Health Policy News
Featured News
SHP's Joshua Salomon and colleagues offer an alternative approach to COVID-19 vaccine distribution — modeling a flexible strategy that would result in an additional 23% to 29% of COVID-19 cases averted compared with the current fixed strategy,.
The most comprehensive study of American children who experience gun violence at school finds they are less likely to graduate from high school or enroll in college — and less likely to hold a job as a young adult. Co-authored by SHP's Maya Rossin-Slater, the researchers estimate a loss in lifetime income of $115,550 per shooting-exposed student.
New research by Maria Polyakova and Petra Persson — both faculty fellows at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research — shows that socioeconomic status is hereditary and getting stronger over time. Children who grow up in poor households are likely to work low-wage jobs as adults. Adult kids of high-income parents typically have higher incomes themselves.
The world of economics has not always opened its arms to women — in fact it can be outright hostile. But the field influences so much public policy, so SHP medical economist Maya Rossin-Slater brings together other early career economists to mentor and encourage aspiring economists from around the world.
The Uncertain Impact of Accelerating Science
The urgency of the coronavirus pandemic has led to enormous research efforts and some shortcuts. Michelle Mello, a professor of medicine and law, and David Magnus, a professor of medicine and biomedical ethnics, write in this Scientific American commentary that the scientific surge to understand COVID-19 is inspiring — but has led to some ethical dilemmas.
The COVID-19 pandemic has hit Black and Hispanic populations harder than most for a variety of socioeconomic and medical reasons. Two Stanford PhD students are investigating what interventions might work to combat the racial disparities.
California and its 58 counties have issued more than 1,500 public health orders since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. A team of Stanford researchers has put those orders into a dataset to help policymakers and public health officials plan and protect.
Hannah Fung — a PhD candidate in biology at the School of Humanities and Sciences and a member of the SHP COVID modeling team — talks to us about a new study that shows 17% of COVID-19 patients pass the virus onto others in their households.
SHP's Jeremy Goldhaber-Fiebert, David Studdert and Michelle Mello write in this JAMA Health Forum Insight that school reopening efforts must account for characteristics of the communities within which schools are embedded.
Most Americans think colorectal cancer is a disease of the elderly. But more young people — particularly Black men and women — are falling to the country's third deadliest type of cancer. The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force hopes to change that by lowering the age of routine testing to 45.
Stanford Health Policy's Michelle Mello and Stanford medical student Yasmin Rafiei write in this New England Journal of Medicine perspective that most school reopening plans focus on screening for Covid-19 symptoms. Yet recent research indicates that symptom screening alone will not enable schools to contain Covid-19 outbreaks.
With unaccompanied minors being detained in hotels during COVID-19, Stanford professor of pediatrics Paul Wise is among the few external people with full access to the facilities, detained children, and the agencies responsible for their care.
Election to the National Academy is considered one of the highest honors in the fields of health and medicine, recognizing individuals who have demonstrated outstanding professional achievement and commitment to service.
Epidemiological modeling has emerged as a crucial tool to help decision-makers combat COVID-19, with calls for non-pharmaceutical interventions such as stay-at-home orders and the wearing of masks. But those models have become ubiquitous and part of the public lexicon — so Nirav Shah and Jason Wang write that they should follow an impact-oriented approach.
School shootings are a horrific U.S. phenomenon. And the tragedies aren’t limited to the shootings themselves. SHP's Maya Rossin-Slater finds that fatal shootings have a lingering impact on the mental health of those who survive them.
An estimated 1.8 million African children have been spared crippling paralysis, and 180,000 lives have been saved. Lessons from this success can inform our global response to COVID-19.
For a recent 1:2:1 podcast, Stanford Medicine's Paul Costello asked Stanford Health Policy's Jason Wang about best practices for keeping schools safe and why it's important for kids to have in-person learning when possible.
Goldhaber-Fiebert will become the Society of Medical Decision Making's next secretary-treasurer. “SMDM has been bringing together the global methodological leaders in decision science for health and medicine for decades,” he says.
The coronavirus pandemic is exacerbating domestic violence, particularly among low-income families. Research by Maya Rossin-Slater finds that babies born to mothers who experience an assault during pregnancy are more likely to weigh much less and be born prematurely — resulting in long-term deficits in health and well-being.
The U.S. Supreme Court has interpreted the 8th Amendment of the Constitution, which prohibits cruel and unusual punishment, to guarantee prisoners a minimum basic level of health care. Yet even though prisons are the epicenter of the hepatitis C epidemic, only a small minority of prisoners have gained access to new "miracle" drugs to treat HCV.
Stanford postdoc Ashley Styczynski and collaborators build a website devoted to protecting health-care workers in under-resourced countries, using infographics and videos to show them how to create, wear and preserve personal protective equipment.
While there is no national, cohesive COVID-19 contact tracing plan, SHP's Joshua Salomon writes that it's important to continue to invest in contact tracing capacity now, because once we can get a handle on the virus, the combination of testing, contact tracing and supported isolation will be essential to the containment and outbreak response.
“We’ve never been closer to each other or to those we serve," says Health Policy PhD candidate Suhani Jalota, founder of the Myna Mahila Foundation, a Mumbai-based women’s health and employment nonprofit. Its mission is to create the next generation of women leaders in urban slum communities — but COVID-19 isn't making it easy.
SHP's Jason Wang and School of Medicine student Henry Bair suggest schools should and can reopen safely if they follow a set of strict — though expensive — guidelines to avoid COVID-19 infections among students and teachers.