Americans are confronting a care-giving calamity with the elderly at home, and the alarms are sounding loudly about it. But are experts and politicians grasping the severity of this crushing health care shortfall? The New York Times, Vox, Washington Post, and Forbes all published detailed and solid news articles about the nation’s quiet nightmare with the workforce needed to deal with the booming population of aging baby boomers. Just a reminder: This…

Big data and numbers may seem to drive the world these days, but human factors can play a dizzying role when it comes to statistics and medical treatments. For those fascinated by numeracy in health care, writer Hannah Fry, in a readable New Yorker essay, details how medicine and patients alike have been bedeviled by attempts to quantify life-and-death decision making. She tracks centuries of investigators experiments in applying rationality, logic, and mathematics to…

Consumers, regulators, politicians, and journalists need to keep pressing big corporations to better protect the public’s health because such campaigning can work. It has led to steps that may cut down on reckless promotion of expensive, burgeoning, and dubious treatments involving purported stem cells. It may make vehicles safer, so children and pets don’t die or suffer heat injury when mistakenly left in rear seats. More tough work still needs to be done, however,…

A key feature of great civilizations is that they strive to prevent outbreaks of deadly contagious diseases. So it’s more than worrisome that measles is making what the World Health Organization calls a “dramatic resurgence” in Europe. Measles, an entirely preventable disease, has in a single year doubled the number of its cases in four European nations, including Great Britain, in the first half of 2019: 90,000 cases versus 44,000 in 2018. Measles has come…

Red means stop, right? That’s a driving basic. But Americans’ flouting of a fundamental traffic regulation — the red light — is costing more lives than it has in a decade. The AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety has found that two people die daily in vehicle wrecks involving the running of a red light, NPR reported, noting: “Drivers blowing through red lights killed 939 people in 2017. That’s an increase of 31% from…