Perceptions of Falling Behind “Most White People”: Within-Group Status Comparisons Predict Fewer Positive Emotions and Worse Health Over Time Among White (but Not Black) Americans

Caluori, N., Cooley, E., et al. (2024).

Psychological Science, 35(2), 175-190.

https://doi.org/10.1177/09567976231221546

Abstract

Despite the persistence of anti-Black racism, White Americans report feeling worse off than Black Americans. We suggest that some White Americans may report low well-being despite high group-level status because of perceptions that they are falling behind their in-group. Using census-based quota sampling, we measured status comparisons and health among Black (N = 452, Wave 1) and White (N = 439, Wave 1) American adults over a period of 6 to 7 weeks. We found that Black and White Americans tended to make status comparisons within their own racial groups and that most Black participants felt better off than their racial group, whereas most White participants felt worse off than their racial group. Moreover, we found that White Americans’ perceptions of falling behind “most White people” predicted fewer positive emotions at a subsequent time, which predicted worse sleep quality and depressive symptoms in the future. Subjective within-group status did not have the same consequences among Black participants.

The research is here.

Here is my succinct summary:

Despite their high group status, many White Americans experience poor well-being due to the perception that they are lagging behind their in-group. In contrast, Black Americans feel relatively better off within their racial group, while White Americans feel comparatively worse off within theirs.

Excess Death Rates for Republican and Democratic Registered Voters in Florida and Ohio During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Wallace J, Goldsmith-Pinkham P, Schwartz JL. 

JAMA Intern Med. 

Published online July 24, 2023.

doi:10.1001/jamainternmed.2023.1154

Key Points

Question

Was political party affiliation a risk factor associated with excess mortality during the COVID-19 pandemic in Florida and Ohio?

Findings

In this cohort study evaluating 538 159 deaths in individuals aged 25 years and older in Florida and Ohio between March 2020 and December 2021, excess mortality was significantly higher for Republican voters than Democratic voters after COVID-19 vaccines were available to all adults, but not before. These differences were concentrated in counties with lower vaccination rates, and primarily noted in voters residing in Ohio.

Meaning

The differences in excess mortality by political party affiliation after COVID-19 vaccines were available to all adults suggest that differences in vaccination attitudes and reported uptake between Republican and Democratic voters may have been a factor in the severity and trajectory of the pandemic in the US.

The research is here.

My Take

Beliefs are a powerful force that can influence our health behaviors. Our beliefs about health, illness, and the causes of disease can shape our decisions about what we eat, how much we exercise, and whether or not we see a doctor when we're sick.

There is a growing body of research that suggests that beliefs can have a significant impact on health outcomes. For example, one study found that people who believe that they have a strong sense of purpose in life tend to live longer than those who do not. Another study found that people who believe in a higher power tend to be more optimistic and have a more positive outlook on life, which can lead to better mental health, which can in turn have a positive impact on physical health.  However, certain beliefs may be harmful to health and longevity.

The study suggest that beliefs may play a role in the relationship between political party affiliation and excess death rates. For example, Republicans are more likely to hold beliefs that are associated with vaccine hesitancy, such as distrust of government and the medical establishment. These beliefs may have contributed to the lower vaccination rates among Republican-registered voters, which in turn may have led to higher excess death rates.

Parents think—incorrectly—that teaching their children that the world is a bad place is likely best for them

J. D. W. Clifton & Peter Meindl (2021)

The Journal of Positive Psychology

DOI: 10.1080/17439760.2021.2016907

Primal world beliefs (‘primals’) are beliefs about the world’s basic character, such as the world is dangerous. This article investigates probabilistic assumptions about the value of negative primals (e.g., seeing the world as dangerous keeps me safe). We first show such assumptions are common. For example, among 185 parents, 53% preferred dangerous world beliefs for their children. We then searched for evidence consistent with these intuitions in 3 national samples and 3 local samples of undergraduates, immigrants (African and Korean), and professionals (car salespeople, lawyers, and cops;), examining correlations between primals and eight life outcomes within 48 occupations (total N=4,535) . As predicted, regardless of occupation, more negative primals were almost never associated with better outcomes. Instead, they predicted less success, less job and life satisfaction, worse health, dramatically less flourishing, more negative emotion, more depression, and increased suicide attempts. We discuss why assumptions about the value of negative primals are nevertheless widespread and implications for future research.

