Category: Healthcare

The USDA and its partners maintain an invisible but permanent sterile fly barrier at the Darien Gap. What this means is that every week, airplanes fly over the Darien Gap, dropping sterile males by the millions to keep screwworms out of North and Central America.

The permanent sterile fly barrier just underscores the mind-boggling work it takes to not just eradicate an insect from a country, but to keep it away forever.

Increased trade with Cuba might have brought the little buggers back.

If the U.S. continues to open up trade and travel with Cuba, the screwworm is likely to cross those few hundred miles of ocean again. The best thing to do, says Hendrichs, is partner with Cubans to eradicate screwworms in their country, too. Screwworms don’t care about international relations, but they’ll exploit any holes in it to survive.

Source: Flesh-Eating Worms Have Returned to Florida – The Atlantic

Soylent Is healthier than the average North American diet. And that’s embarrassing.

It’s also cheaper. Much cheaper—just over $200 for a month’s-worth, even at the current small scale of production, whereas the average American spends about $600 per month on food.

So Soylent is more healthy than junk food. Does that mean we should all replace our meals with “meal replacements”? Of course not. That Soylent is healthier is more of an indictment of our broken lifestyles than it is a reason to slurp sludge, day after day. “Better than junk food” is a low bar to set, but no lower than our standards for anything else we put in our mouths.

Source: How Healthy Is Soylent? – The Atlantic

In our intergenerational analyses, we find that wealth increases children’s health care utilization in the years following the lottery and may also reduce obesity risk. The effects on most other child outcomes, including drug consumption, scholastic performance, and skills, can usually be bounded to a tight interval around zero. Overall, our findings suggest that in affluent countries with extensive social safety nets, causal effects of wealth are not a major source of the wealth-mortality gradients, nor of the observed relationships between child developmental outcomes and household income.

Source: Wealth, Health, and Child Development: Evidence from Administrative Data on Swedish Lottery Players

My own plan only covered my child as an extension of me for the first two days. After that, he was on his own.

Source: The Unconscionable Difficulty of Getting Health Insurance for a Newborn – The Atlantic

Source: Wonky Thoughts: Salt and Forgotten Knowledge

For nearly a century, health issues related to iodine deficiency were regarded as a solved problem, until both the problem and the solution became forgotten knowledge.