cancer now say their analysis contained “errors and omissions” and overstated the links. The study was conducted by the American Institute for Cancer Research (AICR) and World Cancer Reserach Fund (WCRF). See Errors found in cancer report for more details.
If you are critical about where you meat/eggs come from, then maybe these questions will help make a decision on what to buy. Also, HERE that you can ask organic farmers.
Lawmakers are considering two new taxes to help pay for a health care overhaul: a tax on fatty foods and taxing insurers on so-called Cadillac plans. Both proposals were scrutinized in news articles…A study released Monday by the Urban Institute and the University of Virginia found that “a 10% excise or sales tax on fattening foods could raise $522 billion over the next 10 years. A 20% tax could raise $937 billion.
I came across the following article when reading a couple of health related posts on Simoleon Sense. Paul Krugman gives his reasoning on why “in health care, the free market just doesn’t work.”
Judging both from comments on this blog and from some of my mail, a significant number of Americans believe that the answer to our health care problems — indeed, the only answer — is to rely on the free market. Quite a few seem to believe that this view reflects the lessons of economic theory.
Ali Al-Rajhi writes with the purpose of informing individuals in the Public Health field about pressing issues in environmental health, public health policy, epidemiology, and behavioral health. Learn more here.
