Health and Illness

Does Austerity Really “Kill”?

by Matthew Melchiorre on May 23, 2013 · 1 comment

in Economy, Health and Illness, Healthcare, International, Labor, Regulation

Does austerity kill? In a recent New York Times op-ed, David Stuckler and Sanjay Basu claim that fiscal austerity leads to a worsening of health outcomes, using higher suicide and disease rates across Southern Europe as their case-in-point. But there are problems with this formulation.

First, the authors make the mistake of linking fiscal austerity with less health spending.  Greece, Spain, and Italy chose to cut health spending even though there were better choices for cuts. And health spending didn’t put them into deep debt to begin with. Borrowing at cheap interest rates and spending it on pet projects and political patronage — which includes the welfare state, but not so much in health — put them in deep debt. Estonia swiftly and severely began to reduce the size of government in 2009, but it increased health spending during that period and suffered no health declines.

Second, Stuckler and Basu point to high unemployment and trimmed social services as the sources of increased depression and suicide in Southern Europe. But this is not an argument against austerity; it is an argument to make people less dependent on the social welfare system. In Southern Europe, labor markets are broken. That’s why the IMF gave each country a failing grade in labor market efficiency in 2010. In Italy, it’s illegal to fire employees for poor performance and difficult to dismiss them for outright negligence. Layoffs also are a long and expensive process. So,when recession comes, employers can’t hire at lower wages and don’t want to hire because of these factors — which makes matters even worse. Droves of Italians and Spaniards wouldn’t be dependent upon state welfare today if labor markets were more flexible. That’s why austerity should regard not just cutting spending and revenues, but also shrinking the regulatory state. Job protections,  a hidden cost of the welfare state, are the real killer.

The narrative with which the authors open their op-ed—in which an older Italian family commits suicide because Italy’s increasing the pension eligibility age forced the main breadwinner back into a workforce with meager opportunities—tells us to abandon not austerity but the level of commitment to current welfare-state policies. If businesses had more flexibility to hire and fire workers, if the implicit tax rate on labor wasn’t the highest in all of Europe, and if Italy’s court system was more efficient in resolving labor disputes, this family wouldn’t have been so reliant on receiving a state pension in the first place. Finding work would not have been such a hopeless proposition that it  ended in such tragedy.

Third, the authors bring up Estonia’s experience with poor health outcomes during its transition from communism but conveniently fail to mention its success with real austerity from 2009 to the present. After making deep cuts to both spending and revenues beginning in January 2009 (unlike any other country in the Euro Area), Estonia experienced positive economic growth by the third quarter of that year — more than 2 percent growth in 2010, and 7.6 percent growth in 2011. Unemployment began to decrease by the sixth quarter after austerity and is now below the Euro Area average. And most importantly to Stuckler and Basu, neither the change in the rate of suicides nor the change in the total death rate were statistically significant relative to Estonia’s previous 10 years. See my in-depth statistical report for more information: http://cei.org/web-memo/separating-european-austerity-fact-and-fiction.

Painting austerity as the grim reaper is more than a stretch. “Austerity” need not mean a reduction in health spending. And focusing on the short-term effects of trimming the welfare state ignores the long-term causes behind why some citizens’ lives depended so heavily upon it. Does austerity “kill”? It doesn’t have to.

U.S. Government Bans French Cheese Based On Food Prejudices

by Hans Bader on April 30, 2013 · 0 comments

in Features, Health and Illness, International, Nanny State, Personal Liberty, Precaution & Risk, Regulation, Trade

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The U.S. government is banning a standard, normal-smelling French cheese based on its own squeamishness. The cheese in question is Mimolette, a commonplace, orange French cheese so mild in flavor that I once confused it with cheddar when I visited my French relatives and ate it for the first time. The ban has triggered protests in New York City, reports the Global Post:

Around 40 protesters took to the streets of New York on Saturday to demonstrate against a US ban on mimolette that has angered lovers of the distinctive French cheese.

