News by Subject Policy & Ethics

Could where you live dictate how long you live? New research at Syracuse University's Maxwell School, published today in the Milbank Quarterly, shows Americans who live in so-called blue states tend to live longer than those in red states, primarily due to state policies.

Banks with powerful CEOs and smaller boards are more likely to take risks and be susceptible to money laundering. The study tested for a link between bank risk and enforcements issued by US regulators for money laundering in almost 1,000 publicly listed US banks. The results show that money laundering enforcements are associated with an increase in bank risk. The impact of money laundering is heightened by the presence of powerful CEOs and only partly mitigated by large and independent executive boards.

The diverse situations experienced by health-care workers during the COVID-19 pandemic often present serious ethical challenges. From the allocation of resources and triage protocols to health-care worker and patient rights and the management of clinical trials, new ethical questions have come to the forefront of today's global public health emergency.

Effective contact tracing and epidemic control measures are essential for safe opening of schools during COVID-19 pandemic, according to two studies published simultaneously in The Lancet Child & Adolescent Health journal.

After tracking a cohort of community members equipped with naloxone and a smartphone application for more than a year, researchers showed that laypersons can effectively signal and respond to overdose incident to administer nasal naloxone in advance of emergency medical service (EMS) arrival. Just as CPR and early defibrillation administered by laypersons in advance of EMS contribute to positive outcomes after cardiac arrest, so, too, can opioid patients benefit from similar forms of community support.

A review of the human health hazards, risks, and impacts of California wildfires, and impacts of policies aimed to prevent and mitigate wildfires to serve as a resource in the development and deployment of California wildfire management policies within a human health context.

Two new USC reports describe a challenging obstacle course for patients to access Alzheimer's disease treatments once they become available.

"Our findings suggest that travel from just a few countries with substantial SARS-CoV-2 transmission may have seeded additional outbreaks around the world before the characterisation of COVID-19 as a pandemic on March 11, 2020", says Dr Fatimah Dawood from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), USA, who co-led the research.