Harvard Researcher Says This Inexpensive Action Will Lower Hospital Infection Rates And Protect Us For The Flu Season
Picornavirus (picornavirid), responsible for: Colds, gastroenteritis, poliomyelitis and meningitis. Image made from a transmission electron microscopy view. (Photo by: Cavallini James/BSIP/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)UNIVERSAL IMAGES GROUP VIA GETTY IMAGES
‘One factor stood out above them all, and it shocked the research team. The one factor most associated with infection was (drum roll): dry air. At low relative humidity, indoor air was strongly associated with higher infection rates. “When we dry the air out, droplets and skin flakes carrying viruses and bacteria are launched into the air, traveling far and over long periods of time. The microbes that survive this launching tend to be the ones that cause healthcare-associated infections,” said Taylor. “Even worse, in addition to this increased exposure to infectious particles, the dry air also harms our natural immune barriers which protect us from infections”…’
Hospitals will be required to post online a list of their standard charges under a rule finalized Thursday by the Trump administration.
Increasing price transparency has been a priority for the administration as a way to drive down health-care costs.
“This is a small step towards providing our beneficiaries with price transparency, but our work in this area is only just beginning”, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Seema Verma said in a speech last month. “Price transparency is core to patient empowerment and making sure American patients have the tools they need so they can make the best decisions for them and their families.”
It can distract us from rational thought and meaningful compassion.
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Excerpted from article by Jesse Singal (linked below)
“Empathy is bad” sounds more like trolling than a substantive argument … If I’m honest with myself, despite having a great deal of respect for Bloom as a writer and thinker, I went into Against Empathy eagerly anticipating the holes I’d be able to poke in it.
The holes didn’t materialize. Instead, over the course of a brisk 250 pages, [Paul] Bloom laid out what really does feel like a tough-to-crack case against an idea that most of us have long known is key to repairing the world.
As Bloom points out early in the book, there are many subtly different definitions of empathy, so he goes with this one: “Empathy is the act of coming to experience the world as you think someone else does”. His critique of empathy centers most notably on two of its features: empathy has a “spotlight effect” and entails a certain “innumeracy.” The two ideas aren’t wholly distinct. The spotlight effect simply refers to the fact that the act of feeling someone else’s pain causes us to zoom in on that pain and want to do something about it, often at the expense of other, more important causes. When, to take a real-life example Bloom invokes, the Make-A-Wish Foundation spent thousands of dollars to let a terminally ill child be Batman for a day in San Francisco, that was the spotlight effect: The focus on a single child’s suffering (and joy) led good people to spend a sum that could, put to more efficient use, save many lives. (This argument only holds, of course, under the assumption that had those donations not gone to the Make-A-Wish Foundation, they could have gone to some other worthy cause. Throughout Against Empathy, Bloom is fastidious about acknowledging these sorts of caveats and counter-arguments. None of his shots are cheap.)
