Amid the United States’ heavily documented opioid crisis, the nation is dealing with another, lesser known rise in substance use. In recent years, national rates of cocaine use have steadily climbed.
Two new studies demonstrate a link between Medicaid expansion and positive health outcomes, adding quantitative evidence to inform the nation’s ongoing debate about health insurance coverage.
Each year, around 88,000 people in the United States die from alcohol-related causes, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. This is higher than the number of deaths caused by overdoses from all other drugs, combined.
This tip sheet, originally published in 2018, has been updated to include more recent statistics and additional information.
Sex education has been a controversial subject for decades as public school officials and parents have debated the best ways to help teenagers avoid unplanned pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases. Not all states require schools to teach sex ed. But many states require sex education instructors to discuss or stress abstinence from sexual activity, with some schools offering abstinence-only programming, which urges kids to wait until marriage and often excludes information about contraceptives.
About one-quarter of adults living in rural parts of the U.S. were not able to get health care when they needed it during the past few years, despite having health insurance, according to new findings from a national survey made public on Tuesday.
Child and adolescent deaths have decreased 51.7% worldwide from 1990 to 2017. But inequality between poor and rich countries has increased, with wealthier nations accounting for an increasingly smaller proportion of deaths overall, according to new research in JAMA Pediatrics.