Since March, several hundred pounds of the bright orange cheese have been held up by US customs because of a warning by the Food and Drug Administration that it contained microscopic cheese mites.

The mites are a critical part of the process to produce mimolette, giving it its distinctive grayish crust.

The US decision has angered importers and consumers, who have even set up a Facebook page titled “Save the Mimolette.”

Benoit de Vitton, an importer of the cheese. . . said he was baffled by the recent blockade, noting he has imported mimolette for two decades without a problem.”They are afraid of allergies,” he said. “But we’ve been doing this for 20 years without any problem.”

Who cares if it has tiny, invisible mites in it? Cheese is the product of bacteria. Good yogurt has live cultures of bacteria in it, and that is beneficial for your health. Food that is alive can be good for you. The human body is full of living, friendly microbes that keep us alive. The cheese mites in Mimolette are there to enhance its flavor: as Wikipedia notes, the “crust of aged Mimolette is the result of cheese mites intentionally introduced to add flavor by their action on the surface of the cheese.”

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Bill Would Prevent CDC’s Taxpayer-Funded Anti-Food Propaganda

by Michelle Minton on April 19, 2013

in Economy, Features, Health and Illness, Nanny State, Personal Liberty, Politics as Usual, Stimulus to Nowhere

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Even in a divided Washington, everyone agrees on the importance of creating jobs in America. So why are some government agencies using taxpayer money to lobby against some food manufacturers?

At least one lawmaker, Rep. Aaron Schock (R-Ill.) thinks it’s time government officials stopped using taxpayer money to run smear campaigns against the makers of lawfully produced goods that consumers want. On April 15, Rep. Schock introduced the Stopping Taxpayer Outlays for Propaganda Act (STOP) Act (H.R. 1572), which would prohibit the use of federal funds for advertising and media campaigns to discourage consumption of any food or beverage that is lawfully marketed under the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act. In a Politico op-ed this week, Schock explains that in this time of economic stress, using taxpayer money to harm American industry doesn’t make a lot of sense.

Not only do these government-funded campaigns harm American businesses, they are doing nothing to improve Americans’ health — and may even cause harm in some cases. Government is simply not very good at determining what is best or healthy for each individual. Studies funded by government grants are often cited by legislators to promote one-size-fits-all policies that fail to take into account a person’s health risks or specific dietary needs. Yet many such studies are based on limited data that often result in incorrect conclusions.

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Food Safety Modernization Act Far More Costly Than Supporters Claimed

by Hans Bader on April 16, 2013

in Agriculture, Environment, Health and Illness, Regulation

“Proposed FDA safety rules frustrate tree fruit farmers,” reported The Washington Post. As the FDA puts “in place a massive overhaul of the nation’s food safety system,” due to the Food Safety Modernization Act, “Few groups have expressed more frustration than tree fruit farmers, who grow apples, pears and a variety of other produce. They complain that the FDA’s approach, in some ways, defies common sense.” The 2010 law is proving far more costly than its supporters promised it would be in order to get enacted. The “Food Safety Modernization Act would impose only modest costs on farmers, or so we kept being assured when it passed in 2010.” But many orchard growers now face tens of thousands of dollars in costs, notes the Cato Institute’s Walter Olson. As he notes, the law’s unexpected costs have caused a furor in some farming communities, and the Town of Brooksville recently became the “ninth in Maine to pass symbolic ‘food sovereignty’ resolution [See Jordan Bloom, The American Conservative; Food Renegade (Dan Brown of Blue Hill)].”

“The FDA has issued two proposed rules to implement the Food Safety Modernization Act enacted in 2011.” [Brian Wolfman, Public Citizen, including details and links; The Packer] “The costs to fruit and vegetable growers for complying with the newly proposed produce safety regulation have been estimated at more than $30,000 annually for large farms and about $13,000 per year for smaller farms.” [The Grower] As Olson observes, this could be an enormous burden for some farmers: “How much do typical US farm households make in a year, you may wonder? According to U.S. government figures (here and here, for example) a large proportion of smaller family farms make little or no profit, and are instead supported by the off-farm earnings of family members.”

