My name is Bree and this is my blog documenting my time as a PHASE (Public Health Advance Summer Education) research intern at WUSTL during Summer 2015. I'm an undergraduate at Allegheny College majoring in Global Health Studies, and I'm passionate about health policy, health communication, and health equity. This summer I will be working with Dr. Mary Politi on her project, "Supporting Decisions about Health Insurance to Improve Care for the Uninsured." Thank you for reading!
Today’s World Hepatitis Day, so it seems like a great time to celebrate rising global rates of vaccination! Find out more about preventing Hepatitis here: http://worldhepatitisday.org/
It is hard to believe that I only have three more days in St. Louis. This summer has gone by so incredibly fast. Still, I’ve learned a lot and I’m so glad I was able to be part of the PHASE program.
Work is definitely winding down, but tomorrow I am going to give my final presentation. Dr. Politi suggested that I submit my abstract to the Society of Behavioral Health’s Annual Meeting, so if my work is accepted I’ll be able to present a poster there (in DC) in the spring. So I’ve also been working on my abstract and poster for that, as well as helping to edit the qualitative paper that the research team will be submitting to a journal soon. I’m going to be named as an author on that paper which is incredibly exciting for me! Dr. Politi and I have also discussed ways that I can continue to be involved with some of her ongoing projects even after I leave, which I am really looking forward to.
All and all its been an amazing summer. I feel incredibly privileged to have been a part of this program, and I wish all of the other PHASE/SPRINGH fellows luck in whatever is next for them!
Lihong Wang creates the sort of medical technology you’d expect to find on the starship Enterprise.
Wang, a professor of biomedical engineering at Washington University in St. Louis, has already helped develop instruments that can detect individual cancer cells in the bloodstream and oxygen consumption deep within the body. He’s also created a camera that shoots at 100 billion frames a second, fast enough to freeze an object traveling at the speed of light.
Wang’s ultimate goal is to use a combination of light and sound to solve the mysteries of the human brain. The brain is a “magical black box we still don’t understand,” he says.
A Scientist Deploys Light And Sound To Reveal The Brain
While the Pentagon acknowledged years ago that it used American servicemen in World War II mustard gas experiments, NPR found new details about tests that grouped subjects by the color of their skin.
Part one of two investigative reports by NPR.
Further reading on the history of race-based medical experimentation in the U.S. (x) (x)
This is something all of us in public health / medicine need to be aware of, especially when working with underserved and vulnerable patients. Distrust of the medical system is completely warranted in many cases.
Here’s a visual explanation of spoon theory for those unfamiliar with the term. Depicted is one of my good days. I narrowed it down so as not to make the graphic too long.
As always, please let me know if you find any errors or things that need to be corrected (this is an unedited version, so there’s bound to be something).
A group of oncologists has released a framework for evaluating the effectiveness and costs of various cancer treatments.
I love seeing doctors playing a more active role in their patients’ lives like this and acknowledging how different factors besides physiological health (including mental health and financial status) may change patients’ experiences or choices when facing cancer. Its also great to see physicians taking a stand against the high drug prices that are adding to our national health care expenditure in an unsustainable way.
Even though this is just a first look at the rating scheme, the authors of this article included some examples to demonstrate how various drugs might be evaluated. For instance, one regiment for prostate cancer scored a 16 of 130 possible points, with a cost of $10,700 per month. A lung cancer drug priced at nearly $12,000 per month also scored at 16 out of 130 due to its small survival benefit.
While it is undoubtedly true that cancer drugs are becoming increasingly targeted at small and specific patient populations, and that different patients will value treatment options and outcomes differently, it is important to note that some drugs costing thousands and thousands per month are adding only weeks (or less) to even the lives of the patients they were developed for.
This is especially interesting to me in light of a lecture we all attended yesterday by Dr. Rochelle Walensky on the cost-effectiveness in the context of HIV/AIDS..
Picking a plan that provides the coverage you need at a price you can afford is tough. It's even harder when you don't have a great understanding of the language that insurers use to describe plans.
Hi everyone! Here is an article for the website The Conversation by my PI that I was able to contribute to. When I spoke with my PI earlier this week she said it had been read by more than 1,000 people so far!
Advances in HIV/AIDS treatment – most notably, the development of antiretroviral drugs – suggests the once deemed impossible is possible: an end to the AIDS epidemic, first locally and by 2030, around the world.
