World Health Organization (WHO)

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Superbugs Spread Across U.S.

Brian Hughes | Washington Examiner | October 6, 2014

As Americans worry about Ebola, the swiftly spreading virus that has traveled from West Africa to Texas, a more silent killer poses a greater danger...Drug-resistant bacteria killed 23,000 people in America last year and caused 2 million illnesses...

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Survey: Less Than 10% Of Physician Practices Ready For ICD-10

Dan Bowman | FierceHealthIT | February 5, 2014

Less than 10 percent of practices responding to a survey issued by the Medical Group Management Association are ready for the transition to ICD-10 [...]. While the number is up from 4.7 percent who indicated readiness last summer, it adds to a growing chorus of providers and payers who indicate they aren't ready to switch from using ICD-9 coding. Read More »

Tamiflu Cost Us £424m Yet We Still Don’t Know Much About It

Tom Jefferson | The Conversation | June 3, 2013

Are you worried about how decisions involving public money are made? You should be. Read More »

The Antibiotic Resistance Coalition (ARC)

Press Release | Antibiotic Resistance Coalition (ARC) | May 22, 2014

Act now, or face catastrophic post-antibiotic era Read More »

The Anvil Podcast: OpenMRS

Several weeks ago I went to the O’Reilly Open Source Convention in Portland, Oregon. The OpenMRS project was represented there by a number of the team members, and I was able to have a few informal conversations with them. After I got back home, I conducted an interview with Ben Wolfe, who actually wasn’t at the conference, but he talked to me about what the OpenMRS project does, and who is using it in the world, and where it’s going in the future. We also talked a little bit about their Google Summer of Code students. Here’s my conversation with Ben.

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The Best Governance For Medicines ... Is In Thailand

Roy M. Poses | Health Care Renewal | May 23, 2013

Here in the US, a lot of people have been convinced that we have the best health care system in the world... Read More »

The Bird Flu Has Spread Beyond China, And It's 'One Of The Most Lethal' Ever

Connor Simpson | The Atlantic Wire | April 24, 2013

The new strain of bird flu infecting and killing people in China is on the move. All of the reported cases had been contained to a relative few hotspots, but the first reported case of a human infection outside mainland China arrived Wednesday, and that's got the world's top scientists pretty worried about this H7N9 strain—even if it's not being transmitted from person to person. Read More »

The Case Against Sugar

Gary Taubes | Aeon | December 22, 2016

‘Virtually zero.’ That’s a reasonable estimate of the probability that public health authorities in the foreseeable future will successfully curb the worldwide epidemics of obesity and diabetes, at least according to Margaret Chan, the director general of the World Health Organization (WHO) – a person who should know. Virtually zero is the likelihood, Chan said at the National Academy of Medicine’s annual meeting in October, that she and her many colleagues worldwide will successfully prevent ‘a bad situation’ from ‘getting much worse’...

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The Case For Open Access

Bart GJ Knols | Xindex | August 30, 2012

For most of us, it’s entirely logical that medical practitioners should be familiar with the latest scientific knowledge and evidence-based practices in order to treat ailments. This forms our fundamental basis of trust in medical professionals...But what if you live in sub-Saharan Africa, where the vast majority of medical personnel, as well as scientists, researchers and medical students, remain badly deprived of the latest medical developments? Read More »

The Challenges of Bringing Health Care to Everyone, Everywhere

Kate Torgovnick May | Ideas.Ted.Com | June 8, 2017

Around the world right now, more than one billion people don’t have access to basic health care. That means no checkups, no vaccinations, no medications, all because of the environment in which people live. They might be too poor to visit a clinic, or they might live too far from one, but the result is the same, and often fatal. It’s a problem that troubles many. Take physician Raj Panjabi, TED Prize winner and co-founder of Last Mile Health, who trains community health workers to bring care door-to-door in remote communities in Liberia (TED Talk: No one should die because they live too far from a doctor)...

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The Future Of Health Care Access

John A. MacDonald, Anita M. McGahan, and Will Mitchell | Stanford Social Innovation Review | October 18, 2013

Traditional health care is a hands-on, brick-and-mortar affair. But across the developing world, a wave of technology-driven innovation signals the emergence of a compelling new model. Read More »

The Health Benefits Of Trees

James Hamblin | The Atlantic | July 29, 2014

They prevent $7 billion in health costs every year by filtering air pollution—not to mention their psychological effects. New research says the closer you can live to trees, the better off you are...

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The ICD 10 Extension: For whatever reasons, Congress did the right thing!

Did you hear the one about the CMS administrator who was asked what it would take to delay the 2014 ICD-10 implementation deadline? An act of Congress, he smugly replied, according to unverified reports. Good thing he didn’t say an act of God. So, now that CMS has been overruled by Congress, who wins and who loses? Who’s happy and who’s not?

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The Need for Speed - It's Time to Act!

As a society we also need to get moving on the population level as well - and the sooner the better! In his fascinating genomic epidemiology detective work Trevor Bedford conducted based on the COVID-19 research he and his team had done in the Bedford lab in Seattle WA, he concluded that the narrow testing that was done in the Seattle area in the early days of the Coronavirus spread allowed the virus to spread faster. In contrast, the Coronavirus testing-blitz in South Korea appears to keep the death rate lower than it could be. It's time to test! The FDA gave high-tech labs the green light to operate tests before receiving any agency review or authorization and both Quest Diagnostics and LabCorp already announced that they have test in the market. But according to CDC, as of March 8 there were only 1,707 tests performed in the US vs. 189,236 in South Korea.

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The Next Frontier For Mobile Health

Adva Saldinger | Devex Impact | December 20, 2013

The mobile health community is growing up. After years of piloting ideas and trying to bring them to scale, mHealth leaders are setting their sights on a more ambitious target: integrated health systems. Read More »