Research shows women will take prescription drugs over 60% of their lives. Credit: Danilo Alvesd / Unsplash
Pharma Nation: Americans will spend half their lives taking prescription drugs, study predicts
UNIVERSITY PARK. PENNSYLVANIA — It’s hard to argue that Americans don’t love their pills. Recent estimates tell us that over 60 percent of U.S. adults take prescription drugs, and over 45 percent have taken a prescribed drug over the prior 30 days. Now, worrying new predictive research from Penn State reports young Americans born in 2019 can expect to spend a significant portion of their lives medicated.
In fact, study authors estimate these young Americans will likely spend more years on prescription meds than being married or receiving an education!
Led by Jessica Ho, associate professor of sociology and demography at Penn State, the research also points to some gender disparities. American males will be on prescription drugs for 48 percent of their lives. That percentage balloons to 60% for females.
“As an American, I’d like to know what medications I’m putting in my body and how long I can expect to take them,” says Prof. […]
Yet another report on the damage fracking does to the environment and the people who live anywhere near a fracking installation. Who is opposed to this scientific research and in support of fracking? Why Republicans, of course, and the corporations who profit from this technology, and rent those MAGAts. Who is damaged by fracking, as reported by thousands of scientific studies? Why people like you, of course.
Fracking installation Credit: Adobe
As public health experts compile thousands of papers with “damning evidence” linking fracking with health harms, fossil fuel groups are working to undermine the research by arguing that not all of it is peer-reviewed.
“The ninth edition of a ‘compendium’ of scientific, medical, government, and media reports on the industry’s health effects, contains references to almost 2,500 papers that add to evidence that fracking has an array of negative impacts on human health,” writes Inside Climate News.
Newer studies corroborate older research and reveal the same conclusions wherever fracking is practiced in the United States, said lead author Dr. Sandra Steingraber, a member of Physicians for Social Responsibility and Concerned Health Professionals of New York, which jointly published the document. “The fact that there is lots of new data that supports the older data means that the case against fracking is ever more damning.”
Hydraulic fracturing, better known as fracking, has been linked to an array of health harms for residents near extraction sites, including […]
Two or three times a week now I see reports on how the Republicans are trying to dismantle education in the United States from kindergarten to college. Fascists historically never want fact-based education, they always want indoctrination in support of their distorted non-fact-based view of what education should be about. This has become a national tragedy in states where the Republicans have the power to do such things. Here is the latest story I have seen, this one from Wisconsin. Is this how you want your children to be educated?
Wisconsin Assembly Speaker Republican Robin Vos Credit: Facebook
Wisconsin Republicans are holding hostage a pay increase for staff at the University of Wisconsin system, in an effort to force them to dismantle diversity programs, reported the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
The bipartisan Joint Committee on Employee Relations, which consists of legislative leaders, approved a plan to give state workers who do not work within the UW System a 6% pay increase over two years. The group includes state troopers, prison guards and other staffers,” reported Tyler Katzenberger and Molly Beck. “But the committee, co-led by Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, did not include pay raises for staff on UW System campuses. Vos has vowed not to approve the raises until UW campuses dismantle programs focused on diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI.”
Democratic Senate Minority Leader Melissa Agard reacted with outrage to the move.
“We are denying pay increases for half of our state workforce because of one person’s [Vos’] resistance to initiatives to increase inclusion on our campuses,” said Agard. “This is […]
There are so many sectors of our culture that are breaking down. Schools and education generally are one example, including this. And what is becoming clear is that Americans, in this case American parents, are a big part of the problem.
Credit: Madeline Monroe/Adobe Stock
Chronic absenteeism among U.S. students has nearly doubled since before the pandemic, and experts fear plummeting test scores and soaring learning loss will be impossible to correct without fixing it.
New data released on the Return 2 Learn Tracker from the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) shows chronic absenteeism, defined as students missing more than 10 percent of the school year, went from 15 percent in 2018 to 29 percent in 2022.
The problem is particularly prominent in districts that already have a history of trouble with student success, such as low-achieving schools, ones with high poverty rates and districts with a high minority population.
“We’re able to see that there are really big increases, much larger increases in traditionally disadvantaged districts,” said Nat Malkus, senior fellow and deputy director of the Education Policy Studies at AEI, who worked on the tracker.
Between 2018 and 2022, there was a 17 percentage point jump in chronic absenteeism among low-achieving districts compared to only 10 points in high-achieving ones, according to the tracker. In […]
The United States is at once the richest country in the world and one of the most difficult in the world to live in if you aren’t affluent. It is a national disgrace that thousands of families don’t have enough to eat properly. It is also incredibly expensive because it results in all kinds of chronic medical conditions. Meanwhile the nasty circus we call Congress does nothing, and the Republicans actually try to cut food support for children.
The number of Americans who were food insecure — meaning they couldn’t reliably afford to eat — soared last year, according to new government data.
Why it matters: The economy might’ve looked great in 2022 by some metrics, like the low unemployment rate, but not this one.
Food insecurity spiked to a level not seen since the U.S. economy was slowly recovering from the financial crisis.
Historic inflation rates and the disappearance of pandemic-era benefits hammered vulnerable Americans last year.
Zoom in: The share of households that couldn’t reliably afford food rose to 12.8% from 10.2%, according to the report released by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s economic research service.
Food insecurity, per the USDA’s definition, means that at times during the year, a given household was unable to acquire an adequate amount of food for one or more of its members because they didn’t have enough money or resources.
It can mean households rely on a few very basic foods and reduce variety in their diets. Those with “very low” food […]