From the General Discussion

When might very positive primals be damaging illusions (i.e., associated with negative outcomes)? Study 2 was a big-net search for these contexts. We examined eight outcomes, six samples, 4,535 unique subjects, and 48 occupations (n ≥ 30), including lawyers, doctors, police officers, professors, and so forth. This unearthed 1,860 significant correlations between primals and outcomes, and the overall pattern was clear. In 99.7% of these relationships, more negative primals were associated with worse outcomes, roughly categorized as slightly less job success, moderately less job satisfaction, much less life satisfaction, moderately worse health, much increased frequency of negative emotion and other depression symptoms, dramatically decreased psychological flourishing, and moderately increased likelihood of having attempted suicide. We also found no empirical justification for the popular moderation approach. In 297 of 297 significant differences in outcomes, those who saw the world as somewhat positive always experienced worse outcomes than those who saw the world as very positive. In sum, a robust correlational relationship exists between more negative primals and more negative outcomes, even when comparing positive beliefs to positive beliefs, even when comparing within occupation. The seemingly widespread meta-belief that associates negative primals with positive outcomes is unsupported.

The research is here.

A pdf to the research is here.

As a doctor in a COVID unit, I’m running out of compassion for the unvaccinated. Get the shot

Anita Sircar

The Los Angeles Times

Originally published 17 Aug 21

Here is an excerpt:

The burden of this pandemic now rests on the shoulders of the unvaccinated. On those who are eligible to get vaccinated but choose not to, a decision they defend by declaring, “Vaccination is a deeply personal choice.” But perhaps never in history has anyone’s personal choice affected the world as a whole as it does right now. When hundreds and thousands of people continue to die — when the most vulnerable members of society, our children, cannot be vaccinated — the luxury of choice ceases to exist.

If you believe the pandemic is almost over and I can ride it out, without getting vaccinated, you could not be more wrong. This virus will find you.

(cut)

If you believe if I get infected I’ll just go to the hospital and get treated, there is no guarantee we can save your life, nor even a promise we’ll have a bed for you.

If you believe I’m pregnant and I don’t want the vaccine to affect me, my baby or my future fertility, it matters little if you’re not alive to see your newborn.

If you believe I won’t get my children vaccinated because I don’t know what the long-term effects will be, it matters little if they don’t live long enough for you to find out.

If you believe I’ll just let everyone else get vaccinated around me so I don’t have to, there are 93 million eligible, unvaccinated people in the “herd” who think the same way you do and are getting in the way of ending this pandemic.

If you believe vaccinated people are getting infected anyway, so what’s the point?, the vaccine was built to prevent hospitalizations and deaths from severe illness. Instead of fatal pneumonia, those with breakthrough infections have a short, bad cold, so the vaccine has already proved itself. The vaccinated are not dying of COVID-19.

SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, has mutated countless times during this pandemic, adapting to survive. Stacked up against a human race that has resisted change every step of the way — including wearing masks, social distancing, quarantining and now refusing lifesaving vaccines — it is easy to see who will win this war if human behavior fails to change quickly.

The info is here.

Updated Physician-Aid-in-Dying Law Sparks Controversy in Canada

Richard Karel

Psychiatric News

Originally posted 27 May 21

Here is an excerpt:

Addressing the changes for people who may be weighing MAID for severe mental illness, the government stated the following:

“If you have a mental illness as your only medical condition, you are not eligible to seek medical assistance in dying. … This temporary exclusion allows the Government of Canada more time to consider how MAID can safely be provided to those whose only medical condition is mental illness.

“To support this work, the government will initiate an expert review to consider protocols, guidance, and safeguards for those with a mental illness seeking MAID and will make recommendations within a year (by March 17, 2022).

“After March 17, 2023, people with a mental illness as their sole underlying medical condition will have access to MAID if they are eligible and the practitioners fulfill the safeguards that are put in place for this group of people. …”

While many physicians and others have long been sympathetic to allowing medical professionals to help those with terminal illness die peacefully, the fear has been that medically assisted death could become a substitute for adequate—and more costly—medical care. Those concerns are growing with the expansion of MAID in Canada.

The info is here.

Are Conspiracy Theories Harmless?

Douglas, K. M.

