(source: Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health)
Tom Kirsch, MD, MPH, an emergency physician at Johns Hopkins Hospital and co-director of the Bloomberg School’s Center for Refugee and Disaster Responseis leading the first of twoJohns Hopkins Disaster Teams to Haiti. He has served in a number of other disasters, including the September 11 destruction of the World Trade Center towers in 2001 and Hurricane Katrina.
The team will be stationed at University Hospital in Port-au-Prince, where they will provide health care for those affected by the earthquake.
Dr. Kirsch will send updates from Haiti, which you can follow here or on the CRDR Facebook page.
Shopping the perimeter of your local grocery store and avoiding the aisles will give you a head start on fighting the battle of the bulge. “In most grocery stores, the aisles are filled with canned goods, frozen and boxed dinners that are loaded with fat and extra unnecessary calories,” said Gaye Lynn Hicks, RD, LD, with The Methodist Weight Management Center in Houston. “The perimeter features fruits, vegetables, lean meats and other healthy fair.”
Q. I have a coworker who has diabetes and possibly a very rare syndrome that could shorten her life significantly. She is very concerned about it and is trying to take good care of herself by exercising. However, every day at lunch she brings a plain sandwich of cheese and white bread and nothing else. I don’t feel it’s my place to say anything, but is there a polite and indirect way to suggest whole wheat bread and vegetables?
Sharing powerful stories from his anti-obesity project in Huntington, W. Va., TED Prize winner Jamie Oliver makes the case for an all-out assault on our ignorance of food.
About Jamie Oliver
(source: TED)
Jamie Oliver has been drawn to the kitchen since he was a child working in his father’s pub-restaurant. He showed not only a precocious culinary talent but also a passion for creating (and talking about) fresh, honest, delicious food. In the past decade, the shaggy-haired “Naked Chef” of late-’90s BBC2 has built a worldwide media conglomerate of TV shows, books, cookware and magazines, all based on a formula of simple, unpretentious food that invites everyone to get busy in the kitchen. And as much as his cooking is generous, so is his business model — his Fifteen Foundation, for instance, trains young chefs from challenged backgrounds to run four of his restaurants.
Now, Oliver is using his fame and charm to bring attention to the changes that Brits and Americans need to make in their lifestyles and diet. Campaigns such as Jamie’s School Dinner, Ministry of Food and Food Revolution USA combine Oliver’s culinary tools, cookbooks and television, with serious activism and community organizing — to create change on both the individual and governmental level.
Posted February 23, 2010 by Ali Al-Rajhi under Video Articles
Governments are increasingly turning to private insurance in order to widen access to health care and make it more efficient. Are they expecting too much?
OTTO VON BISMARCK believed that the ordinary worker “is unsure if he will always be healthy and he can predict that he will reach old age and be unable to work. If he falls into poverty, and be that only through prolonged illness, he will find himself totally helpless.” So in 1883 Germany’s Iron Chancellor introduced a health-insurance law that required both companies and workers to contribute to the costs of care.
Regulation – perhaps one of the most disliked words by businesses, fundamental economists and the average American citizen. Most of us have grown to believe the market knows best; when left alone it operates more efficiently and produces better outcomes than the public sector ever could. This may be true, under certain conditions, but the devil is always in the details. Even where markets operate perfectly, government must still regulate to establish rules that present an open and honest playing field for consumers and businesses. From an ethical standpoint, they also regulate, because these markets may provide inadequate equity and well-being among the population; in other words, perfect markets do not consider unbalanced distributions of income or differences in health care needs. However, there are times when markets simply don’t function properly, thereby requiring governments to improve their performance. Such is the case of health care.
In the first two categories, for instance, government may protect patients’ rights when dealing with health care providers and insurers, as the latter will risk select and take advantage of ill patients if left unregulated (even when their illness may be unavoidable). Additionally, governments might reallocate recent medical graduates to rural areas where services are in low supply. In the third group, several types of “market failures” exist. Externalities, like immunizations, are goods that have unintended benefits or costs on society beyond the scope of transaction between an individual consumer and seller. As more people are immunized to a given disease, the population is less likely to catch that disease – thus in order to convince individuals to purchase immunizations, governments may need to provide subsidies. For bad externalities, like cigarettes, governments tax consumers or businesses to improve social welfare. Regulation is also crucial when helping patients or consumers make informed choices, because there exists severe “asymmetric information” in the health care sector. The knowledge gap between buyers and sellers in health care is enormous and wide-spread; we see this in pharmaceutical drug advertising, where patients often know very little about the product being marketed. Providers know far more than patients about necessary treatments and quality of health care, thus it is crucial for governments to regulate by establishing quality indicators for hospitals and doctors as well as creating incentives to provide sound levels of care. Finally, regulation can limit monopolies throughout the health sector. Failure to regulate often leads to poor health outcomes, higher costs & inequity through mechanisms such as supplier induced demand and weak competition – i.e. the most crucial element of functioning markets.
In developed economies, like the United States, regulation is much easier due to greater resource capacity, laws and human capital (though political and cultural challenges abound). Developing societies, however, lack such administrative resources and experience severe regulatory challenges – which are often the greatest cause of failing health care markets and high inequity among the population. For instance, unqualified practitioners and clinics in addition to poor medical supplies and ineffective drugs run rampant in parts of rural India, because it is impossible for all levels of government to enforce licensing, maintain transparency and reduce corruption.
Posted February 20, 2010 by Ali Al-Rajhi under Guest Bloggers
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.
