Closer Look
Opinion: Stealing health care workers from the Global South is no solution
You're no doubt aware the U.S. is experiencing an acute shortage of health care workers. That's also true in the U.K., faced with strikes by nurses and junior doctors, and in much of Europe. What these countries have in common is how they are filling their gaps: Many are recruiting from the Global South. Already 15% of health care workers work outside their country of birth.
That can hurt those left behind, Vanessa Kerry, the CEO of Seed Global Health and a physician at Massachusetts General Hospital, and Travis Bias, a family medicine physician who has taught medicine in Uganda and Kenya, write in a STAT First Opinion. "The labor pull to higher-income countries leaves lower-income countries less able to meet the burden of disease and undermines economic and social stability," they say. "High-income countries need to commit to training and hiring more of their own workers." Read more.
health
Room for improvement in reducing cancer risk, analysis says
The American Cancer Society brings us both good news and bad in its new report on risk factors, preventive behaviors, and access to care for cancer. Starting on the cusp of the Covid-19 pandemic, the analysis found that smoking, alcohol use, and physical inactivity went down from 2019 to 2021, but the prevalence of obesity went up and cervical cancer screening went down during the same period. There were disparities:
- People without health insurance were 28% to 60% less likely to be current with recommended cancer screening compared to people with private health insurance.
- People with less than a high school education, who are four to five times more likely to smoke than people with a college education, did not see changes in smoking.
For context, the report says, 45% of the more than 600,000 U.S. cancer deaths expected this year can be attributed to avoidable risk factors.
science
Social safety nets can narrow gaps in kids' brain development, study says
It makes intuitive sense that family income is tied to children's mental health when you think about stress and opportunities influenced by what money can buy. Research has linked brain anatomy, too, to income, associating lower volume in the hippocampus — critical in memory and emotional learning — to lower income. A new study in Nature Communications goes a step further, identifying a connection between anti-poverty programs and disparities in brain development and mental health symptoms.
The researchers, who studied 10,000 children age 9 to 11 in 17 states with varying costs of living and anti-poverty policies, expected the biggest disparities to show up in states with the highest cost of living. Instead, more expensive states that had anti-poverty programs had narrower gaps in income-associated differences in brain structure. And mental health symptoms like anxiety and depression were 48% lower in expensive states whose social safety nets had larger cash benefits than in states with lower cash benefits.
Jeff Chiu/AP
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