Advocates for subsidized health care insist we face a black and white issue - the rich have health care and the poor do not.

Yet poor people in developing nations are healthier than wealthier countries. 

Hans Rosling,  Professor of International Health at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, is giving a presentation at
the 64th Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting where he intends to underscore the fact that false assumptions regarding the reality of life for people throughout the world are an impediment to the urgently needed potential solutions to the rising global demand for health care. 

That the world of health is divided between rich and poor is more cliché

Surveys of 20 homeless, alcohol-dependent patients who had four or more annual visits to Bellevue Hospital's emergency department for two consecutive years determined that all began drinking in childhood or adolescence, and 13 reported having alcoholic parents. 13 patients reported abuse in their childhood homes and 19 left home by age 18. Only one was married and none of the subjects was employed. The three who were military veterans said that military life amplified their alcohol use. 

A small, drab and highly inconspicuous moth has been flitting nameless about its special niche among the middle elevations of one of the world's oldest mountain ranges, the southern Appalachian Mountains in North America. A team of American scientists has now identified this new to science species as Cherokeea attakullakulla.

It was frequenting these haunts for tens of millions of years before the first humans set foot on this continent, all the while not caring in the least that it had no name or particular significance, but it will probably still get listed as endangered. 

Tuberculosis (TB) remains a major cause of disability and death worldwide. An estimated 8.6 million people fell ill and 1.3 million people died from the disease in 2012, according to the World Health Organization. Although TB is curable, adherence to therapy is difficult as treatment requires taking antibiotic drugs for at least six months and sometimes up to two years. Poor adherence to medication and other factors have resulted in drug-resistant strains, and currently no effective TB vaccine exists.  

A new paper describes a type of tuberculosis (TB) treatment that involves manipulating the body's response to TB bacteria rather than targeting the bacteria themselves, a concept called host-directed therapy.

A new form of neurotransmission influences the long-lasting memory created by addictive drugs, like cocaine and opioids, and the subsequent craving for these drugs of abuse, according to a recent study.

Loss of this type of neurotransmission creates changes in brains cells that resemble the changes caused by drug addiction so targeting it might lead to new therapies for treating drug addiction.

A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down but apparently the public will also happily accept movie tickets, cell phone minutes and discounts on air travel.

A private South African health plan, Discovery Health, increased patient use of preventive care using a program that incentivized healthy behavior using discounts on retail goods and travel. 

"Even though most people know that preventive care is important, too few people take advantage of it," said Ateev Mehrotra, associate professor of health care policy at  Harvard Medical School. "Incentive plans like this try to reinforce those long-term gains with more immediate rewards." 

As hormone levels change during the transition to menopause, the quality of a woman's cholesterol carriers degrades, leaving her at greater risk for heart disease, according to researchers at the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health. 

Their evaluation was done using an advanced method to characterize cholesterol carriers in the blood and was published in the Journal of Lipid Research. They believe the results call for further research to evaluate the menopause-related dynamic changes in sex hormones on the quality of cholesterol carriers over time, as well as increased emphasis on the importance of healthy diet and exercise for women undergoing menopause. 

A paper in Scientific Reports posits a new cause of the ice age that covered large parts of the Northern Hemisphere 2.6 million years ago.

The study found a previously unknown mechanism by which the joining of North and South America changed the salinity of the Pacific Ocean and caused major ice sheet growth across the Northern Hemisphere. The change in salinity encouraged sea ice to form which in turn created a change in wind patterns, leading to intensified monsoons. These provided moisture that caused an increase in snowfall and the growth of major ice sheets, some of which reached over a mile in thickness.

Tsunami earthquakes are rare but they happen at relatively shallow depths in the ocean. So while are small in terms of their magnitude, they create very large tsunamis, with some earthquakes that only measure 5.6 on the Richter scale generating waves that reach up to 30 feet high when they hit the shore. 

A global network of seismometers enables researchers to detect even the smallest earthquakes. However, the challenge has been to determine which small magnitude events are likely to cause large tsunamis.  New research has revealed the causes and warning signs of these rare tsunami earthquakes, which may lead to improved detection measures.