We have smartphones and smart watches, so why not smart toilets? Seung-min Park and his colleagues from Stanford University School of Medicine would like people to use the Stanford toilet, a smart toilet that monitors their excretions much as a smart watch counts their daily steps. For this achievement the team won the 2023 Ig Nobel Award for Public Health.1234
Park told The BMJ he has met some resistance to the Stanford toilet. “There’s a huge perception of human excreta as taboo,” he said. He got a “brutal rejection” from a major science foundation that said his project violated decorum.
The Stanford toilet uses a variety of technologies including a urinalysis dipstick test strip, a computer vision system for defecation analysis, an anal print sensor paired with an identification camera, and a telecommunications link to monitor and quickly analyse the substances that people excrete. It could be linked to a person’s electronic health record.
The smart toilet device coul
The number of abortions rose in most states in the US during the first six months of this year compared with the same period in 2020, before the US Supreme Court overturned the right to abortion. The number of women travelling out of state for abortions rose dramatically, a report from the non-profit Guttmacher Institute found.1
Abortion was legal in all 50 US states until the Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade in June 2022 in the case referred to as Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization.2 The court returned the decision to the states. At present, 14 states ban abortion and the right to abortion is in the courts in at least three other states. States banning abortion are concentrated in the south and south eastern parts …
The US could have averted more than a million deaths each year in 2020 and 2021 if death rates were similar to those in other rich countries during the covid-19 pandemic, a study has shown.
Researchers at Boston University School of Public Health, the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard Chan School of Public Health, and other US institutions examined how many US deaths could have been avoided each year from 1933 to 2021 if US age specific mortality had been the same as the average in 21 other rich countries. Their results, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Nexus ,1 show that US death rates have been worsening since the 1980s, with the greatest losses during the pandemic.
Excess deaths in the US are often referred to as “missing Americans.”
From the …
President Joe Biden’s administration has announced it will begin negotiating prices for 10 expensive drugs used by people who are covered by the Medicare health insurance scheme for over 65s.1
US drug prices are among the highest in the world, but negotiating prices was forbidden until passage of the Inflation Reduction Act last year.
Biden said, “For far too long Americans have paid more for prescription drugs than any major economy. And while the pharmaceutical industry makes record profits, millions of Americans are forced to choose between paying for medications they need to live or paying for food, rent, and other basic necessities . . . There is no reason why Americans should be forced to …
A meta-analysis of six common cancer screenings has concluded that “current evidence does not substantiate the claim that common cancer screening tests save lives by extending lifetime, except possibly for colorectal cancer screening with sigmoidoscopy.”
Michael Bretthauer and colleagues from the University of Oslo reported in JAMA Internal Medicine that screening benefits were small: a statistically significant 110 days’ gain was seen with colorectal cancer screening with sigmoidoscopy.1 Gains were 37 days with prostate cancer screening and colonoscopy and 107 days with lung cancer screening. No days were gained with mammography or faecal occult blood testing.
The authors did not call for abandoning all screening but said that it was important for organisations and policy makers “to provide the public with reliable estimates for benefits and harms of screening on cancer incidence and mortality and on lifetime gained by screening.”
Organised cancer screening programmes hav