The Spanish Journal of Psychology

(2021). 24, e13, 1-7.

Abstract

In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in the consequences of conspiracy theories and the COVID–19 pandemic raised this interest to another level. In this article, I will outline what we know about the consequences of conspiracy theories for individuals, groups, and society, arguing that they are certainly not harmless. In particular, research suggests that conspiracy theories are associated with political apathy, support for non-normative political action, climate denial, vaccine refusal, prejudice, crime, violence, disengagement in the workplace, and reluctance to adhere to COVID–19 recommendations. In this article, I will also discuss the challenges of dealing with the negative consequences of conspiracy theories, which present some opportunities for future research.

Conclusions

Conspiracy theories are associated with a range of negative consequences for political engagement, political behavior, climate engagement, trust in science, vaccine uptake, civic behavior, work-related behavior, inter-group relations, and more recently the COVID-19 response.  A significant challenge for researchers is to learn how to deal with conspiracy theories and their associated effects.

The research is here.

The Antiscience Movement Is Escalating, Going Global and Killing Thousands

Peter J. Hotez

Scientific American

Originally posted 29 MAR 21

Antiscience has emerged as a dominant and highly lethal force, and one that threatens global security, as much as do terrorism and nuclear proliferation. We must mount a counteroffensive and build new infrastructure to combat antiscience, just as we have for these other more widely recognized and established threats.

Antiscience is the rejection of mainstream scientific views and methods or their replacement with unproven or deliberately misleading theories, often for nefarious and political gains. It targets prominent scientists and attempts to discredit them. The destructive potential of antiscience was fully realized in the U.S.S.R. under Joseph Stalin. Millions of Russian peasants died from starvation and famine during the 1930s and 1940s because Stalin embraced the pseudoscientific views of Trofim Lysenko that promoted catastrophic wheat and other harvest failures. Soviet scientists who did not share Lysenko’s “vernalization” theories lost their positions or, like the plant geneticist, Nikolai Vavilov, starved to death in a gulag.

Now antiscience is causing mass deaths once again in this COVID-19 pandemic. Beginning in the spring of 2020, the Trump White House launched a coordinated disinformation campaign that dismissed the severity of the epidemic in the United States, attributed COVID deaths to other causes, claimed hospital admissions were due to a catch-up in elective surgeries, and asserted that ultimately that the epidemic would spontaneously evaporate. It also promoted hydroxychloroquine as a spectacular cure, while downplaying the importance of masks. Other authoritarian or populist regimes in Brazil, Mexico, Nicaragua, Philippines and Tanzania adopted some or all of these elements.   

As both a vaccine scientist and a parent of an adult daughter with autism and intellectual disabilities, I have years of experience going up against the antivaccine lobby, which claims vaccines cause autism or other chronic conditions. This prepared me to quickly recognize the outrageous claims made by members of the Trump White House staff, and to connect the dots to label them as antiscience disinformation. Despite my best efforts to sound the alarm and call it out, the antiscience disinformation created mass havoc in the red states. 

The info is here.

Neuroscience shows how interconnected we are – even in a time of isolation

Lisa Feldman Barrett

The Guardian

Originally posted 10 Feb 21

Here is an excerpt:

Being the caretakers of each other’s body budgets is challenging when so many of us feel lonely or are physically alone. But social distancing doesn’t have to mean social isolation. Humans have a special power to connect with and regulate each other in another way, even at a distance: with words. If you’ve ever received a text message from a loved one and felt a rush of warmth, or been criticised by your boss and felt like you’d been punched in the gut, you know what I’m talking about. Words are tools for regulating bodies.

In my research lab, we run experiments to demonstrate this power of words. Our participants lie still in a brain scanner and listen to evocative descriptions of different situations. One is about walking into your childhood home and being smothered in hugs and smiles. Another is about awakening to your buzzing alarm clock and finding a sweet note from your significant other. As they listen, we see increased activity in brain regions that control heart rate, breathing, metabolism and the immune system. Yes, the same brain regions that process language also help to run your body budget. Words have power over your biology – your brain wiring guarantees it.

Our participants also had increased activity in brain regions involved in vision and movement, even though they were lying still with their eyes closed. Their brains were changing the firing of their own neurons to simulate sight and motion in their mind’s eye. This same ability can build a sense of connection, from a few seconds of poor-quality mobile phone audio, or from a rectangle of pixels in the shape of a friend’s face. Your brain fills in the gaps – the sense data that you don’t receive through these media – and can ease your body budget deficit in the moment.

