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Prescription drug prices in the United States are significantly higher than in other nations, with prices in the U.S. averaging 2.56 times those seen in 32 other nations, according to a new RAND Corporation report.
The gap between prices in the U.S. and other countries is even larger for brand-named drugs, with U.S. prices averaging 3.44 times those in comparison nations.
The RAND study found that prices for unbranded generic drugs which account for 84% of drugs sold in the U.S. by volume but only 12% of U.S. spending are slightly lower in the U.S. than in most other nations.
A new paper in the
Review of Economic Studies, published by Oxford University Press, finds that a generous parental leave policy nurses enjoyed in Denmark caused nursing shortages, which resulted in a decline in the quality of hospital and nursing home care. The study estimates a large increase in nursing home mortality.
Beginning in 1994 a parental-leave program in Denmark offered any parent the opportunity to take up to a full year off work, paid, for every child under the age of nine. The researchers find that many nurses in Denmark took advantage of this program. Nurses, however, could not be replaced on net despite the Danish government s efforts to expand education and immigration to cover the gap.
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Stopping the spread of COVID-19 is difficult enough. It s even more complicated and confusing when information and resources provided by governments are largely inaccessible to a variety of disabled populations. A newly-published global survey of national health authority websites in nearly 200 countries has directly quantified COVID-19 information accessibility.
The survey, published on January 27, 2021 in the journal
Frontiers in Medicine, was conducted by researchers and medical professionals from Bar-Ilan University s Azrieli Faculty of Medicine, the Galilee Medical Center and Tel Aviv University.
The researchers utilized universal accessibility criteria written by the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI), to determine what percentage of national health authority websites fully implemented accessibility principles of the WAI, a global organization seeking to improve website accessibility. With the rise in smartphone use as a primary method of gaining Internet access
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IMAGE: Age-adjusted incidence rates per 100,00 in 1990 and 2017 in all countries studied. view more
Credit: European Heart Journal
The wealthiest countries in Europe have higher death rates from atrial fibrillation than the least wealthy and these death rates are increasing more rapidly than incidence rates, according to the first analysis of its kind published in the
European Heart Journal [1] today (Tuesday). The study also found that women who developed the condition were more likely than men to die from it in all 20 European countries studied.
The researchers believe the difference between countries could be due to lifestyle factors, such as increased obesity and alcohol consumption in wealthier countries, or what is known as the survivor effect , where people live for longer due to better treatments for other diseases such as cancer, leaving greater numbers of more elderly people to die from diseases of the heart or circulatory system, such as atrial
Credit: University of Ottawa
An analysis undertaken by Faculty of Law professors and a physician-researcher from the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Ottawa feels provincial and territorial governments should set clear rules for vaccinating health care workers against SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, in public and private settings.
Mandatory vaccination for health care workers: an analysis of law and policy, published in the
Canadian Medical Association Journal (CMAJ), describes legal precedents from attempts to mandate influenza vaccines for health care workers and how those precedents might apply to SARS-CoV-2 vaccination. It also describes the legal justification for mandating SARS-CoV-2 vaccination for health care workers and other legal considerations.