Posts Tagged ‘vaccine’
“Infant mortality and life expectancy are reasonable indicators of general well-being in a society”*…
… and in the U.S., as Adam Tooze explains, we’re doing not so well of late…
In August America’s Center for Disease Control (CDC) published a set of data that ought to have brought political, economic and social debate to a standstill. If there is one question that should surely dominate public policy debate, it is the question of life and death. What did the Declaration of Independence promise, after all, if not “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”. But on that score the CDC in 2022 delivered alarming news. In the last three years, life expectancy in the United States has plunged in a way not seen at any point in recent history.
America is inured to bad news about its health. Life expectancy in the United States has stagnated since 2011, a trend which separates the United States not just from rich peer countries but from most other countries in the world, rich or poor.
Given economic growth and advances in medicine for life expectancy to stagnate requires serious headwinds. In the United States those headwinds include, homicides and suicides, the opioid epidemic (so-called deaths of despair) car accidents and obesity. As John Burn-Murdoch shows in the FT, without those factors the US would have tracked its peer societies much more closely…
But stagnation is one thing, the collapse since 2019 is a phenomenon of a different quality. It is a full measure of the disaster that was the COVID pandemic in the United States. Over a million Americans died of COVID, one of the worst outcomes on the planet.
…
…it is not only China that has overtaken the United States based on this metric. In 2021 Cuba has a higher life expectancy than the US. So does Albania.
In a society marked by inequality as deep as modern America’s, to speak in terms of national averages is not very meaningful. The circumstances of life and health outcomes are vastly different…
…One might think that faced with these stark facts all other subjects of political debate would pale into insignificance. Whatever else a society should do, whatever else a political system promises, it should ensure that its citizens have a healthy life expectancy commensurate with their nation’s overall level of economic development. An ambitious society should aim to do more, as Japan does for instance. Judged by this basic metric, the contemporary United States fails and for a substantial minority of its population, it fails spectacularly. And yet that extraordinary and shameful fact barely registers in political debate, a silence that is both symptom and cause.
“Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness? How China, Cuba and Albania came to have higher life expectancy than the USA,” from @adam_tooze. Eminently worth reading in full.
For an example of the ways in which these wounds are self-inflicted: “The Human Psyche Was Not Built for This.”
* P. J. O’Rourke
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As we ponder priorities, we might recall that it was on this date in 1892 that the first diagnostic public heath laboratory in the U.S. was founded by New York City (as its “Division of Pathology, Bacteriology and Disinfection”). Spurred by the cholera epidemic of the time, it soon took on the diagnosis and tracing of diphtheria and tuberculosis; in 1895, it began production of a smallpox vaccine.
The New York City public health laboratory became a model for other cities’ public health departments. Within a few years, similar labs had become essential components of an effective health departments across the nation.
“The welfare and the future of our societies depend on our capacity to remain mobilized so as to improve the health of every mother and child”*…
Preparing for a world post Roe v Wade…
The red states poised to ban or severely limit abortion already tend to have limited access to health care, poor health outcomes and fewer safety net programs in place for mothers and children.
If the U.S. Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade, as it’s expected to, the ensuing increase in births will likely leave families in tough circumstances and strain systems that are already hanging by a thread.
“What we’re facing as a country is hundreds of thousands of births, probably disproportionately located in the states that have been most limited in what they do for pregnant women, infants and children. So this is the great paradox that we are dealing with,” said Sara Rosenbaum, a health law and policy professor at George Washington University. “We have not ever designed these programs for a world without Roe,” she added. “You need a child welfare system, the likes of which we’ve never seen.”…
A growing shortage of obstetricians, higher maternal mortality rates and worse health care outcomes generally, increased pressure on U.S. foster and adoption systems— it all bodes ill…
We know from focus on health outcomes that kids born into poverty, kids born into unstable social circumstances, tend to have higher incidence of early onset chronic diseases,” Shannon said. “We also know that when those children are raised in unstable circumstances and have to be cared for in foster care, the outcomes there are really sobering.
Richard Shannon, chief quality officer for Duke Health
“Red states aren’t prepared for a post-Roe baby boom,” from Caitlin Owens (@caitlinnowens) in @axios.
* Jean Ping
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As we contemplate care, we might sending healing birthday greetings to Thomas Huckle Weller; he was born on this date in 1915. A virologist, he developed a technique for cultivating poliomyelitis viruses in a test tube, using a combination of human embryonic skin and muscle tissue– which enabled the study of the virus “in the test tube,” a procedure that led to the development of polio vaccines. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1954.
“Life is a DNA software system”*…
DNA from discarded cigarette butts and chewed up gum has been used to create a series of life-sized 3D printed portraits for a new exhibition at the Wellcome Collection.
American artist Heather Dewey-Hagborg walked the streets of New York picking up cigarettes and hair for her project called Stranger Visions.
She then analysed the DNA to work out the gender and ethnicity of the people involved as well as their likely eye colour and other traits including the size of their nose, before using face-generating software and a 3D printer to create a series of speculative portraits…
More– and more photos– at “3D printed portraits made with DNA from cigarette butts to feature in new Wellcome Collection display.”
See also the analogically-related “Artificial Intelligence Generates Humans’ Faces Based on Their Voices.”
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As we noodle on nature and nurture, we might recall that it was on this date in 1981 that the USDA announced the first genetically-engineered vaccine for any animal or human disease: an immunization against Hoof and Mouth Disease (also known as Foot and Mouth Disease, or FMD), created using gene splicing.
“What the mind doesn’t understand, it worships or fears”*…
Vaccination rates are plummeting at top Hollywood schools, from Malibu to Beverly Hills, from John Thomas Dye to Turning Point, where affluent, educated parents are opting out in shocking numbers (leaving some schools’ immunization rates on par with South Sudan) as an outbreak of potentially fatal whooping cough threatens L.A. like “wildfire”…
Read @GarymBaum’s fascinating– and chilling– story (and find the interactive version of the map above) at “Hollywood’s Vaccine Wars: L.A.’s “Entitled” Westsiders Behind City’s Epidemic.” See also: “The Calculus of Contagion.”
[TotH to Quartz for the pointer]
* Alice Walker
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As we steel ourselves for the prick, we might spare a thought for Abraham Flexner; he died on this date in 1959. The founding director of Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Studies, Flexner is best remembered for his pioneering work as a reformer of American higher education, especially medical education. On the heels of his 1908 study, The American College, in which he effectively critiqued the university lecture as a method of instruction, he published the Flexner Report, which examined the state of American medical education and led to far-reaching reform in the training of doctors. The report called on American medical schools to enact higher admission and graduation standards, and to adhere strictly to the protocols of mainstream science in their teaching and research. While one unintended consequence of Flexner’s impactful advocacy was the reversion of American universities to male-only admittance programs to accommodate a smaller admission pool (female admissions picked up again only later the century), most historians agree with his biographer, Thomas Bonner, that Flexner was “the severest critic and the best friend American medicine ever had.”
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