In the midst of social distancing, my Zoom friend and I rediscovered the body-budgeting benefits of older means of communication, such as letter writing. The handwriting of someone we care about can have an unexpected emotional impact. A piece of paper becomes a wave of love, a flood of gratitude, a belly-aching laugh.

The info is here.

The Last Children of Down Syndrome

Sarah Zhang

The Atlantic

Originally posted December 2020

Here is an excerpt:

Eugenics in Denmark never became as systematic and violent as it did in Germany, but the policies came out of similar underlying goals: improving the health of a nation by preventing the birth of those deemed to be burdens on society. The term eugenics eventually fell out of favor, but in the 1970s, when Denmark began offering prenatal testing for Down syndrome to mothers over the age of 35, it was discussed in the context of saving money—as in, the testing cost was less than that of institutionalizing a child with a disability for life. The stated purpose was “to prevent birth of children with severe, lifelong disability.”

That language too has long since changed; in 1994, the stated purpose of the testing became “to offer women a choice.” Activists like Fält-Hansen have also pushed back against the subtle and not-so-subtle ways that the medical system encourages women to choose abortion. Some Danish parents told me that doctors automatically assumed they would want to schedule an abortion, as if there was really no other option. This is no longer the case, says Puk Sandager, a fetal-medicine specialist at Aarhus University Hospital. Ten years ago, doctors—especially older doctors—were more likely to expect parents to terminate, she told me. “And now we do not expect anything.” The National Down Syndrome Association has also worked with doctors to alter the language they use with patients—“probability” instead of “risk,” “chromosome aberration” instead of “chromosome error.” And, of course, hospitals now connect expecting parents with people like Fält-Hansen to have those conversations about what it’s like to raise a child with Down syndrome.

The info is here.

What do you believe? Atheism and Religion

Kristen Weir

Monitor on Psychology

Vol. 51, No. 5, p. 52

Here is an excerpt:

Good health isn’t the only positive outcome attributed to religion. Research also suggests that religious belief is linked to prosocial behaviors such as volunteering and donating to charity.

But as with health benefits, Galen’s work suggests such prosocial benefits have more to do with general group membership than with religious belief or belonging to a specific religious group (Social Indicators Research, Vol. 122, No. 2, 2015). In fact, he says, while religious people are more likely to volunteer or give to charitable causes related to their beliefs, atheists appear to be more generous to a wider range of causes and dissimilar groups.

Nevertheless, atheists and other nonbelievers still face considerable stigma, and are often perceived as less moral than their religious counterparts. In a study across 13 countries, Gervais and colleagues found that people in most countries intuitively believed that extreme moral violations (such as murder and mutilation) were more likely to be committed by atheists than by religious believers. This anti-atheist prejudice also held true among people who identified as atheists, suggesting that religious culture exerts a powerful influence on moral judgments, even among non­believers (Nature Human Behaviour, Vol. 1, Article 0151, 2017).

Yet nonreligious people are similar to religious people in a number of ways. In the Understanding Unbelief project, Farias and colleagues found that across all six countries they studied, both believers and nonbelievers cited family and freedom as the most important values in their own lives and in the world more broadly. The team also found evidence to counter a common assumption that atheists believe life has no purpose. They found the belief that the universe is “ultimately meaningless” was a minority view among non­believers in each country.

“People assume that [non­believers] have very different sets of values and ideas about the world, but it looks like they probably don’t,” Farias says.

For the nonreligious, however, meaning may be more likely to come from within than from above. Again drawing on data from the General Social Survey, Speed and colleagues found that in the United States, atheists and the religiously unaffiliated were no more likely to believe that life is meaningless than were people who were religious or raised with a religious affiliation. 

America’s Schools Are a Moral and Medical Catastrophe

Laurie Garrett
foreignpolicy.com
Originally posted 24 July 20

After U.S. President Donald Trump demanded last week that schools nationwide reopen this fall, regardless of the status of their community’s COVID-19 epidemic status, his Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos was asked how this could safely be accomplished. She offered no guidelines, nor financial support to strapped school districts. Her reply was that school districts nationwide needed to create their own safety schemes and realize that the federal government will cut off funds if schools fail to reopen. “I think the go-to needs to be kids in school, in person, in the classroom,” she said in an interview on CNN on July 12.

