Should Hospital Workers Who Don't Get a Flu Shot Be Required to Wear a Mask?
…for just started this policy, I think it is very interesting and may push those who don’t want to get a flu shot for whatever reason to get a flu…
After struggling to schedule a flu shot for his own toddler, host Bapu Jena went down a research rabbit hole. He discovered that the time of year kids are born…
Influenza kills, but you’d never know it by how few of us get the vaccine.
…for just started this policy, I think it is very interesting and may push those who don’t want to get a flu shot for whatever reason to get a flu…
…While we were watching for avian flu, swine flu spread from Mexico around the globe so quickly that sealing our borders against it would have been “akin to closing the…
…vaccine — a live virus in a nasal spray — is much more effective than flu shots in protecting young children against the disease.” FluMist, made by Medimmune, has not…
What “Sleep No More” and the Stanford Prison Experiment tell us about who we really are.
What “Sleep No More” and the Stanford Prison Experiment tell us about who we really are.
At the start of the 20th century, there weren’t many hospitals in the U.S. That changed in 1918, thanks to the Great Influenza pandemic. Its effects on health care are…
…flu isn’t much more dangerous than seasonal flu, it just struck a particularly vulnerable population. That didn’t prevent a public panic, of course: the Mexican economy could lose as much…
…the flu in the winter months. Even if, let’s say, some research physicians expose you to live flu virus in the middle of summer, you’re still less likely to get…
Also: would you take a confirmation-bias vaccine?…
…in to see to see a physician, who told me I definitely had a bad flu and the only one going around was the swine flu. The good news is…
Feeling a little feverish? Throat a little scratchy? You may be relieved to know that the last time a great swine flu epidemic was predicted it didn’t materialize. In 1976,…
Bapu talks to White House Covid Czar Dr. Ashish Jha about becoming a household name, studying pandemics, and the frustrations of politics. Also, when will he be out of a…
…most of this internet-peddled Tamiflu is likely counterfeit. Maybe that’s good news, since it’s been theorized that widespread use of Tamiflu could result in more drug-resistant flu strains as the…
Chronic fatigue syndrome looks remarkably similar to Long Covid, but has been ignored by the medical community. Could patients finally get some answers to their debilitating illness?…
…That has sharply reduced cases of pinkeye. On net, I imagine that the economic costs of the swine-flu epidemic exceed the costs of the pinkeye outbreak. Nonetheless, it’s always nice…
I’ve long felt like a flu epidemic is one of the biggest external threats to the U.S. right now when measured in expected lives lost over the next ten years….
In Seattle recently, I met a pulmonologist who said that the H1N1 virus has him busier than he’s ever been, his hospital beds full of flu patients. The uptick hit…
…is related to these amazing Sunderband Tiger masks: As explained on this funky “Man-eaters” page, the idea of flipping the mask around was an attempt to reduce tiger attacks: This…
They are the most-trusted profession in America (and with good reason). They are critical to patient outcomes (especially in primary care). Could the growing army of nurse practitioners be an…
In a conversation fresh from the Freakonomics Radio Network’s podcast laboratory, Michèle Flournoy (one of the highest-ranking women in Defense Department history) speaks with Cecil Haney (one of the U.S….
Jason Kottke explains how the H1N1 vaccine is made — including the step where part of the virus is injected into eggs, where it incubates for two to three days…
Last month, Levitt blogged about how Google Flu Trends, which measures flu queries in real-time, can serve as an early-warning system for flu outbreaks. The catch: it only works if…
For all the anxiety surrounding the spread of swine flu, some of the most effective flu countermeasures are also the cheapest and simplest: social distancing (keeping about three feet away…
A conversation with 2008 Olympic gold medalist Shawn Johnson, recorded for the Freakonomics Radio series “The Hidden Side of Sports.”…
Behavioral economists say “regret lotteries” are powerful motivational tools. When Philadelphia tried one in 2021, the results were disappointing. Bapu looks at how incentives can backfire — and what we…
The U.S. spent the past few decades waiting for China to act like the global citizen it said it wanted to be. The waiting may be over.
