COVID-19 may remain in our communities for the foreseeable future, and we are told to live with as yet to be defined “new normal.” By and large, this pandemic has been fought on an individual level, one case, mask, and vaccination at a time. Alternatively, environmental risk analysis involves three levels of specificity: community, local, and individual, comprising a “3-legged stool”. Understanding the first two legs is required to benefit the third.
Harm Reduction
Access to health care and having health insurance are two easily recognizable “social determinants” of health. But is having access to the Internet another social determinant? A new study and the media suggest that the answer is yes. Let’s see what the paper actually said and what it might mean.
Pneumonia is a relatively common problem resulting in antibiotics and the need, in some cases, for hospitalization or intensive care. Can physicians follow guidelines that deliver optimal care and reduce cost? Intermountain Healthcare offers a "yes."
The evidence clearly shows that vaping helps many smokers quit cigarettes. Naturally, federal regulators and state legislators are trying to kill the e-cigarette industry.
On March 25, 1911 a devastating inferno consumed the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in New York's lower Manhattan. There, 146 workers – mostly young immigrant women – either perished or jumped to their deaths to escape the ravaging flames. Some who reached the lobby were prevented from exiting because of the “raining” bodies falling from above. But the carnage proved far worse because, infamously, other exits had been locked.
A new study employs some blatantly obvious sleight of hand to amplify the so-called teen vaping 'epidemic.' Here's what you need to know.
“For a man's house is his castle, and each man's home is his safest refuge.” With that phrasing, English common law reinvented the Castle Doctrine, the concept that one may be safe and protect one’s home. With time, the definition of our “home” expanded into the space around us, morphing from the Castle Doctrine to Stand Your Ground. A new study looks at how those laws have changed our behavior.
Nurses, more so than physicians, are joining the Great Resignation. 32% say they are heading for the exits, up from 22% just a few months ago.
Another day, another bad vaping study makes headlines. This time researchers speculate that e-cigarette use may increase your risk for prediabetes.
What chemicals, specifically, pose a danger as a potential human carcinogen? To address this issue two competing approaches, which use scientific data to evaluate chemicals for this danger, are at odds. Can we tease out which of these two may be “better”?
It is indeed another day and time to complete my deeper look at the origin and uses of Morphine Milligram Equivalents (MME). It is time to consider the uncertainty introduced in how MMEs are calculated and how that makes the research on MME a minefield of unintended errors and variation.
Virus particles come from people, like you and me, when we are ill, even before we are symptomatic. While the necessity for masks for this pandemic may be ending, barrier face coverings (BFC) may, in the future, reduce exposure to particles of concern - other viruses. Here is the work of my organization.