This is nothing short of moral bankruptcy. The Trump administration is effectively demanding schools bend to its will, without offering a hint of expert guidance on how to do so safely, much less the necessary financing.

I can’t correct for the latter failure, of course. But here’s some information that will be of use to the many rightfully concerned parents and educators across the United States.

1. Should a national-scale school reopening be considered, at all?

Emphatically, no. The state of Florida’s data shows that 13 percent of children who have been tested for the novel coronavirus were found to be infected, and there’s a gradient of infection downward with age: Only 16 percent of these positive cases are in children 1 to 4 years old, whereas 29 percent are in those 15 to 17 years old. In Nueces County, Texas, 85 children under age 2 have tested positive for the coronavirus since March, killing one of them. The infections were likely caught from parents or older siblings. A South Korean government survey of 60,000 households discovered that adults living in households that had an infected child aged 10 to 19 years had the highest rate of catching the coronavirus—more so than when an infected adult was present. Nearly 19 percent of people living with an infected teenager went on to test positive for the virus within 10 days. A Kaiser Family Foundation study says some 3.3 million adults over 65 in the United States live in a home with at least one school-aged child, putting the elders at special risk.

The info is here.

College Football’s Brand At Stake, Ethics Expert Says

Ray Glier
Forbes.com
Originally posted 16 July 20

Here is an excerpt:

“What is the potential harm vs potential good? This the core ethical question,” Etzel said.

The caretakers of college athletics insist it is too early to be making decisions about canceling football this fall. They are allowing players to work out, coaches to scheme, and fans to dream until the last possible moment before they have to pull the plug. Their runway is growing short.

“To be certain—rigid in what is important—is very risky,” Etzel said in an email response to the ethical dilemma facing college administrators. “Decisions and potential mistakes of this magnitude have not been made in the past, so those running and influencing the show have no benchmarks.

“Presidents and other leaders need to responsibly step in to decide on their own—consistent with their job descriptions—just what the most useful, compassionate path is for each organization.”

If athletes get sick from the virus in workouts this summer and do not recover, or have permanent damage to their health, the college game will get hit with vitriol nationally like it has never seen before. Millions of people in the U.S. are college football fans, but not everyone worships the U. Coaches and administrators are going to be painted as money-thirsty villains. An athletic director, maybe a coach, is going to be scapegoated, then fired, if an athlete does not recover from the virus.

The info is here.

Physicians united: Here’s why pulling out of WHO is a big mistake

Andis Robeznieks
American Medical Association
Originally published 8 July 20

Here is an excerpt:

The joint statement builds on a previous response from the AMA made back in May after the administration announced its intention to withdraw from the WHO.

Withdrawal served “no logical purpose,” made finding a solution to the pandemic more challenging and could have harmful repercussions in worldwide efforts to develop a vaccine and effective COVID-19 treatments, then-AMA President Patrice A. Harris, MD, MA, said at the time.

Defeating COVID-19 “requires the entire world working together,” Dr. Harris added.

In April, Dr. Harris said withdrawing from the WHO would be “a dangerous step in the wrong direction, and noted that “fighting a global pandemic requires international cooperation “

“Cutting funding to the WHO—rather than focusing on solutions—is a dangerous move at a precarious moment for the world,” she added

The message regarding the need for a unified international effort was echoed in the statement from the physician leaders.

"As our nation and the rest of the world face a global health pandemic, a worldwide, coordinated response is more vital than ever,” they said. “This dangerous withdrawal not only impacts the global response against COVID-19, but also undermines efforts to address other major public health threats.”

The info is here.

Why Do People Avoid Facts That Could Help Them?

Francesca Gino
Scientific American
Originally posted 16 June 20

In our information age, an unprecedented amount of data are right at our fingertips. We run genetic tests on our unborn children to prepare for the worst. We get regular cancer screenings and monitor our health on our wrist and our phone. And we can learn about our ancestral ties and genetic predispositions with a simple swab of saliva.