San Diego-based writer Jon Cohen chronicles how much progress has been made and where things stand in a sprawling article in the current issue of the journal Science. Also included is a sidebar story about UC San Diego research and groundwork in Tijuana, led by Jose Luis Burgos, Steffanie Strathdee and Division of Global Public Health colleagues.
Their battle is tougher (the city’s lone AIDS hospice doesn’t even have trained medical staff) but, says Strathdee, undaunted: “It’s entirely possible to end the AIDS epidemic in Tijuana.”
And if Tijuana can do it, writes Cohen, so can much of the rest of the world.
Image courtesy of Malcolm Linton, Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting http://pulitzercenter.org/
The simplest welfare program imaginable: an income for everyone, no strings attached.
“This fall, a truck dumped eight million coins outside the Parliament building in Bern, one for every Swiss citizen. It was a publicity stunt for advocates of an audacious social policy that just might become reality in the tiny, rich country. Along with the coins, activists delivered 125,000 signatures — enough to trigger a Swiss public referendum, this time on providing a monthly income to every citizen, no strings attached. Every month, every Swiss person would receive a check from the government, no matter how rich or poor, how hardworking or lazy, how old or young. Poverty would disappear. Economists, needless to say, are sharply divided on what would reappear in its place — and whether such a basic-income scheme might have some appeal for other, less socialist countries too.
The proposal is, in part, the brainchild of a German-born artist named Enno Schmidt, a leader in the basic-income movement. He knows it sounds a bit crazy. He thought the same when someone first described the policy to him, too. “I tell people not to think about it for others, but think about it for themselves,” Schmidt told me. “What would you do if you had that income? What if you were taking care of a child or an elderly person?” Schmidt said that the basic income would provide some dignity and security to the poor, especially Europe’s underemployed and unemployed. It would also, he said, help unleash creativity and entrepreneurialism: Switzerland’s workers would feel empowered to work the way they wanted to, rather than the way they had to just to get by. He even went so far as to compare it to a civil rights movement, like women’s suffrage or ending slavery.
When we spoke, Schmidt repeatedly described the policy as “stimmig.” Like many German words, it has no English equivalent, but it means something like “coherent and harmonious,” with a dash of “beauty” thrown in. It is an idea whose time has come, he was saying. And basic-income schemes are having something of a moment, even if they are hardly new. (Thomas Paine was an advocate.) But their renewed popularity says something troubling about the state of rich-world economies.
Go to a cocktail party in Berlin, and there is always someone spouting off about the benefits of a basic income, just as you might hear someone talking up Robin Hood taxes in New York or single-payer health care in Washington. And it’s not only in vogue in wealthy Switzerland. Beleaguered and debt-wracked Cyprus is weighing the implementation of basic incomes, too. They even are whispered about in the United States, where certain wonks on the libertarian right and liberal left have come to a strange convergence around the idea — some prefer an unconditional “basic” income that would go out to everyone, no strings attached; others a means-tested “minimum” income to supplement the earnings of the poor up to a given level.
The case from the right is one of expediency and efficacy. Let’s say that Congress decided to provide a basic income through the tax code or by expanding the Social Security program. Such a system might work better and be fairer than the current patchwork of programs, including welfare, food stamps and housing vouchers. A single father with two jobs and two children would no longer have to worry about the hassle of visiting a bunch of offices to receive benefits. And giving him a single lump sum might help him use his federal dollars better. Housing vouchers have to be spent on housing, food stamps on food. Those dollars would be more valuable — both to the recipient and the economy at large — if they were fungible.
Even better, conservatives think, such a program could significantly reduce the size of our federal bureaucracy. It could take the place of welfare, food stamps, housing vouchers and hundreds of other programs, all at once: Hello, basic income; goodbye, H.U.D. Charles Murray of the conservative American Enterprise Institute has proposed a minimum income for just that reason — feed the poor, and starve the beast. “Give the money to the people,” Murray wrote in his book “In Our Hands: A Plan to Replace the Welfare State.” He suggested guaranteeing $10,000 a year to anyone meeting the following conditions: be American, be over 21, stay out of jail and — as he once quipped — “have a pulse.”
The left is more concerned with the power of a minimum or basic income as an anti-poverty and pro-mobility tool. There happens to be some hard evidence to bolster the policy’s case. In the mid-1970s, the tiny Canadian town of Dauphin ( the “garden capital of Manitoba” ) acted as guinea pig for a grand experiment in social policy called “Mincome.” For a short period of time, all the residents of the town received a guaranteed minimum income. About 1,000 poor families got monthly checks to supplement their earnings.
