Elder care

A recent article in The Atlantic tells us that the Netherlands offers “the world’s most generous long-term care insurance, covering professional nursing or home care for all residents who can demonstrate need.” That country spends 4.1 percent of its GDP on formal elder-care services. In the U.S., the percentage is 1.3.

The point of the article is to expose the false belief that, with sufficient savings and adequate public services, care of the elderly can be handled by professionals. In fact, most elder care is still done informally—that is, by relatives or friends. This is true even for the elderly Dutch. Plus, even if the elderly are in residential care, family members tend to be highly involved.

One woman, in commenting on this article, wrote the following: 

“My mother had to go into a senior living facility after several falls and had become increasingly confused. I lived a 5 hour drive away and my brother lived 3,000 miles away. She kept asking when she could go home (we had to sell her house). She had long-term care insurance but it did finally run out because even though she made over $300,000 for her house her monthly fees at the facility were inching up to $10,000/month. Eventually she needed to be moved to a nursing home in my home town ($4,000 for the ambulance) and now the monthly cost was $15,000. Outrageous is the only word for it. We can pay $16,000,000 for the reflecting pool fiasco but not health care. The whole thing is devastating and depressing.”

Agreed.

For an introduction to this blog, see I Just Say No; for a list of blog topics, click the Topics tab.

Veering left

It’s not political. Rather, researchers have discovered that almost all of us have a natural tendency to wander in a counterclockwise direction. An applied physicist discovered this phenomenon when he was studying whether people maintain a certain distance between one another while walking. In reviewing the data from his 40 experiments, he noticed that most of his participants spontaneously veered to the left. This piqued his interest. He looked for additional data in the scientific literature and found a study showing that people who are lost usually wander in circles, but the study didn’t specify the direction.

As he continued his research, he found that veering left was unrelated to hand dominance, the layout of the room, or anything else that he could discern. He did find that the phenomenon holds true across demographics, cultures, and conditions. A study of 52 Japanese kindergarten children, who were moving about while music played, showed that most of the children moved counterclockwise.

To continue collecting data, scientists conducted further experiments. For example, they instructed study participants to wander about in an open schoolyard while a drone recorded their movements. Within seconds, they found that 80 percent of people were moving in a counterclockwise direction. As one researcher noted, “It’s not a gradual drift but rather a bias that emerges almost immediately.”

The scientists are baffled. As one physicist noted, "In principle, there is no reason for the fact that people prefer rotating counterclockwise."

I’ve never paid much attention to my own wanderings, although I’m aware that I usually tend to go left when exiting a hotel room, regardless of where I’m heading.

For an introduction to this blog, see I Just Say No; for a list of blog topics, click the Topics tab.

The germs among us

Germs are microscopic organisms, such as bacteria, viruses, fungi, and protozoa.

As one who doesn’t believe in sanitizing everything—or, really, anything—I was heartened to read about an international project in which over 900 scientists and volunteers collected samples of microorganisms from subways in 60 cities and on six continents. They swabbed turnstiles, railings, ticket kiosks, benches, and subway cars. (One researcher was thanked by a bystander for cleaning the subway.)

The researchers found 4,246 known species of micro-organisms. Two thirds of these were bacteria and the remainder were a mix of fungi, viruses, and other kinds of microbes. They also found 10,928 viruses and 748 kinds of bacteria that had never been documented.

The vast majority of the collected organisms pose little risk to humans. As one scientist reported, “We don’t see anything that we are worried about. People are in contact with these all the time.” In fact, nearly all of the new viruses the researchers found are likely to be bacteriophages—viruses that infect bacteria.

 Half of the bacteria the researchers identified were those that typically live in and on the human body, especially the skin. Some of the bacteria were those that live in soil, and some were a species typically associated with the ocean.

All this is to say that microbes are a natural part of our environment. You can’t avoid the little creatures, and you can’t get rid of them.

For an introduction to this blog, see I Just Say No; for a list of blog topics, click the Topics tab.

Excess deaths in the United States

According to an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association, the term “excess deaths” refers to the “difference between observed deaths and deaths expected if US death rates equaled the rates of other high-income countries.” In fact, the US has higher mortality rates than other high-income countries. In 2023, life expectancy in the US ranked 50^th among other countries across the globe.

The causes of our excess mortality vary according to age groups. For ages 25 to 55, half of the excess deaths were caused by drug poisoning, alcohol, and suicide. For people 55 to 64, circulatory diseases and metabolic conditions, such as diabetes, account for nearly half of the excess deaths; for ages 64 to 84 those conditions account for more than half. For people 85 and older, mental and nervous system disorders, such as Alzheimer’s disease, were the leading cause of excess deaths. According to the Journal, “many of these excess US deaths could likely be avoided by adopting health and social policies that have benefitted other high-income countries.”

The most rapid increase in excess US deaths is the result of drug poisonings, alcohol-related causes, and suicide—“deaths of despair”—and were most common among males.  Deaths of despair accounted for 24 percent of the increase in US deaths from 1999 to 2022. The Journal noted that deaths of despair are closely associated with social disadvantage, the loss of manufacturing jobs, automation, and worsened opportunities for less-educated workers. It also noted that “US regions with less-protective safety net and health coverage policies have higher and worsening mortality than other regions, as do those where majorities voted for Donald Trump in 2016.”  Whaddaya know!  

For an introduction to this blog, see I Just Say No; for a list of blog topics, click the Topics tab.