Yesterday the FDA approved a drug treatment for hemophilia B that costs $3.5 million per patient (story here). That’s not necessarily a ripoff by the drug maker. Developing new drugs is expensive, especially gene therapies, which this is. And drugs for rare diseases, lacking a mass market, usu[...]
Archive for the ‘Health’ Category
Junk food sellers target black kids
Johane Filemon (photo, left), a black nutritionist and mother, insists families of color “are being systematically targeted with ads for unhealthy foods.” She complains junk food ads are everywhere, “on TV, YouTube, social media platforms, game-streaming apps and even mobile educat[...]
November 7th, 2022 - 6:57 pm § in Health
Don’t lick the toads
I remember when hippies tried to get high by smoking banana peels. (Could they? Find out here.) Creative attempts to get high, like computer software, have evolved and grown more sophisticated since then. Enter the Sonoran Desert Toad. The “National Park Service … warned visitors on Fac[...]
Politicians shouldn’t make medical decisions
In this article, I will explain why you should trust your doctor, not a politician, for Covid-19 vaccination advice. Florida GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis is a smart guy; he graduated from Yale and Harvard Law School. But he has more ambition than character. These days he’s slamming Covid-19 vaccines[...]
October 18th, 2022 - 8:25 pm § in Health
Washington’s safest and sickest places during the pandemic
The San Juan islands, as you’d expect, were the safest place to be during the pandemic. Protected by isolation, cooperative residents, an early mask mandate, and a high vaccination rate, the islands experienced no Covid-19 deaths until January 2022, and only 2 total deaths,* both unvaccinated [...]
Why did Covid-19 kill more Republicans than Democrats?
Multiple academic studies have indicated that Republican were statistically more likely to die of Covid-19 than Democrats. The latest, a working paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research, concludes, “Average excess death rates in Florida and Ohio were 76% higher among Republicans than [...]
U.S. life expectancy is dropping
Most Americans assume longevity is increasing, but lately it’s gone into reverse. From 2019 to 2021, average U.S. life expectancy dropped from 79 years to 76 years (see story here). Losing over a million Americans to Covid-19 obviously skewed the statistics. But U.S. life expectancy was alread[...]
August 16th, 2022 - 3:38 pm § in Donald Trump, Health
Playing football without a helmet
The late President Gerald Ford grew up when college football was played with leather helmets, and years later critics snidely sniped that’s how he got to be “soft in the head.” Then there’s Richard Aaron York III, who on Sunday, August 15, 2022, smashed a car into a concrete [...]
The unintended consequences of hasty abortion bans
I grew up in a conservative community, and as a juvenile, my political thinking was conservative, too. Not just because everyone around me thought that way, but because conservatives’ black-and-white worldview seemed to make everything clear and simple: There’s right vs. wrong, good vs. [...]
August 8th, 2022 - 5:02 pm § in Health
Did Covid-19 turn America into a nation of alcoholics?
A lot of Americans apparently picked up boozing habits while stuck in their homes during the pandemic, according to the Daily Mail, a U.K.-based tabloid (see story here). Their source is vaguely-described studies. One of these showed “at-home drinking ‘spiked’ in 2020 and held strong in 20[...]