Yet there’s some information that many of us do not want to know. A study of more than 2,000 people in Germany and Spain by Gerd Gigerenzer of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin and Rocio Garcia-Retamero of the University of Granada in Spain found that 90 percent of them would not want to find out, if they could, when their partner would die or what the cause would be. And 87 percent also reported not wanting to be aware of the date of their own death. When asked if they’d want to know if, and when, they’d get divorced, more than 86 percent said no.

Related research points to a similar conclusion: We often prefer to avoid learning information that could cause us pain. Investors are less likely to log on to their stock portfolios on days when the market is down. And one laboratory experiment found that subjects who were informed that they were rated less attractive than other participants were willing to pay money not to find out their exact rank.

More consequentially, people avoid learning certain information related to their health even if having such knowledge would allow them to identify therapies to manage their symptoms or treatment. As one study found, only 7 percent of people at high risk for Huntington’s disease elect to find out whether they have the condition, despite the availability of a genetic test that is generally paid for by health insurance plans and the clear usefulness of the information for alleviating the chronic disease’s symptoms. Similarly,participants in a laboratory experiment chose to forgo part of their earnings to avoid learning the outcome of a test for a treatable sexually transmitted disease. Such avoidance was even greater when the disease symptoms were more severe.

The info is here.

Why some nurses have quit during the coronavirus pandemic

Safia Samee Ali
nbcnews.com
Originally posted 10 May 20

Here is an excerpt:

“It was an extremely difficult decision, but as a mother and wife, the health of my family will always come first. In the end, I could not accept that I could be responsible for causing one of my family members to become severely ill or possibly die.”

As COVID-19 has infected more than one million Americans, nurses working on the front lines of the pandemic with little protective support have made the gut-wrenching decision to step away from their jobs, saying they were ill-equipped and unable to fight the disease and feared not only for their own safety but also for that of their families.

Many of these nurses, who have faced backlash for quitting, say new CDC protocols have made them feel expendable and have not kept their safety in mind, leaving them no choice but to walk away from a job they loved.

'We're not cannon fodder, we’re human beings'

As the nation took stock of its dwindling medical supplies in the early days of the pandemic, CDC guidance regarding personal protective equipment quickly took a back seat.

N95 masks, which had previously been the acceptable standard of protective care for both patients and medical personnel, were depleting so commercial grade masks, surgical masks, and in the most extreme cases homemade masks such as scarves and bandanas were all sanctioned by the CDC -- which did not return a request for comment -- to counter the lacking resources.

The info is here.

'DNA is not your destiny': Genetics a poor indicator of health

Nicole Bergot
Edmonton Journal
Originally posted 18 Dec 19

The vast majority of diseases, including many cancers, diabetes, and Alzheimer’s, have a genetic contribution of just five to 10 per cent, shows the meta-analysis of data from studies that examine relationships between common gene mutations, or single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), and different conditions.

“Simply put, DNA is not your destiny, and SNPs are duds for disease prediction,” said study co-author David Wishart, professor in the department of biological sciences and the department of computing science.

But there are exceptions, including Crohn’s disease, celiac disease, and macular degeneration, which have a genetic contribution of approximately 40 to 50 per cent.

“Despite these rare exceptions, it is becoming increasingly clear that the risks for getting most diseases arise from your metabolism, your environment, your lifestyle, or your exposure to various kinds of nutrients, chemicals, bacteria, or viruses,” said Wishart.

The info is here.

Is Editing the Genome for Climate Change Adaptation Ethically Justifiable?

Lisa Soleymani Lehmann
AMA J Ethics. 2017;19(12):1186-1192.

Abstract

As climate change progresses, we humans might have to inhabit a world for which we are increasingly maladapted. If we were able to identify genes that directly influence our ability to thrive in a changing climate, would it be ethically justifiable to edit the human genome to enhance our ability to adapt to this new environment? Should we use gene editing not only to prevent significant disease but also to enhance our ability to function in the world? Here I suggest a “4-S framework” for analyzing the justifiability of gene editing that includes these considerations: (1) safety, (2) significance of harm to be averted, (3) succeeding generations, and (4) social consequences.

Conclusion

Gene editing has unprecedented potential to improve human health. CRISPR/Cas9 has a specificity and simplicity that opens up wide possibilities. If we are unable to prevent serious negative health consequences of climate change through environmental and public health measures, gene editing could have a role in helping human beings adapt to new environmental conditions. Any decision to proceed should apply the 4-S framework.

