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Reuters blog archive
from Felix Salmon:
Learning from breast cancer
Over the weekend one of my friends took to Facebook to ask a very good question. Her four-year-old daughter was going to run a lemonade stand, and my friend wanted suggestions "to incorporate an element of giving into the project". Which charity should the daughter start supporting with her lemonade-stand profits? There were some very good answers, but there was also one woman who suggested, of all things, breast cancer research.
The Facebook post appeared at roughly the same time as Peggy Orenstein's excellent 6,600-word NYT Magazine cover story on the problems with the breast cancer industry. Orenstein concludes:
It has been four decades since the former first lady Betty Ford went public with her breast-cancer diagnosis, shattering the stigma of the disease. It has been three decades since the founding of Komen. Two decades since the introduction of the pink ribbon. Yet all that well-meaning awareness has ultimately made women less conscious of the facts: obscuring the limits of screening, conflating risk with disease, compromising our decisions about health care, celebrating “cancer survivors” who may have never required treating. And ultimately, it has come at the expense of those whose lives are most at risk.
There are broader lessons to be learned from what we're seeing in the world of breast cancer.
from Global Investing:
There’s cash in that trash
There's cash in that trash.
Analysts at Bank of America/Merrill Lynch are expounding opportunities to profit from the burgeoning waste disposal industry, which it estimates at $1 trillion at present but says could double within the next decade. They have compiled a list of more than 80 companies which may benefit most from the push for recycling waste, generating energy from biomass and building facilities to process or reduce waste. It's an industry that is likely to grow exponentially as incomes rise, especially in emerging economies, BofA/ML says in a note:
We believe that the global dynamics of waste volumes mean that waste management offers numerous opportunities for those with exposure to the value chain. We see opportunities across waste management, industrial treatment, waste-to-energy, wastewater & sewage,...recycling, and sustainable packaging among other areas.
from The Great Debate:
New bird flu strain creates fear and surveillance
An emerging bird flu that is mysterious and deadly is haunting China. With four fresh H7N9 cases reported in Jiangsu Province and no indication as to how three Chinese adults caught the little-noted avian flu virus that killed two of them in March, the global medical community is hoping the new flu will calm down until China’s health system can determine how it spread.
“I can tell you this thing is real and definitely has the markings of being a killer,” says Jason Tetro, coordinator of the Emerging Pathogens Research Centre in Ottawa, which on Monday examined gene sequences from three of China's H7N9 cases.
from Photographers Blog:
Clowning around with healthcare
Bern, Switzerland
By Pascal Lauener
The first time I meet Regula Kaltenrieder, a qualified acupuncturist, I didn't know that she was one of the 200 Clown Doctors of the Theodora foundation.
The funny and loud crowd celebrated their 20th anniversary on the Federal Parliament Square in Bern. The foundation was founded in 1993 through the initiative of two brothers, André and Jan Poulie, who decided, in memory of their mother, to name the foundation Theodora. Outside Switzerland, the foundation is currently active in seven countries: England, Belarus, China, Spain, France, Italy and Turkey. After a chat with the media representative of the foundation and several phone calls and e-mails later they accepted a photographer to go on a visit with one of their clown doctors.
from Felix Salmon:
Don’t let doctors’ incomes derail healthcare-cost reform
Sarah Kliff and Matt Yglesias both have good summaries of Steve Brill's monster Time article on healthcare costs. Both of them correctly point out that the heart of the piece is about negotiating power: who has it (Medicare); who doesn't have it (the uninsured); and how the lack of negotiating power on the healthcare-consumer side inevitably leads to sky-high costs.
Yglesias says that the natural conclusion from this is that either Medicare should cover everybody -- which would massively increase Medicare costs while massively decreasing overall healthcare costs -- or else that rates should be set by the government, even if the bills are paid privately. He also says that Brill "rejects both of these ideas".
from The Human Impact:
Q+A – Child-friendly toilets key in fight to improve global sanitation
If toilets meet children’s needs, this will keep them in school longer, reduce the spread of life-threatening diarrhoeal diseases and help meet development goals, according to the charity Water For People.
At least 2.5 billion people worldwide do not have proper sanitation facilities. The combined effects of improper sanitation, unsafe water supply and poor hygiene are estimated to cause almost 2,000 child deaths per day, the U.N. children’s agency, UNICEF, reports.
from Davos Notebook:
To fight worker illness, we need uniform measurements
Improving the health of employees worldwide is vital to our global economic strength and growth. In the U.S. alone, the economic cost of chronic diseases is estimated at $1.3 trillion annually. The World Economic Forum’s Workplace Wellness Alliance was launched in 2010, and it has spent the years since driving home the critical importance of investing in workplace wellness.
This year, the Alliance is releasing a report that underscores a crucial ingredient to help our mission. Entitled “Making the Right Investment: Employee Health and the Power of Metrics,” the report focuses on the need to establish a common set of yardsticks that organizations can use to understand fully the impact of their wellness programs. It further demonstrates how imperative it is for all of us to work together to learn more about the ways we can encourage and enhance health and wellness in the workplace.
from Felix Salmon:
How to improve vaccination
The NYT is leading its home page right now with a big story about the current raging flu epidemic. The cost of this disease is going to be enormous, both in dollars and in lives, and there's a limited number of things that anybody can do to slow it down. As Kent Sepkowitz says:
This season’s hyperactivity demonstrates emphatically how critical vaccination is to control of influenza... There can be no greater advertisement for vaccination or a louder call for better vaccines than the great influenza outbreak of 2012–13.
from The Human Impact:
London sanitation show aims to make “poo” hot topic
Human defecation remains a taboo subject, despite the fact that 2.5 billion people lack toilets, causing a global health crisis that kills more than a million children each year.
The London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) hopes a new exhibition opening on Thursday will make sanitation easier to discuss. The show is part of its efforts to help fight diseases causing diarrhoea, which kill more children than malaria, HIV/AIDS and measles combined.
from The Human Impact:
Female genital cutting ‘destroys women’ – Malian singer
By Maria Caspani
LONDON (TrustLaw) – "In Mali, when a girl has not been cut, it means she is dirty, she is loose," says Bamako-born singer Bafing Kul.
This concept baffled Kul, who struggled to understand why, in order to be pure, women in his country needed to be subjected to female genital mutilation (FGM) - a traditional practice involving the total or partial removal of the external genitalia.
