With Covid 19 crippling much of the world, there’s intense uncertainty about what’s next. In the United States, it’s hard to envision when the economy, and our lives, will get back to normal. But it turns out there is a plan to beat the virus, and to get the country back to work. The question is whether the government will follow it. Health reporter Anna Edney spoke to Scott Gottlieb, a former Food and Drug Administration commissioner and current informal adviser to the White House, about what h...
Apr 06, 2020•14 min•Season 5Ep. 9
Italy has been among the hardest hit countries by coronavirus. An outbreak epicenter, Italy’s cases are at nearly 120,000 with over 14,000 deaths. It’s sobering evidence of how vicious the virus can be. And yet, just to the north, Germany seemed like it was escaping the worst of the outbreak by enacting widespread testing and taking the virus seriously earlier. With fewer cases and, until recently, a mortality rate that hovered under 1%, Germany appeared to be a model of how to successfully navi...
Apr 03, 2020•14 min•Season 5Ep. 8
Under the $2 Trillion economic stimulus bill passed last week, the US government will make direct payments to Americans who are suffering because of the coronavirus pandemic. Giving everybody money, with no strings attached, has an obvious benefit in an economic emergency. But some economists have always advocated for handing out money to nearly everyone, in good times and bad. Joe Weisenthal explains. Plus the day's Covid-19 headlines. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information....
Apr 02, 2020•11 min•Season 5Ep. 6
Scientists around the world are racing to develop a vaccine for COVID-19. But experts have said it could take a year to 18 months for one to hit the market. The process for testing and approving a vaccine is long and complicated. That can be frustrating when the coronavirus is taking more and more lives every day. But cutting corners to push a vaccine through faster can lead to devastating consequences. We know that, because it’s happened before. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy informati...
Apr 01, 2020•15 min•Season 5Ep. 6
Around the country and the world, more and more people are locked down in their homes, but people still need to see the doctor. That has made telehealth companies -- businesses that let doctors treat patients remotely -- the new stars of the Covid-19 economy. And companies that until now have mainly offered prescriptions for birth control or hair loss pills are pivoting to provide services related to the pandemic. Plus: Today's headlines. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information....
Mar 31, 2020•14 min•Season 5Ep. 5
Covid-19 acts in a way that scientists are still trying to figure out. In some people who are infected, symptoms are mild -- like a common cold. Some are completely fine. In others, the infection can be fatal, stopping the lungs from functioning and causing the body to shut down. So why are symptoms so mild in some people and deadly in others? It turns out there's a tipping point -- a moment where the virus moves from one part of the body to another -- that takes the infection from manageable to...
Mar 30, 2020•14 min•Season 5Ep. 4
A little known geneticist in Seattle has become something of a CSI detective, unraveling the origins of Covid 19 in the U S. Could his research hold secrets to a better understanding of the disease? Some policymakers seem to think so. Plus: today's headlines. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mar 27, 2020•11 min•Season 5Ep. 3
How can we make sense of the scary reality we are all now living in? Where do pandemics come from? And why are they occurring more frequently? On this special episode, Bloomberg’s Jason Gale talks to some of the world’s most experienced pandemic experts to get their insights. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mar 26, 2020•29 min•Season 5Ep. 2
On the series premiere of the Prognosis daily podcast, host Laura Carlson gives the latest updates on the coronavirus outbreak. Health officials around the world have been urging countries to conduct widespread testing. Jason Gale explores why some nations have been slow to respond. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mar 26, 2020•12 min•Season 5Ep. 1
Harnessing Bloomberg's reporting from every continent, Bloomberg's daily Prognosis podcast brings the news, data and analysis you need for living in the time of Covid-19. In around ten minutes, we will explain the latest developments in health and science, the impact on individuals, industries and governments and the adaptions they are making in the face of the global pandemic. Come back every weekday afternoon for a short dose of the best information about the novel coronavirus from more than 1...
Mar 24, 2020•56 sec
From Pushkin Industries, introducing Deep Background with Noah Feldman. Every story has a backstory, even in today's 24-hour news cycle. In Deep Background, Harvard Law School professor and Bloomberg Opinions columnist Noah Feldman will bring together a cross-section of expert guests to explore the historical, scientific, legal, and cultural context that help us understand what's really going on behind the biggest stories in the news. This week, Richard Lazarus, a law professor at Harvard and a ...
Mar 17, 2020•37 min
We continue our look back at some of our favorite episodes from the podcast. Joel Grimwood was almost certainly going to die. The pump that kept his failing heart going had become infected, and surgery after surgery had scraped away parts of his chest. Drugs didn’t work because the bacteria were in a slime, impenetrable to antibiotics. What saved his life was a little-known treatment called phage therapy. Popular in the former Soviet Union, they’ve fallen out of favor in the West. The viruses ar...
Feb 27, 2020•26 min
We continue our look back at some of our favorite episodes from the podcast. Among those most vulnerable to superbug infections are cancer chemotherapy patients. In India, many are dying from bacteria poisoning their blood that even the most potent antibiotics available can't stop. This calamitous scenario portends a global crisis as superbugs spread through international travel and trade. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information....
Feb 20, 2020•32 min
We continue our look back at some of our favorite episodes from the podcast. Do exercise-tracking apps and gadgets like the Fitbit actually make us healthier? Or do they just create a high-tech, data-centric illusion of control over our weight, sleep and general well-being? Bloomberg's Naomi Kresge loaded up some popular apps to find the answer –- and to see if she could get a better night’s sleep than her husband. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information....