The info is here.

Association Between Life Purpose and Mortality Among US Adults Older Than 50 Years

Aliya Alimujiang, Ashley Wiensch, Jonathan Boss, and others
JAMA Network Open 2019;2(5):e194270. 

Abstract

Importance  A growing body of literature suggests that having a strong sense of purpose in life leads to improvements in both physical and mental health and enhances overall quality of life. There are interventions available to influence life purpose; thus, understanding the association of life purpose with mortality is critical.

Objective  To evaluate whether an association exists between life purpose and all-cause or cause-specific mortality among older adults in the United States.

Main Outcomes and Measures  All-cause and cause-specific mortality were assessed between 2006 and 2010. Weighted Cox proportional hazards models were used to evaluate life purpose and mortality.

Results  Of 6985 individuals included in the analysis, 4016 (57.5%) were women, the mean (SD) age of all participants was 68.6 (9.8) years, and the mean (SD) survival time for decedents was 31.21 (15.42) months (range, 1.00-71.00 months). Life purpose was significantly associated with all-cause mortality in the HRS (hazard ratio, 2.43; 95% CI, 1.57-3.75, comparing those in the lowest life purpose category with those in the highest life purpose category). Some significant cause-specific mortality associations with life purpose were also observed (heart, circulatory, and blood conditions: hazard ratio, 2.66; 95% CI, 1.62-4.38).

Conclusions and Relevance  This study’s results indicated that stronger purpose in life was associated with decreased mortality. Purposeful living may have health benefits. Future research should focus on evaluating the association of life purpose interventions with health outcomes, including mortality. In addition, understanding potential biological mechanisms through which life purpose may influence health outcomes would be valuable.

The research is here.

A fate worse than death

Cathy Rentzenbrink
Prospect Magazine
Originally posted March 18, 2018

Here is an excerpt:

We have lost our way with death. Improvements in medicine have led us to believe that a long and fulfilling life is our birthright. Death is no longer seen as the natural consequence of life but as an inconvenient and unjust betrayal. We are in an age of denial.

Why does this matter? Why not allow ourselves this pleasant and surely harmless delusion? It matters because we are in a peculiar and precise period of history where our technological advances enable us to keep people alive when we probably shouldn’t. Life or death is no longer a black and white situation. There are many and various shades of grey. We behave as though death is the worst outcome, but it isn’t.

Many years after the accident, when I wrote a book about it called The Last Act of Love, I catalogued what happened to me as I witnessed the destruction of my brother. I detailed the drinking and the depression. The hardest thing was tracking our journey from hope to despair. I still find it hard to be precise about exactly when and how I realised that Matty would be better off dead. I know I moved from being convinced that if I tried hard enough I could bring Matty back to life, to thinking I should learn to love him as he was. Eventually I asked myself the right question: would Matty himself want to be alive like this? Of course, the answer was no.

The info is here.

Huge price hikes by drug companies are immoral

Robert Klitzman
CNN.com
Originally posted September 18, 2018

Several pharmaceutical companies have been jacking up the prices of their drugs in unethical ways. Most recently, Nirmal Mulye, founder and president of Nostrum Pharmaceuticals, defended his decision to more than quadruple the price of nitrofurantoin, used to treat bladder infections, from about $500 to more than $2,300 a bottle. He said it was his "moral requirement to sell the product at the highest price."

Mulye argues that his only moral duty is to benefit his investors. As he said in defending Martin Shkreli, who in 2015 raised the price of an anti-parasite drug, daraprim, 5,000% from $13.50 to $750 per tablet, "When he raised the price of his drug he was within his rights because he had to reward his shareholders."

Mulye is wrong for many reasons. Drug companies deserve reasonable return on their investment in research and development, but some of these companies are abusing the system. The development of countless new drugs depends on taxpayer money and sacrifices that patients in studies make in good faith. Excessive price hikes harm many people, threaten public health and deplete huge amounts of taxpayer money that could be better used in other ways.

The US government pays more than 40% of all Americans' prescription costs, and this amount has been growing faster than inflation. In 2015, over 118 million Americans were on some form of government health insurance, including around 52 million on Medicare and 62 million on Medicaid. And these numbers have been increasing. Today, around 59 million Americans are on Medicare and 75 million on Medicaid.

The info is here.