Liberal newspapers trumpeted the passage of the Food Safety Modernization Act, while ignoring its potential harms to innovation, small business, and the availability of unconventional foods. CEI’s  Greg Conko, who studies biotech and food safety regulation, earlier explained how the bill’s expensive and cumbersome red tape might thwart “firms from developing innovative new processes and practices that could deliver real food safety improvements.” Earlier versions of the bill backed by left-leaning interest groups were even worse, and would have driven “out of business” many more “local farmers and artisanal, small-scale producers of berries, herbs, cheese, and countless other wares, even when there is in fact nothing unsafe in their methods of production.” The version of the bill ultimately enacted was less extreme, but even it could “leave tens of thousands of small and mid-sized farms and food stands to be crushed under the weight of rules designed for some of the world’s largest food processors,” Conko observed.

When The Nanny State Kills

by Hans Bader on March 25, 2013 · 4 comments

in Features, Health and Illness, Nanny State, Precaution & Risk, Regulation

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The government told people to switch from saturated animal fats to unsaturated vegetable fats. But that advice may have killed a lot of people. As David Oliver notes, a recent study “in the British Medical Journal” shows that ”those who heeded the advice” from public-health officials “to switch from saturated fats to polyunsaturated vegetable oils dramatically reduced their odds of living to see 2013,” incurring up to a ”60% increase in risk of death by switching from animal fats to vegetable oils.” This possibly deadly medical advice has a long history:

Fifty years ago the medical community did an about-face . . . and instead went all in on polyunsaturated fats. It reasoned that since (a) cholesterol is associated with cardiovascular disease and (b) polyunsaturated fats reduce serum cholesterol levels, it inescapably followed that (c) changing people’s diet from saturated fats to polyunsaturated fats would save a lot of lives. In 1984 Uncle Sam got involved – Time magazine reported on it in “Hold the Eggs and Butter” – and he made a big push for citizens to swap out animal fat in their diet for the vegetable variety and a great experiment on the American people was begun.

As Oliver, an expert on mass torts, points out, it is hard to ”think of any mass tort, or combination of mass torts, that has produced as much harm as the advice to change to a plant oil-based diet” may have done.

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Vitter Amendment To Ban Drug Patent Settlements Would Raise Pharmaceutical Prices

by Greg Conko on March 22, 2013

in Health and Illness, Intellectual Property, Legal, Regulation

With time running out for the Senate to act on a continuing budget resolution, members are trying to find some magic pot of money that would mask the fact that our government spends far more than it raises in revenue. Tonight, it looks like Sen. David Vitter has resurrected an old proposal to ban what are known as reverse payment patent settlements — agreements in which brand name drug manufacturers pay generic firms not to challenge patents on the innovators’ drugs.

Critics, including the Obama administration and the Federal Trade Commission, call these settlements “pay-for-delay,” and argue that successful patent challenges would get generics to market sooner. In turn, they claim, that could save federal health programs billions of dollars every year, which is why the proposal is so popular with both Democratic and Republican members of Congress. A CBO analysis scored a ban proposed in 2011 as saving federal health programs $2.68 billion over 10 years.

The problem is, any alleged savings from a ban on these patent settlements is illusory because reverse payment settlements actually have the effect of getting generic drugs on the market sooner, thereby lowering drug costs, not raising them.

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No, Hugo Chavez Did Not Improve Health Or Human Development In Venezuela

by Hans Bader on March 8, 2013 · 2 comments

in Health and Illness, International, Personal Liberty

Reuters’ recent obituary for Venezuela’s anti-American strongman, Hugo Chavez, obscured the fact that he made life worse for his countrymen — worse, that is, than if his oil-rich country had been governed by just about anyone else during a period of rapidly-rising oil prices, that showered Venezuela’s government with money, much of which Chavez wasted. As Reuters put it, Chavez’s “death will devastate millions of supporters who adored his charismatic style, anti-U.S. rhetoric and oil-financed policies that brought subsidized food and free health clinics to long-neglected slums.” Reuters also calls this “socialist leader a hero for the poor but a hate figure to his opponents.”