Evelyn Forget, a health economist at the University of Manitoba, has done some of the best research on the results. Some of her findings were obvious: Poverty disappeared. But others were more surprising: High-school completion rates went up; hospitalization rates went down. “If you have a social program like this, community values themselves start to change,” Forget said.
There are strong arguments against minimum or basic incomes, too. Cost is one. Creating a massive disincentive to work is another. But some experts said the effect might be smaller than you would think. A basic income might be enough to live on, but not enough to live very well on. Such a program would be designed to end poverty without creating a nation of layabouts. The Mincome experiment offers some backup for that argument, too.“For a lot of economists, the issue was that you would disincentivize work,” said Wayne Simpson, a Canadian economist who has studied Mincome. “The evidence showed that it was not nearly as bad as some of the literature had suggested.”
There’s a deeper, scarier reason that arguments for guaranteed incomes have resurfaced of late. Wages are stagnant, unemployment is high and tens of millions of families are struggling in Europe and here at home. Despite record corporate earnings and skyrocketing fortunes for the college-educated and already well-off, the job market is simply not rewarding many fully employed workers with a decent way of life. Millions of households have had no real increase in earnings since the late 1980s. Consider the current debate over fast-food workers’ wages.
The advocacy group Low Pay Is Not OK posted a phone call, recorded by a 10-year McDonald’s veteran, Nancy Salgado, when she contacted the company’s “McResource” help line. The operator told Salgado that she could qualify for food stamps and home heating assistance, while also suggesting some area food banks — impressively, she knew to recommend these services without even asking about Salgado’s wage ($8.25 an hour), though she was aware Salgado worked full time. The company earned $5.5 billion in net profits last year, and appears to take for granted that many of its employees will be on the dole.
Absurd as a minimum income might seem to bootstrapping Americans, one already exists in a way — McDonald’s knows it. If our economy is no longer able to improve the lives of the working poor and low-income families, why not tweak our policies to do what we’re already doing, but better — more harmoniously? It’s hardly uplifting news, but minimum incomes just might be stimmig for the United States too.”
The results from Canada’s Mincome experiment suggest that this type of policy could have tremendous benefit for public health. The only groups who significantly reduced their work hours after receiving Mincome were new mothers and unmarried mothers. Because moms were able to spend more time with their children, dropout rates decreased and test scores increased. Bravo Switzerland for considering such a progressive policy!
BREAKING: The Supreme Court’s ruling in King v. Burwell ensures that 6.4 million people can keep their affordable health insurance coverage under Obamacare!
A list of educational resources helpful for discussing the events in Charleston, South Carolina and providing context to the history of race relations in the U.S.
An incredible project inspired by the #FergusonSyllabus.
“In the coming days, weeks and months, we will relive the horror and trauma of the Charleston shooting. Funerals will take place. Irrevocably shattered families will bury their loved ones. Tears of unspeakable grief will be shed. Politicians will posture about the Confederate flag, change the subject on gun control, and patronizingly laud black people for their ability to forgive. A trial will take place. Pundits and self-professed experts will subject us to more explanations of why Dylann Roof did what he did. The soul wrenching details of Roof’s actions will be made public for us to hear and see. We will be told that his execution is necessary for closure, knowing full well that when it comes to atrocities committed against African Americans, closure all too often means sweeping history under the rug.
These moments promise to test our moral strength and spiritual resolve. But, as black people have done throughout time, we will find sources of mental and emotional sustenance. The work of redeeming America and saving its soul will continue. #CharlestonSyllabus, as community formation, as knowledge production, as intellectual practice, offers to aid us in our work and provide inspiration to press on.” -Dr. Chad Williams, Associate Professor of African and African-American studies at Brandeis University (original article)
Planned Parenthood has unveiled Uber, but for STD testing
The service, called Planned Parenthood Direct, charges $149 for a urine testing kit for chlamydia and gonorrhea, the two most common STDs in the United States. If the test comes back positive, the fee already covers any necessary treatment.
“We understand that life gets busy, and this way, consumers can access STD testing without needing to make an appointment,” says Jill Balderson, vice president of health innovation at Planned Parenthood. “They can order a kit to their home, send the samples back, and get their results securely and discreetly.”
There are two big advantages to visiting Planned Parenthood’s mobile app versus one of their clinics: privacy and convenience. But will patients miss out on in-person care?
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