Man bites dog. As reported on the Wonkblog and elsewhere yesterday, a new analysis indicates that the rate of gun-induced homicide has plummeted by half over the past two decades.
Asked in a March Pew Research Center survey whether crimes involving guns have increased, held steady or been in remission since twenty years ago, more than half of all respondents said such crimes were on the rise.
Wrong. In 1993 - a year remembered by many of us through a Vaseline-coated lens of nostalgia - the gun-homicide rate in the United States was twice what it is today. The 49 percent drop since then is consistent with a general and steady, if unheralded, drop-off in rates of all violent crimes, as the federal Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics confirms.
Actually, the rate of firearm-related homicides began a rapid ascent in the 1960s, peaked in the early 1990s, and has now returned to that of the early 1960s. (Gun-related suicides have also declined, but not as dramatically.)
These statistics do not bring back to life a single innocent person who has been killed, by guns or otherwise, in the past two decades. But they do provide some perspective in what has been an emotion-charged and too-often fact-challenged debate. As I’ve previously written, I fear that the debate leading to the Affordable Care Act - now proving famously tough to implement -a few years ago involved some misconceptions concerning the state of health care in the United States. People on both sides of the current debate on gun-control legislation would be well advised to get the facts straight.
Ambulance response time can vary widely across cities, depending on traffic patterns and the location of the emergency situation. As a volunteer medic in Jerusalem, Elli Beer witnessed firsthand how a few minutes can make a significant difference in saving a life. His frustration with poor ambulance response times led him to develop an all-volunteer rescue service called United Hatzalah.
In this recently posted TEDMED talk, Beer talks passionately about how a small neighborhood group dedicated to responding to nearby emergencies evolved into United Hatzalah’s network of 2,000 volunteers. Today, volunteers respond to incidents on “ambu-cycles,” motorcycles carrying the same equipment as a conventional ambulance but lacking the ability to transport patients, and have treated more than 200,000 people in the past year. Beer has rolled out the service in Brazil and Panama and plans to expand to India.
Health-care providers know there’s a wealth of valuable information trapped in the hand-written notes on patients’ charts. But the challenge of collecting and interpreting the data on a large scale remains to be solved. Now researchers at Stanford have taken a step forward in mining patient-based information by using existing language-analysis methods to identify drug side effects in advance of the Food and Drug Administration issuing official alerts.
Although their application is new, their information-gathering methods are based on well-established text processing techniques. It’s also simpler and faster than current strategies used in the same arena, said [engineering research associate Paea LePendu, PhD, the lead author of the paper]. Content is first grouped via “ontologies,” which are information graphs organized by associative relationships instead of a rigid linear structure. For example, melanoma is a kind of skin cancer, and so is Kaposi’s sarcoma; by knowing “skin cancer” encompasses both kinds of cancer, the search process picks up this medical knowledge. The system also de-identifies patient information in the process, so sensitive data, such as names and addresses, doesn’t get revealed. With these methods, LePendu said, the technique allows them to process 11 million clinical notes in about seven hours on hardware no different from a laptop computer — a pace that other programs can’t match.
The information is also current: It’s generated from what is observed and recorded in the hospital or doctor’s office. That’s an advantage over the FDA’s AERS reports, which rely on patients and health providers to make the additional effort to report adverse events.
The researchers developed the computerized method to sift through the contents of clinical notes in electronic medical records and used it to examine how often specific drugs and diseases were mentioned in roughly 10 million notes for about 1.8 million patients over 15 years. The goal was to organize these notes into a data-mining substrate they refer to as a patient-feature matrix. “Everyone is excited about the prospect of ‘big data’ mining on electronic health record data,” Shah said. “We demonstrate it in practice.”
There’s a new feature on the 30-mile stretch of highway that takes me from the Stanford campus to my San Francisco home: a digital sign warning people not to text and drive. “IT’S NOT WORTH IT,” the large orange letters scream out to me and the thousands of other commuters who pass by each day - and it’s a sentiment that leaders at the National Transportation Safety Board wholeheartedly agree with.
Earlier this week the government agency issued a reminder on the dangers of distracted driving and the importance of raising awareness of the issue:
A recent report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that nearly 70 percent of Americans ages 18 – 64 report talking on their phones while driving in the past 30 days. About 30 percent say they texted while driving.
For years, the NTSB has seen how deadly distraction can be across all modes of transportation, but it’s on our highways where distraction claims the greatest number of lives. After investigating a crash where a pickup driver sent and received 11 texts in the 11 minutes before he ran into a truck triggering collisions that killed two and injured 38, the NTSB called for a nationwide ban on the use of personal electronic devices. This year, we put Eliminate Distraction in Transportation on our Most Wanted List.
According to the agency, 39 states and the District of Columbia currently ban text messaging for drivers, while ten states and the District of Columbia prohibit the use of handheld mobile phones while behind the wheel.
As families get ready to travel during the holiday season, many pediatricians are stressing the importance of child passenger safety.
Car crashes are the leading cause of death for children in the U.S., and, according to this NPR story, many accidents could be prevented by properly installing car seats and following basic safety tips. But:
“I think we’ve become immune to [accidents],” says Ben Hoffman, MD, a professor of pediatrics at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine. “I think it happens so frequently and with such regularity that we’ve lost focus on how important it is. And I think that we’re so reliant on cars to get us from Point A to Point B that we’ve sort of accepted it as the price of doing business.”
Today, the National Transportation Safety Board held a one-day forum on the importance of child-safety restraints in aircraft and motor vehicles. Currently, all 50 states require infants and children to be buckled up in car seats when riding in automobiles, and the NTSB is urging the Federal Aviation Administration to apply the same requirement to flying. According to NTSB chairman Deborah Hersman:
“When you get on an airplane, you’re expected to fasten your seat belt on takeoff and landing and during turbulence. The same should be true for children.”
The NPR piece includes a nice primer on car seat safety tips. And many hospitals, including Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital, offer car seat installations and inspections for new parents.
Man bites dog. As reported on the Wonkblog and elsewhere yesterday, a new analysis indicates that the rate of gun-induced homicide has plummeted by half over the past two decades.