Reuters’ reference to “health clinics” implies that Chavez improved public health in Venezuela. But the opposite is true. In 1999, just before the Marxist Chavez took power in Venezuela, life expectancy was three years longer in Venezuela than in Colombia. But after 13 years of Chavez’s socialist rule and seizure of key industries, life expectancy in Venezuela is now a year shorter than in Colombia. (These figures are from the World Almanacs for 1999 and 2013.) Improvements in life expectancy lagged in socialist Venezuela even though Venezuela has benefited from rapidly-rising oil prices during Chavez’s rule, enabling Venezuela to dramatically increase government health care spending. Oil was dirt cheap when Chavez took office, and is fairly expensive now, giving him a huge amount of revenue to spend at his whim. It was Chavez’s good luck to preside over massively increasing oil prices that gave him so much revenue to spend that he could effectively buy the loyalty of key voting blocs through government largesse. Yet, under the Chavez regime, Venezuela’s capital, Caracas, has become one of the world’s most violent cities.

Socialism does not improve public health, and it does not make people live longer. Cuba is often cited as an example of how socialism improves health and education, which is peculiar, because Cuba lost its edge over other Latin American countries after the Communist Castro took over. Cuba led virtually all countries in Latin America in life expectancy in 1959, before a communist regime took power in Cuba. But today, countries like Panama, Chile, and Costa Rica that once had shorter life expectancies than Cuba now have slightly longer life expectancies (even if you trust official Cuban government statistics), even though countries like Panama were much poorer than Cuba before Cuba became Communist in 1960, and had a much shorter average lifespan. As the proudly progressive economist Brad DeLong admits, Cuba’s health achievements predated Castro and Communism, and Cuba’s relative position in health and education has eroded under Communism:

Cuba in 1957 had lower infant mortality than France, Belgium, West Germany, Israel, Japan, Austria, Italy, Spain, and Portugal. Cuba in 1957 had doctors and nurses: as many doctors and nurses per capita as the Netherlands, and more than Britain or Finland. . . .GDP per capita, infant mortality, education . . . for Cuba in the late 1950s [were] in the range of Japan, Ireland, Italy, Spain, Israel. . .Thus I don’t understand lefties who talk about the achievements of the Cuban Revolution: “…to have better health care, housing, education, and general social relations than virtually all other comparably developed countries.”

Human Achievement Of The Day: Using HIV To Cure Leukemia

by Michelle Minton on March 7, 2013 · 2 comments

in Features, Health and Illness, Human Achievement Hour

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The title of the Vimeo video below is “Fighting Fire with Fire,” which conveys fairly well what doctors from the University of Pennsylvania (Penn) and the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) did when they used the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) to reprogram the T-cells of a 7 year old girl in order to cure her of leukemia.

Fire With Fire | Ross Kauffman from Focus Forward Films on Vimeo.

Pediatric oncologist Stephan A. Grupp of CHOP and his colleagues presented the updated results of their clinical trial of the innovative therapy at the American Society of Hematology (ASH) annual meeting on December 10 in Atlanta. To conduct the treatment (officially called CTL019), doctors collect T-cells from the patient and reengineer them with a disabled form of HIV to recognize and attach to a protein that is found only on the surface of B-cells. B-cells are found in the immune system and become cancerous in certain leukemias and lymphomas. Once the reengineered T-cells are injected into the patient, they multiply and are able to attach to the cancerous B-cells—which would otherwise fly under the immune system’s radar—and destroy them.

