Shortchanging America's Health 2008: A State-by-State Look at How Federal Public Health Dollars Are Spent

Examines public health indicators in each state, in combination with federal and state funding for programs to promote health. Includes state rankings by funding per capita, percentage of population who are uninsured, disease rates, and other indicators

Complete information pivotal-voter model with asymmetric group size

We study the equilibria of the standard pivotal-voter participation game between two groups of voters of asymmetric sizes (majority and minority), as originally proposed by Palfrey and Rosenthal (Public Choice 41(1):7–53, 1983). We find a unique equilibrium wherein the minority votes with certainty and the majority votes with probability in (0,1); we prove that this is the only equilibrium in which voters of only one group play a pure strategy, and we provide sufficient conditions for its existence. Equilibria where voters of both groups vote with probability in (0, 1) are analyzed numerically

Ready or Not? Protecting the Public's Health From Diseases, Disasters, and Bioterrorism, 2008

Examines ten indicators to assess progress in state readiness to respond to bioterrorism and other public health emergencies. Evaluates the federal government's and hospitals' preparedness. Makes suggestions for funding, restructuring, and other reforms

Medical Implications of Space Radiation Exposure Due to Low Altitude Polar Orbits

Space radiation research has progressed rapidly in recent years, but there remain large uncertainties in predicting and extrapolating biological responses to humans. Exposure to cosmic radiation and Solar Particle Events may pose a critical health risk to future spaceflight crews and can have a serious impact to all biomedical aspects of space exploration. The relatively minimal shielding of the cancelled 1960's Manned Orbiting Laboratory program's space vehicle and the high inclination polar orbits would have left the crew susceptible to high exposures of cosmic radiation and high dose-rate SPEs that are mostly unpredictable in frequency and intensity. In this study, we have modeled the nominal and off-nominal radiation environment that a MOL-like spacecraft vehicle would be exposed to during a 30-day mission using high performance, multi-core computers. Projected doses from a historically large SPE (e.g. the August 1972 solar event) have been analyzed in the context of the MOL orbit profile, providing an opportunity to study its impact to crew health and subsequent contingencies.It is reasonable to presume that future commercial, government, and military spaceflight missions in low-Earth orbit will have vehicles with similar shielding and orbital profiles. Studying the impact of cosmic radiation to the mission's operational integrity and the health of MOL crewmembers provides an excellent surrogate and case-study for future commercial and military spaceflight missions.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figures, 2 table

A study of methanol and silicon monoxide production through episodic explosions of grain mantles in the Central Molecular Zone

Methanol (CH$_3$OH) is found to be abundant and widespread towards the Central Molecular Zone, the inner few hundred parsecs of our Galaxy. Its origin is, however, not fully understood. It was proposed that the high cosmic ray ionisation rate in this region could lead to a more efficient non-thermal desorption of this species formed on grain surfaces, but it would also mean that this species is destroyed in a relatively short timescale. In a first step, we run chemical models with a high cosmic ray ionisation rate and find that this scenario can only reproduce the lowest abundances of methanol derived in this region ($\sim$10$^{-9}$-10$^{-8}$). In a second step, we investigate another scenario based on episodic explosions of grain mantles. We find a good agreement between the predicted abundances of methanol and the observations. We find that the dominant route for the formation of methanol is through hydrogenation of CO on the grains followed by the desorption due to the grain mantle explosion. The cyclic aspect of this model can explain the widespread presence of methanol without requiring any additional mechanism. We also model silicon monoxide (SiO), another species detected in several molecular clouds of the Galactic Centre. An agreement is found with observations for a high depletion of Si (Si/H $\sim$ 10$^{-8}$) with respect to the solar abundance.Comment: Accepted in MNRA