Author: Neil Schoenherr

Last year was an unquestionably busy time for health care news of all kinds. Media and policy coverage rightly focused on the many attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act, but it was also an eventful year in news for those of us who focus on prescription drug policy. In this post, I review five of the biggest drug policy developments of the past year, and look ahead to five issues I expect to make headlines in 2018.

The absurdity of condemning an entire group because of the actions of a single member seems self-evident. If a left-handed immigrant commits a crime, no one would propose banning all left-handed immigrants. The real question is whether there is a causal link between the commission of the crime and either the substantive criteria or the processes of the particular program. No such link exists.

In 2016, a group of engineers and doctors at Washington University in St. Louis launched efforts to determine if an imaging-based technique could provide a more detailed view of the cancer and enable women to make an informed decision for treatment options at the onset.

African-American girls with strong racial identity are more likely to be academically curious and persistent in school, according to a recent study from Washington University in St. Louis.

Feeding eggs to infants could provide them with key nutrients for better brains. A Brown School study finds infants who were introduced to eggs beginning at 6 months showed significantly higher blood concentrations of key nutrients.

Peggie Smith, the Charles F. Nagel Professor of Employment and Labor Law at Washington University’s School of Law, has been elected to the American Law Institute.

Today universities and colleges have lot of information but can’t use it effectively to drive business. Data is both difficult to access and needed by more applications. How do we examine the effective and proactive use of data — how to consolidate, integrate and use it to drive business?

Cookstoves, a central part of millions of homes throughout Asia, clog the air with particulates that, when inhaled, are dangerous to overall human health. Despite advances in technology, many people are reluctant or unable to adopt the newer, cleaner cookstoves. New research from our university gives us a clearer picture of the problem’s true scope.

As we plunge once more into a national debate over sex, power, assault and morality, many hope this will finally be the watershed moment in which a full reckoning will take place. We’ve been here before, though, and we’ve seen such hopes fade and get overtaken by self-interested partisan political fights. And it’s happening again.

Generic medications could be an effective way to improve health outcomes while lowering costs, but the existing drug patent system is poorly designed to motivate such discoveries, says an expert on health law at Washington University in St. Louis.