Elsevier

EXPLORE

Volume 14, Issue 2, March–April 2018, Pages 99-104
EXPLORE

Explorations
Politics is Now a Major Risk Factor for Illness and Death in America

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President Trump is Killing ME. Really

In September 2017 Jacob Bor, assistant professor in the Departments of Global Health and Epidemiology at Boston University, published research in the American Journal of Public Health that assessed whether voting patterns in the 2016 election were correlated with long-run trends in life expectancy in counties.11 He found, “Changes in county life expectancy from 1980 to 2014 were strongly negatively associated with Trump's vote share, with less support for Trump in counties experiencing greater

The War on Planned Parenthood

In May 2017 physician Melissa Moffitt, of Oregon Health & Science University, described the health threat posed by politics by focusing on Republican efforts to destroy Planned Parenthood:

As a practicing gynecologic oncologist for six years, I have dedicated my life to the health and well-being of women in Oregon. Every year I see hundreds of patients at all stages of cancer treatment and recovery. This commitment to my practice and patients makes it all the more disheartening and disturbing to

NIH in the Crosshairs

Healthcare initiatives that used to enjoy bipartisan support are under assault, including an American gem—our National Institutes of Health, the most prestigious biomedical research unit in the world. In March 2017 President Donald Trump released the first draft of his budget proposal for the coming year. He proposed to cut the budget of the NIH by 22%. This was part of a broad reordering of budgetary priorities away from science and social spending toward defense and border security, including

Clean, Beautiful Coal

Health-threatening, industry-pleasing decisions spill forth almost every day from the current administration. On 18 August 2017 the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine received an order from the Interior Department to stop an assessment of the potential risks to human health from coal mining by mountaintop removal. The State of West Virginia had requested the $1 million study in early August because people in rural Appalachia experience significantly higher rates of cancer

Climate Change and Hurricanes

Calling global warming a hoax concocted by China to create a trade advantage, Mr. Trump has pulled the United States from the Paris agreement on climate change. He went to war not just on global warming, but on other initiatives of President Obama. “Among Trump's first presidential acts, he instructed EPA Secretary Scott Pruitt to deep-six President Obama's Clean Power Plan, aimed at reducing carbon dioxide emissions from coal-fired power plants; and he ordered Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke to

Scientists Out, Non-Scientists In

Like a Gulf hurricane, Secretary Pruitt is on a rampage. He is replacing dozens of members on the EPA’s scientific advisory boards with non-scientists. This is like replacing a brain surgeon with a podiatrist (with no disrespect to podiatrists). In March he dismissed five scientists from the agency's 18-member Board of Scientific Counselors, replacing them with advisers who, said a spokesman, “understand the impact of regulations on the regulated community.” In July he dissolved the 15-member

Data Imperiled

Scientists are concerned that the Trump administration will do more than ignore scientific findings. They are worried that climate-change skeptics in high office may destroy them. Thus:

As Donald Trump was sworn into office as the new president of the United States on January 20, a group of around 60 programmers and scientists were gathered in the Department of Information Studies building at the University of California—Los Angeles, harvesting government data. A spreadsheet detailed their

Who Trusts Science? the shift

Trust in science has become polarized along political lines. It was not always so. In 2012 sociologist Gordon Gauchat, of the University of Wisconsin, examined levels of trust in science among various groups from 1974 to 2010. “Results show that group differences in trust in science are largely stable over the period, except for respondents identifying as conservative. Conservatives began the period with the highest trust in science, relative to liberals and moderates, and ended the period with

Values

Our national debate over healthcare is contentious because conservatives and progressives hold different values. Whose values should prevail in healthcare? Schwartz again:

If it is a fight over values, which values are best? Of course the critical word here is best, so let me define what I mean by that. Best is the greatest state of social wellness beginning with the individual and growing to include our entire society, Earth, and all the beings who inhabit the planet. This is the transition we

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