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Germs In Reusable Grocery Bags Can Prove Deadly

by Angela Logomasini on January 30, 2013

in Environment, Features, Health and Illness, Precaution & Risk

Cloth supermarket bags may be fashionable, but they can also prove deadly, according to a recent research paper published by the University of Pennsylvania Law School. The researchers point out that after the city of San Francisco banned plastic bags, the number of emergency room visits for bacterial related diseases increased significantly. A Reason.com blog post explains the connection:

Basically people were schlepping leaky packages of meat and other foods in their canvas bags, then wadding to the bags somewhere for awhile, leaving bacteria to grow until the next trip, when they tossed celery or other foods likely to be eaten raw in the same bags.

It is in fact plausible that at least some portion of these illnesses did in fact result from reusable bags. Another study conducted by researchers at the University of Arizona and Loma Linda University in 2010 measured bacteria in a sample of reusable bags, finding many containing dangerous bacteria, such as coliform (found in half the bags) and E. coli (found in 12 percent of bags). They also noted that consumers reported that they rarely wash the bags in an attempt to control the development of such pathogens.

That is why I am not so surprised to read this in the University of Pennsylvania report:

We examine emergency room admissions related to these bacteria in the wake of the San Francisco ban. We find that ER visits spiked when the ban went into effect. Relative to other counties, ER admissions increases by at least one fourth, and deaths exhibit a similar increase.

Ironically, plastic bag bans are not even better for the environment. Reusable bags require far more energy and other resources to make. It is not clear they save resources unless they are used many, many times over.

For example, a study produced for the Environment Agency in the United Kingdom found that cotton bags would have to be used 103 times before they yielded environmental benefits. But the government study estimated that cotton bags are only used 51 times, making them worse for the environment than plastic. This study did not even consider the energy and water use associated with washing the bags, which increases their environmental impacts and costs.

For more details on why plastic bans don’t help the environment, see my paper on the topic.

Here is yet another example of how green advice forcing us to substitute one consumer product for another can be dangerous. For other examples, my recent posts on green advice related to BPA and bottled water. The list continues to grow.

Image credit: preetamrai on Flickr.

New Study Questions Link Between Alcohol And Breast Cancer Risk

by Michelle Minton on October 18, 2012 · 1 comment

in Features, Health and Illness, Precaution & Risk

Post image for New Study Questions Link Between Alcohol And Breast Cancer Risk

Every day, we make decisions about what to eat and drink that can affect our long-term health. Each individual is ultimately responsible for determining the best diet for his or her body and life. Ideally, individuals should make nutritional decisions by balancing health goals and personal enjoyment, while considering their unique physical condition, family history, and risk for certain conditions.

Unfortunately, this is not what public health advocates or many in the media believe. Every new study that manages to get published in a journal (regardless of how reliable or unreliable the conclusions are) represents an opportunity to push for government policies or lifestyle recommendations, applying one-sized-fits-all prescriptions for the public.

For example: Alcohol has known health risks but it also has significant health benefits—not to mention the social and psychological costs and gains. This past November, the Journal of the American Medical Association published a study linking moderate alcohol consumption to an increased risk for breast cancer. The study was conducted by the Nurses’ Health Study (NHS), and it received a great deal of media attention.  While earlier research had theorized that heavy drinking was associated with increased breast cancer risk, the NHS study found that even moderate and light consumption (less than one drink a day) could cause a 10 percent increase in a woman’s risk for breast cancer.

The Los Angeles Times, USA Today, and ABC News among many others reported on the study. The Telegraph went as far as to tell female readers that they should “stick to one glass a day” or completely abstain if they have a family history of breast cancer.

However, the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) released a paper this month that called the NHS study into question and saying that the “relationship between moderate alcohol consumption and breast cancer risk needs further study.” They highlight some problems with the self-reporting method, such as underreporting of alcohol consumption, which might lead to the conclusion that less alcohol has greater effects. Also, the NIAAA points out that the study does not account for the potential difference in binge-drinking versus long-time light drinking. While epidemiological studies like the NHS study add valuable information, as the NIAAA notes, it’s inadvisable to create guidelines for consumers based on such preliminary evidence.

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