Women worried about breast cancer have just one concern: What can they do to reduce the risk of dying from the disease?
One answer is to get regular mammograms. Over the past 15 years, that advice has saved thousands of lives.…
A volunteer at a St. Charles County food pantry looks over empty shelves.
The number of Americans without enough to eat has reached the highest level since the federal government began keeping track 14 years ago.
About 49 million people — including…
A baby in St. Louis Childrens Hospital Neonatal Intensive Care Unit.
The little girl lay silent and asleep.
She wore a white stocking cap. A pair of plastic tubes sprouted from her chest, deep crimson from the blood that filled them.
They led…
Post-Dispatch file photo.
If you’re planning to get sick outside of regular business hours, you’d be well advised to do it in the Netherlands.
Almost every Dutch primary care doctor — 97 percent, to be precise — has a nurse or physician…
Here’s something you won’t learn from reading headlines or obsessively watching text crawl across the bottom of the TV screen: Health care reform isn’t a horse race.
It doesn’t turn on what the latest key member of Congress said this morning…
Dan Callahan
It began with a little black spot on Dan Callahan’s lower lip. He didn’t think it was anything to worry about. His doctor thought it was cancer.
The doctor was right.
It was neurotropic melanoma, a very rare — and very…
Protesters demand health reform at a rally outside Blue Cross headquarters in Los Angles last month.
Nothing about health care reform has inspired more overheated rhetoric than the so-called public option.
Opponents say it would unleash a government juggernaut against which no…
Who wants a drumstick? The six-foot-tall phorusrhacos longissimus roamed what is now Argentina during the Middle Miocene.
People often talk as if warming temperatures are the only evidence of human-induced global climate change. But the amount of carbon dioxide in the…
In Sunday’s third installment of a Post-Dispatch series on loopholes in Missouri’s drunk driving laws, we learned that the state law that mandates a one year-suspension of driving privileges for drivers who refuse to take a breathalyzer test often is a joke.
In…
House Democrats unveiled a sweeping health care reform bill last Thursday built on shared responsibility.
Individuals would have to buy health insurance for themselves and their families.
Taxpayers would subsidize coverage for those unable to afford it on their own.
Employers would have…
R.J. Matson/Post-Dispatch
Last week, Gov. Jay Nixon whacked another $203.7 million from the state’s budget. He’d already cut $385 million in July, and vetoed another $105 million when he signed the $23 billion budget in June.
The governor really had no choice.…
Water skiing on the Mississippi River
It takes more than 200 pages of dense, legalistic language to detail the intricacies of the federal Clean Water Act. But the bottom line is simple: Federal and state governments must protect lakes, streams and…
R.J. Matson/Post-Dispatch
The Doe Run Company has been operating a giant lead smelter in Herculaneum for decades. For just as long, elevated lead levels have been found in people, properties and roads around it.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Missouri Department…
About 60 percent of Americans - 175 million people - now live in communities that restrict smoking in public places.
On Nov. 3, voters in St. Louis County can add the county’s nearly 1 million residents to the list by voting…
House Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio.
Sen. Bob Corker, a Republican from Tennessee, was in a fine fury Tuesday morning. Speaking on the Senate floor, he blasted Democratic lawmakers for a plan to permanently adjust the Medicare formula used to set payment…
If there were a way to save $207.4 million, avoid 30,000 unnecessary hospitalizations and more than 2,000 premature deaths, we’d jump at it, right?
That’s what Missouri would gain if its health system performed as well as the systems in Vermont,…
R.J. Matson/Post-Dispatch
Last April 8, the Missouri House passed a measure that would have given voters the right to change the state’s non-partisan judicial selection process and put politics back in the system.
On Sunday, The Kansas City Star looked at that 85-72 vote…
President Barack Obama speaks after last week's historic Senate health reform vote.
Forget all the angry shouting about socialized medicine and government take-overs. Health care reform is really all about markets, competition and choice.
That’s probably not what you’ve heard. But as…
To hear some people tell it, the number of people without health insurance in the United States is vastly overstated.
There are the illegal immigrants, the argument goes, and then there are those who can afford to buy insurance but don’t…
The more you learn about how drunk driving laws are enforced — or more often, not enforced — in the St. Louis area, the more obvious it becomes why drunk driving remains so prevalent.
Unless a drunk driver runs into someone or…
Previous entries
