Health Affairs

If one were to try and identify what issue has most roiled the biomedical community in the past few months it is surely the effort to censor two papers describing genetic modifications of the H5N1 flu virus. Background.  Last December, the U.S. National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB) was asked by the U.S. National... Read the rest of this entry »

Tomorrow, on Wednesday,  May 4, Health Affairs will hold a Washington D.C. briefing in connection with its first ever issue on environmental health. National environmental health and policy experts will discuss the state of environmental health and its future, and will present new research in the field. The briefing and Health Affairs issue on environmental... Read the rest of this entry »

Amid the ongoing debate over restructuring health care and implementing health reform, other factors that could affect health usually get far less attention.  One, the recently enacted $1.6 billion cut in the budget of the Environmental Protection Agency for fiscal 2011, could impair the agency’s ability to enforce rules governing clean air and water. Also... Read the rest of this entry »

Editor’s Note: In an interview published this week, Health Affairs Contributing Editor Barbara Culliton asks Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Associate Commissioner For Science, Norris Alderson, about his agency’s regulation of nanomedicine and the potential for health care cost savings. Here’s an excerpt of their conversation: Barbara Culliton: Nanomedicine is the “next big thing” in... Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, Health Affairs published three interviews [one-week free access] that I conducted with leading cancer oncologists. As Donald Kennedy, editor-in-chief of Science, and I wrote in an introduction to these interviews: “An intellectual chasm exists between those who do innovative research and those who deliver it. Researchers and physician-scientists read different journals than their counterparts in health policy... Read the rest of this entry »

It is by no means a coincidence that an explosion of knowledge about the human genome has occurred simultaneously with huge breakthroughs in computing capability and information technology. Sequencing the genome, after all, depended on being able to digitize the representation of the nucleotides in DNA. The genome’s mechanisms of operation involve intercellular messaging that... Read the rest of this entry »