Fred McElwee

Air pollution in Oxford continues to fall, according to the 2024 Air Quality report issued by the City Council today. NO2 pollution fell 10% from 2023 levels, and 24% on the High where electric buses made a big difference. Levels in LTNs and their boundary roads also decreased.

Relying on private hospitals is helping the NHS to cut waiting times — but it’s also fueling a two-track system trib.al/04ksT58

We just analysed the road casualty data for Oxford and Oxfordshire 2023. In Oxford, there were 47 Serious Injuries on our roads (& zero fatalities). 23 were to cyclists, 8 pedestrians, 8 motorcyclists, 4 car occupants and 4 other vehicles @BBCOxford @TheOxfordMail @OxfordClarion

Look how the leading causes of death in the US have changed over the past 4 years @JAMA_current jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/…

In their new Forefront article, @FredMcelwee, Amanda Cole, Louis Garrison, + Adrian Towse from @HERC_Oxford + @OHENews discuss how it is difficult to accurately measure the contribution of prior federal funding to a specific drug product’s development. bit.ly/3KEaZvU

Looking across coun­tries reveals that those with the highest excess deaths typically experienced the big­gest increases in fuel costs econ.st/3MgeN7X

1990: zero states with obesity rates above 20% 2018: zero states with obesity rates below 20% Not to mention an explosion in chronic disease, cancer, ADHD, inflammation... Something has to change. And that something is our broken food system.

according to the @ft, the uk now has the worst access to healthcare in europe (and shocker: it’s worse than america’s too)

Air pollution reduces global life expectancy by 2.2 years on average. That’s more than alcohol use, unsafe water and sanitation, HIV/AIDS, and malaria combined. aqli.epic.uchicago.edu/wp-content/upl…

This newsletter is too bizarre for words. bloomberg.com/view/articles/…

A visualization of chaos: 41 triple pendulums with very slightly different initial conditions

@CharlesFLehman @PredictIt If something was irrational, it would be the relationship between all of these markets (overall win probability, individual states, and EC margin), but “misalignment” between the first two does not necessarily imply irrationality. It's much more complicated than that!

@CharlesFLehman In that case, the probability of D’s winning each battleground state is 70% (.5*1+.5*.4), and the probability of R’s winning each battleground state is 30% (.5*0+.5*.6) even though overall the probabilities are 50/50. That is similar to what you see in the @predictit market

Google Scholar has parsed this cafeteria lunch menu as an author list, and it's delightful

I’m increasingly of the belief that incentive design is the most important problem to work on. Humans are good at overcoming obstacles when they have reason to do so — the worst problems tend to be ones of cooperation, not technological or scientific understanding.

A great op-ed by Kate Baicker and @amitabhchandra2 that gets into the tough questions the campaigns should be debating: “Discussing whether “health care is a right” avoids the harder question of “how much health care is a right?” bostonglobe.com/2019/12/23/opi…

What is politics? Children’s answers ...

Designating our streets primarily for vehicle flow is not a free choice for society. It excludes a multitude of other options and limits the huge potential of our public spaces.

In ‘16, Mark Trusheim @BillCassidy and I developed “Netflix” model for state financing of HepC treatment. @LADeptHealth @rebekahgeemd @WADeptHealth pursuing w/ @GileadSciences @abbvie. But in what other disease areas might it apply? We propose a framework. healthaffairs.org/do/10.1377/hbl…

Food as medicine?: individualized diets delivered to home associated with less hospital admissions and lower costs (matching, not randomized) jamanetwork.com/journals/jamai… by @SethABerkowitz and colleagues @UNC editorial @Dmozaffarian @JerryMande @TuftsNutrition @JAMAInternalMed