In the United States, many of the millions of tons of hazardous wastes that have been produced since World War II have accumulated in sites throughout the nation. Citizen concern about the extent of this problem led Congress to establish the Superfund Program in 1980 to locate, investigate, and clean up the worst sites nationwide. Most such waste exists as a complex mixture of many substances. ...

Maternal and neonatal mortality statistics foreground some possible causes of death at the expense of others. Political place (nation, state) and place of birth (hospital, home) are integral to these statistics; respect for women as persons is not. Using case examples from Malawi and the United States, I argue that the focus on place embedded in these indicators can legitimate coercive approach...

Spending for health care in the United States grew to $604.1 billion in 1989, an increase of 11.1 percent from the 1988 level. Growth in national health expenditures has been edging upward since 1986, when the annual growth in the health care bill was 7.7 percent. Health care spending continues to command a larger and larger proportion of the resources of the Nation: In 1989, 11.6 percent of th...

The Strategic National Risk Assessment (SNRA) was executed in support of Presidential Policy Directive 8 (PPD-8), which calls for creation of a National Preparedness Goal, a National Preparedness System, and a National Preparedness Report. Specifically, national preparedness is to be based on core capabilities that support ―strengthening the security and resilience of the United States through ...

451 In recent years, the development of new medications to treat alcohol dependence, representing the combined efforts of neuroscientists and clinical researchers, has begun a new era in alcoholism treatment. Until 1995, the only medical treatment approved for use in the United States (disulfiram) simply provoked intense physical symptoms such as vomiting upon the ingestion of alcohol. In contr...

Gambling has become a major recreational activity in the United States. Formerly confined to a few states such as Nevada and New Jersey, legal gambling opportunities have exploded across the nation in the past 2 decades. Some form of legalized gambling now exists in all but 2 states: 37 have lotteries, and 27 have casino gambling. Recent estimates indicate that 70% to 90% of North Americans hav...

The U.S. health care system suffers from a number of problems. Almost 46 million individuals were uninsured in 2007, an increase of 6 million people since 2001. Employer-based coverage, the primary source of health insurance across the nation, continues to erode. Costs continue to rise and bear primary responsibility for the nation’s bleak long-term fiscal outlook. While the United States spend...

C. One-third of the world’s people, living in the developing nations, suffer serious hunger and malnutrition and live in fear of famine. The United States has 6% of the world’s population but consumes 40% of the world’s resources. As a nation we waste more of the earth’s products than many poor countries have for their entire sustenance. More money is spent annually on the average American dog ...

Outlays for health care in the Nation reached $192.4 billion in calendar year 1978--13 percent higher than in 1977, according to preliminary figures compiled by the Health Care Financing Administration. This estimate represented $863 per person in the United States and was equal to 9.1 percent of the GNP. This latest report in the annual series representing national health expenditures provides...

The authors of this article have used Current Population Surveys to summarize public and private health insurance trends in the United States over the last 12 years. Key findings include the declining percentage of the non-elderly population with employer-sponsored coverage and increasing numbers of low- and middle-income uninsured. That is, in a period of fast-rising health care costs, the poo...