LISA BISTREICH-WOLFE and PATRICK GIBBONS, - RTI International
Stephan: Yet more evidence the Illness Profit System is failing us, even as it makes record profits. We just have to decide whether achieving broad citizen wellness or profit-making is the purpose of healthcare in the U.S.
RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK, N.C.-A shortage of oncologists and rising costs of chemotherapy and radiation therapies and imaging tests, are making delivering quality cancer care increasingly difficult, according to a new review by researchers at RTI International and Eli Lilly and Company.
The study, published in the March 1 issue of Cancer, found that the definition of quality cancer care differed among patients and physicians.
‘High-quality cancer care cannot be achieved without an understanding of the perceptions of quality,’ said Ann Colosia, Ph.D., a senior associate in market access and outcomes strategy at RTI Health Solutions, a business unit of RTI and the paper’s lead author. ‘The quality of cancer care is under pressure in part because of the rising number of cancer patients in the United States.’
The researchers reviewed 25 sources that described interviews or surveys with patients, providers or professionals in managed care settings. They found that patients defined quality cancer care as being treated well by providers, having multiple treatment options, and being part of the decision-making process.
Patients report poor quality of care when information is difficult to obtain, trust is limited or care is not well coordinated.
Providers, on the other hand, perceive quality cancer care as making decisions based […]
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EMILY GERTZ, - Chemical and Engineering News
Stephan: More on the trend of wasterwater and its effect on our environment. We clearly are not doing what we can and should be doing about cleaning up after ourselves.
When municipal wastewater treatment plants clean up sewage, they never fully remove some types of contaminants. The plants don’t track or treat some chemicals, such as pharmaceuticals, so these compounds remain in the water1, or effluent, that plants release into the environment. Now Canadian researchers report that effluent can cause metabolic stress in rainbow trout, which could harm the long-term health of fish populations (Environ. Sci. Technol., DOI: 10.1021/es103122g2).
Sewage treatment primarily reduces or removes trash, debris, organic matter, and disease-causing organisms from wastewater. Scientists worry about the impacts of the remaining compounds on aquatic organisms. Previous studies have investigated how individual chemicals or classes of these chemicals affect animals, particularly through their endocrine systems. Jennifer Ings, a graduate student at the University of Waterloo3, and her colleagues wanted to understand how animals responded to a realistic mix of the substances that linger in treated municipal wastewater.
The researchers placed cages containing eight to16 juvenile trout (Oncorhynchus mykiss) at five locations in the Speed River in Guelph, Ontario. Three of the sites were downstream of a municipal wastewater treatment plant. The water at these spots consisted of 100%, 50%, and 10% effluent. The final two sites were upstream of the plant and […]
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EMMETT DUFFY, PHD, - Virginia Institute of Marine Science
Stephan: Study co-author Jarrett Byrnes, of the National Center for Ecological Analyses and Synthesis, says 'Species extinction is happening now, and it's happening quickly. And unfortunately, our resources are limited. This means we're going to have to prioritize our conservation efforts, and to do that, scientists have to start providing concrete answers about the numbers and types of species that are needed to sustain human life. If we don't produce these estimates quickly, then we risk crossing a threshold that we can't come back from.
An international team of researchers including professor Emmett Duffy of the Virginia Institute of Marine Science has published a comprehensive new analysis showing that loss of plant biodiversity disrupts the fundamental services that ecosystems provide to humanity.
Plant communities-threatened by development, invasive species, climate change, and other factors-provide humans with food, help purify water supplies, generate oxygen, and supply raw materials for building, clothing, paper, and other products.
The 9-member research team, led by professor Brad Cardinale of the University of Michigan, analyzed the results of 574 field and laboratory studies-conducted across 5 continents during the last 2 decades-that measured the changes in productivity resulting from loss of plants species. This type of ‘meta-analysis
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NEIL TICKNER, - University of Maryland
Stephan: I read this to say that the survey shows what the public wants, and the Congressional and administration budgets show varying degrees of allegiance to what the uber-rich and corporations want.
This disconnect is eating away at our social fabric, and what is really concerning is how fast this is all happening.
A complete report on the new analysis is available online, click through to obtain it.
The original study, which produced the public results, was fielded December 18-29, 2010 with a sample of 793 respondents (margin of error plus or minus 3.5 percent). It was conducted using the web-enabled KnowledgePanel®, a probability-based panel designed to be representative of the U.S. population.
COLLEGE PARK, Md. – The public is on a different page than either the House of Representatives or the Obama Administration when it comes to the federal budget – with a different set of priorities and a greater willingness to cut spending and increase taxes – concludes a new analysis by the University of Maryland’s Program for Public Consultation2 (PPC).
This new analysis compares the House and administration budget proposals with those produced by a representative sample of U.S. adults. These public budgets were part of an innovative study released3 last month.
While there were some partisan differences in the magnitude of spending changes, two thirds of the time, the average Republican, Democrat and Independent in the survey agreed on the items that should be cut or increased.
* Defense: Public favors deep cuts while the administration and the House propose modest increases.
* Domestic: Public favors substantially more spending on job training, education and pollution control than either the House or the administration.
* Level of Cuts: On average the public made a net reduction in spending of $146 billion – far more than either the administration or […]
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KEVIN STACEY, - University of Chicago
Stephan: The idea that early humans were stupid or primitive is just simply wrong. Most of what you learned about early man in school has been shown to be nonsense.
That human evolution follows a progressive trajectory is one of the most deeply-entrenched assumptions about our species. This assumption is often expressed in popular media by showing cavemen speaking in grunts and monosyllables (the GEICO Cavemen being a notable exception). But is this assumption correct? Were the earliest humans significantly different from us?
In a paper published in the latest issue of Current Anthropology, archaeologist John Shea (Stony Brook University) shows they were not.
The problem, Shea argues, is that archaeologists have been focusing on the wrong measurement of early human behavior. Archaeologists have been searching for evidence of ‘behavioral modernity’, a quality supposedly unique to Homo sapiens, when they ought to have been investigating ‘behavioral variability,’ a quantitative dimension to the behavior of all living things.
Human origins research began in Europe, and the European Upper Paleolithic archaeological record has long been the standard against which the behavior of earlier and non-European humans is compared. During the Upper Paleolithic (45,000-12,000 years ago), Homo sapiens fossils first appear in Europe together with complex stone tool technology, carved bone tools, complex projectile weapons, advanced techniques for using fire, cave art, beads and other personal adornments. Similar behaviors are either universal or very nearly so […]
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