An anthropological perspective on obesity considers both its evolutionary background and cross-cultural variation. It must explain three basic facts about obesity: gender dimorphism (women greater than men), an increase with modernization, and a positive association with socioeconomic status. Preindustrial diets varied in quality but shared a tendency to periodic shortages. Such shortages, part...

The consensus statement by Unguru et al concerning national shortages of therapies used to treat children with cancer accomplishes 2 important tasks: it highlights a serious public health threat and proposes steps to address the problem. The working group (WG) has outlined 6 recommendations. All are constructive approaches and, in the case of the recommendations that are within US Food and Drug...

What do employers mean when they say that they face a ‘skill shortage’ at their establishment(s)? How employers conceive of skill shortages matters because they are the prime, often the only, source of information allowing judgments to be made about skills disequilibria. What employers say therefore affects general perceptions about the adequacy, or otherwise, of skills supplies. In Britain’s e...

http://healthaffairs.org/blog/2011/06/08/rx-drug-shortages-regulation-can-be-deadly/ Cass Sunstein, President Obama’s regulatory czar, announced last week that the administration intends to repeal costincreasing, unnecessary regulations [1] from 30 different agencies. If the administration is serious in this effort, a good place to start is with a web of regulations that are preventing life sav...

Introduction R egistered nurses (RNs) are the single largest group of health care professionals in the United States. Current and projected nursing shortages reflect the fact that fewer people are entering the profession. Shortages are difficult to estimate and project. In the past, shortages have tended to be resolved as wages rose in response to increased need for RNs. In addition, there is a...

Researchers for the electricity industry, national laboratories, and state and federal agencies have begun to argue that the country could face water shortages resulting from the addition of thermoelectric power plants, but have not attempted to depict more precisely where or how severe those shortages will be. Using county-level data on rates of population growth collected from the US Census B...

The Drug Shortage Program at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is a division of the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER), one of the five centers within FDA. The four other centers include the Center for Devices and Radiological Health, Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition, and Center for Veterinary Medicine. At the Drug Short...

INTRODUCTION The number of drug shortages in the United States has increased in recent years. While some literature exists on factors that contribute to antimicrobial shortages, the need remains to accurately gage the level of patient harm incurred as a result of realized antimicrobial shortages. Furthermore, current methods of reporting adverse drug events are known to under-report instances o...

PURPOSE A medical center's implementation of adult and pediatric parenteral nutrition (PN) algorithms and other strategies for managing PN ingredient shortages are described. SUMMARY In response to nationwide shortages of amino acids and other PN ingredients in 2010, a large Massachusetts teaching hospital undertook a quality-improvement initiative to ensure appropriate patient selection for ...

Uncertain demand combined with a positive lead time for adding capacity creates the risk of capacity shortage during the lead time. Accurate shortage estimation is very important to determine a capacity expansion policy. In this paper, we investigate four kinds of option pricing methods to estimate the shortage during a fixed lead time under the assumption of an exponential trend for demand gro...