Dec 13th, 2022 - Editor's note: Find the latest COVID-19 news and guidance in Medscape's Coronavirus Resource Center. COVID-19 vaccinations prevented 3.2 million deaths and 18.5 million hospitalizations in the United States from December 2020 through November 2022, according to a new report Tuesday from the Commonwealth Fund and Yale School of Public Health. The report, developed from computer modeling, comes a...

Nov 22nd, 2022 - Editor's note: Find the latest COVID-19 news and guidance in Medscape's Coronavirus Resource Center. SARS-CoV-2 still moves among us, requiring continued efforts and resources to save lives. This is the first of six themes outlined in an article published this month in Nature. A multidisciplinary panel of 386 experts from 112 countries and territories was convened to recommend specific actions ...

Nov 14th, 2022 - Background/Purpose: Remission and low disease activity (LDA) are associated with decreased flares, damage, and mortality. However, little is known about the impact of disease activity states (DAS) on health care costs. We determined the independent impact of different definitions of remission and LDA on direct and indirect costs (DC, IC) in a multicentre, multi-ethnic inception cohort. Methods:...

Nov 13th, 2022 - Background/Purpose: Patients with psoriatic arthritis (PsA) may be at increased risk of herpes zoster (HZ). HZ can involve a painful dermatomal rash and lead to significant complications. This study estimated incremental healthcare resource utilization (HRU) and costs associated with HZ in patients with PsA. Methods: This retrospective cohort study used administrative claims data from Oct 1, 20...

Nov 13th, 2022 - Background Pharmacologic treatment for pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH) improves exercise capacity, functional class, and hemodynamic indexes. However, monthly prescription costs often exceed $4000. We examined associations between (1) medication copayment and (2) annual household income with adherence to pulmonary vasodilator therapy among individuals with PAH. Methods and Results We used...

Nov 12th, 2022 - Background/Purpose: Lupus nephritis (LN) is one of the most serious complications of systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE), which develops in about one-third of SLE patients within 10 years of initial diagnosis. LN is associated with considerable morbidity, including an increased risk of end-stage kidney diseases (ESKD), that may impose a substantial economic burden on the healthcare system. The o...

Nov 10th, 2022 - Expanding our global testing capacity is critical to preventing and containing pandemics1-9. Accordingly, accessible and adaptable automated platforms that in decentralized settings perform nucleic acid amplification tests resource-efficiently are required10-14. Pooled testing can be extremely efficient if the pooling strategy is based on local viral prevalence15-20; however, it requires automa...

Nov 9th, 2022 - Individuals who have chronic pain at age 44 are more likely to report poor general health, poor mental health, and joblessness when they are in their 50s and 60s, new research shows. Chronic pain at age 44 (in 2002) was also predictive of SARS-CoV-2 infection nearly two decades later, in 2021. "We speculate that pain earlier in life predicts a higher likelihood of COVID infection because it may...

Nov 2nd, 2022 - Gene therapy is known to be unaffordable to those who need it the most; however, evidence on the financial impact is limited. This study aimed to estimate the budget impact and affordability of the gene therapy idecabtagene vicleucel for the treatment of adult patients with relapsed or refractory multiple myeloma (rrMM) in the US over a 3-year period from the payer healthcare perspective. A bud...

Oct 6th, 2022 - Laggard rich countries risk slowing the fight against AIDS, malaria and TB.|2022||epidemiology,prevention & control,economics,epidemiology,prevention & control,epidemiology,prevention & control,epidemiology,prevention & control,

Sep 29th, 2022 - This transcript has been edited for clarity. I'm David Kerr, professor of cancer medicine at Oxford. As I'm gearing up to have my autumnal COVID-19 booster vaccine, there's a small controversy raging in the United Kingdom about access to a medicine called Evusheld. This was developed by AstraZeneca. It's a combination of two relatively long-acting antibodies (tixagevimab and cilgavimab) that bi...

Aug 21st, 2022 - Globally, nearly half of all deaths among children under the age of 5 years can be attributed to malaria, diarrhoea, and pneumonia. A significant proportion of these deaths occur in sub-Saharan Africa. Despite several programmes implemented in sub-Saharan Africa, the burden of these illnesses remains persistently high. To mobilise resources for such programmes it is necessary to evaluate their ...

Aug 18th, 2022 - Hypertension is a global problem that affects poorer countries as much as it affects more affluent ones, a new study suggests. A cross-sectional study of some 1.2 million adults in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) found that overall, rates of hypertension were similar across all levels of education and wealth. The one outlier was Southeast Asia. There, higher levels of education and hou...

Aug 17th, 2022 - Retinoblastoma Especially Deadly in Children in Low-Income Countries.|2022|Larkin HD,|economics,statistics & numerical data,statistics & numerical data,economics,epidemiology,mortality,therapy,economics,epidemiology,mortality,therapy,

Jul 28th, 2022 - The COVID-19 pandemic caused by SARS-CoV-2 is still raging. Similar to other RNA viruses, SARS-COV-2 is constantly mutating, which leads to the production of many infectious and lethal strains. For instance, the omicron variant detected in November 2021 became the leading strain of infection in many countries around the world and sparked an intense public debate on social media. The aim of this...

Jun 20th, 2022 - North Korean officials have reported a major outbreak of another infectious disease, which is affecting at least 800 families so far. Medical crews and disease investigators were sent to Haeju City in South Hwanghae province for an "acute enteric epidemic," which refers to a digestive illness. South Korean officials have said the outbreak may be cholera or typhoid, Reuters reported. The new out...

Jun 18th, 2022 - The Zika virus (ZIKV) epidemic, which was followed by an unprecedented outbreak of congenital microcephaly, emerged in Brazil unevenly, with apparent pockets of susceptibility. The present study aimed to detect high-risk areas for ZIKV infection and microcephaly in Goiania, a large city of 1.5 million inhabitants in Central-West Brazil. Using geocoded surveillance data from the Brazilian Inform...

Jun 14th, 2022 - Novel immunotherapy-based combination treatments have drastically improved clinical outcomes for previously untreated patients with advanced/metastatic renal cell carcinoma (aRCC). This study aimed to assess the temporal trends in grade 3/4 adverse event (AE) rates and associated costs of nivolumab plus cabozantinib combination therapy versus sunitinib monotherapy in previously untreated patien...

Apr 21st, 2022 - Mineworkers in Southern Africa have the highest rates of tuberculosis (TB) among working populations in the world (The World Bank, Benefits and costs associated with reducing tuberculosis among Southern Africa's mineworkers, 2014), making mineworkers a key population for TB program efforts. The current evaluation aimed to characterize mineworkers and former (ex-) mineworkers, and assess knowled...

Mar 26th, 2022 - In the wake of a large burden of silicosis and tuberculosis among ex-miners from the South African gold mining industry, several programmes have been engaged in examining and compensating those at risk of these diseases. Availability of a database from one such programme, the Q(h)ubeka Trust, provided an opportunity to examine the accuracy of length of service in predicting compensable silicosi...