Did The Press Give Your Kid Measles?

Dan Blankenhorn, over at ZDNet Healthcare posted this provocative question on his blog. He reports that according to Tammy Boyce, a research fellow at the King's Fund in England. excessive media coverage of the possible like between vaccines and autism had prompted unhealthy behavior among parents of young children. She sees a direct correlation between the rise in media coverage and rise of measles in England. That's because a growing number of parents are refusing to allow their children to receive the standard MMR (mumps, measles and rubeblla) vaccine. While the research that touched off this fear of vaccines (conducted by Andrew Wakefield) has been discredited, the media seem intent on keeping the debate alive, and therby fueling concern among parents about vaccine safety.

When Ms. Boyce was asked in in interview with The Economist if the press had learned anything from what has happened, she answered, "No, on balance I don't think they have."

AN UNHEALTHY AMERICA: The Economic Burden of Chronic Disease

In October 2007, the Milken Institute published an eye-opening report authored by Ross DeVol and Armen Bedroussian. (You can find it in the Reports section of their website) It provides a comprehensive state-by-state look at the impact of chronic disease in America, what will happen if we continue our unhealthy behavior, and charts new courses to save lives and increase productivity and economic growth.

The authors don't waste any time pointing out the magnitude of the problem we face. Here is an excerpt from their introduction to the report: "More than half of Americans suffer from one or more chronic diseases. Each year millions of people are diagnosed with chronic disease, and millions more die from their condition. By our calculations, the most common chronic diseases are costing the economy more than $1 trillion annually—and that figure threatens to reach $6 trillion by the middle of the century. Yet much of this cost is avoidable. This failure to contain the containable is undermining prospects for extending health insurance coverage and for coping with the medical costs of an aging population. The rising rate of chronic disease is a crucial but frequently ignored contributor to growth in medical expenditures."

To quantify the potential savings from healthier lifestyles and plausible but modest advances in treatment, the authors compared a“business-as-usual” baseline scenario with an optimistic scenario that assumes reasonable improvements in health-related behavior and treatment. The major changes contemplated here are weight control combined with improved nutrition, exercise, further reductions in smoking, more aggressive early disease detection, slightly faster adoption of improved therapies, and less-invasive treatments. The impacts of these factors vary widely by condition—gains against diabetes depend largely on reductions in obesity, while colon cancer advances depend heavily on wider early screening. A complete description of the assumptions on which these scenarios are based can be found in the full report.

Across the seven diseases, the optimistic scenario would cut treatment (direct) costs in 2023 by $217 billion (figure ES-1). And the cumulative avoidable treatment costs from now through
2023 would total a whopping $1.6 trillion. Note that this would be a gift that keeps on giving, saving hundreds of billions annually in the years beyond 2023.

California Has a Plan For Fighting Unhealhty Behavior

The CA Department of Public Health, through its Network For a Healthy California, has developed Take Action!, a free 10-week web-based program for employees of California businesses that will empower them to adopt and maintain a healthy lifestyle. Why are they doing this? Consider this quote from the introduction to the Take Action! Program Overview (which you can download by clicking the previous link): California residents have gained 360 million pounds of excess weight in the past ten years, a rate that is among the fastest in the country. A third of our children, one in four teens, and over half of all adults are already overweight or obese.

The impact of this extra weight? According to the CA Department of Health, "rates of chronic disease and disability associated with poor diet and inactivity continue to escalate year after year and are costing California $28 billion annually."

The Take Action! plan is a wellness plan that has great potential to improve health and productivity because of one key ingredient that many similar plans lack: SIMPLICITY. The plan provides two paths to better health: 1. include more fruits and veggies in the diet, 2. increase regular physical activity. The plan realizes that asking people to embrace both paths at the same time is not likely to achieve the desired outcome. So it simply asks participants to just pick one, and be willing to follow the guidelines in the plan for that path. The plan provides a week by week guideline for employers to maximize the plan's effectiveness.

If you are in a position to introduce a wellness plan into your workplace, definitely check out Take Action!