Feb 13, 2020•22 min
We're revisiting some of our favorite episodes, starting with our very first. More than a million Americans suffer from Type 1 diabetes. The disease occurs when the pancreas mysteriously stops producing insulin, the hormone that converts food into energy. Modern medicine has been able to recreate insulin, but not the finely calibrated delivery mechanism of the pancreas. Now a group of like-minded do-it-yourselfers have gotten together on the internet and—working outside the purview of organized ...
Feb 06, 2020•25 min
The average cost of having a baby in the United States is $11,000 for people on private health insurance. But the price tag can vary by tens of thousands of dollars, depending on what hospital you go to and what doctor you see. And high-price medical care isn’t necessarily better: In the U.S., regardless of how much they or their insurance company pays, women experience unexpected problems related to pregnancy and childbirth at alarming rates. The problem, of course, isn’t limited to maternity c...
Jan 30, 2020•24 min•Season 4Ep. 4
In America, poverty is linked to shorter lifespans. The wealthiest 1% of Americans live more than a decade longer than the poorest 1%, and the longevity gap has expanded in recent years. The medical community is increasingly examining the role that poverty and difficult social circumstances play in illness. Some people are asking whether the health care system could do more to address the things that influence people’s health beyond their medical care. This week on Prognosis, we look at one star...
Jan 23, 2020•22 min•Season 4Ep. 3
Independent doctors are a vanishing breed. Hospitals have spent decades scooping up physician groups to build large, powerful health-care systems. The rationale was to increase efficiency and save money but often the opposite occurred. In fact, lots of evidence shows that consolidation in health care has driven prices higher. And both physicians and patients increasingly feel that big health systems and insurance companies have too much sway over what happens in the exam room. A few years ago, a...
Jan 16, 2020•24 min•Season 4Ep. 2
In 2020, Americans will spend almost $4 trillion on health care. Yet for all that spending, Americans overall tend to be less healthy and die younger than citizens of other wealthy nations. The cost of health care has become so burdensome that people all across the United States are forced to make difficult choices every day: forgo urgently needed medicines or treatment for serious injuries out of fear the cost, even with insurance, could bankrupt them. How did the U.S. health-care system get th...
Jan 09, 2020•23 min•Season 4Ep. 1
Americans are paying more and getting less for their health care than ever before. On the new season of Prognosis, reporter John Tozzi explores what went wrong. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Jan 08, 2020•2 min
Bloomberg's Travel Genius podcast is back! After clocking another hundred-thousand miles in the sky, hosts Nikki Ekstein and Mark Ellwood have a whole new series of flight hacking, restaurant sleuthing, and hotel booking tips to inspire your own getaways—along with a who's who roster of itinerant pros ready to spill their own travel secrets. From a special episode on Disney to a master class on packing, we'll go high, low, east, west, and everywhere in between. The new season starts Nov. 6. See ...
Oct 29, 2019•1 min
Stephanie Flanders, head of Bloomberg Economics, returns to bring you another season of on-the-ground insight into the forces driving global growth and jobs today. From the cosmetics maker in California grappling with Donald Trump's tariff war, to the coffee vendor in Argentina burdened by the nation's never-ending crises, Bloomberg's 130-plus economic reporters and economists around the world head into the field to tell these stories. Stephanomics will also look hard at the solutions, in the le...
Oct 02, 2019•2 min
Many antibiotic pills we’ve relied on for decades to treat infections no longer work. It’s a global crisis. Hospitals are increasingly stumped. But where do resistant bugs come from? In our final episode of this season’s Prognosis, Bloomberg Senior Editor Jason Gale takes us to Copenhagen, Denmark, where one scientist searches for clues in airplane waste from all over the globe. He found killer superbugs thriving in healthy people from countries far and wide. Even in countries where antibiotic u...
Sep 26, 2019•28 min•Season 3Ep. 5
It's no secret that dangerous superbugs are showing up more and more in hospitals around the world. But where do they come from? How do they get into hospitals in the first place? In this episode of Prognosis, Bloomberg's Jason Gale unravels the mystery, taking us on a detective's search for the world's most deadly superbugs as they stealthily sneak into hospitals. And how one hospital has come up with a simple yet virtually foolproof safeguard against spreading those bugs once inside the buildi...
Sep 19, 2019•21 min•Season 3Ep. 4
Joel Grimwood was almost certainly going to die. The pump that kept his failing heart going had become infected, and surgery after surgery had scraped away parts of his chest. Drugs didn’t work because the bacteria were in a slime, impenetrable to antibiotics. What saved his life was a little-known treatment called phage therapy. Popular in the former Soviet Union, they’ve fallen out of favor in the West. The viruses are the natural predator of bacteria, and a small number of scientists are tryi...
Sep 12, 2019•26 min•Season 3Ep. 3
Among those most vulnerable to superbug infections are cancer chemotherapy patients. In India, many are dying from bacteria poisoning their blood that even the most potent antibiotics available can't stop. This calamitous scenario portends a global crisis as superbugs spread through international travel and trade. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Sep 05, 2019•32 min•Season 3Ep. 2
On this new season of Prognosis, we look at the spread of infections that are resistant to antimicrobial medicines. You're probably more likely to have heard of these as superbugs. Their rise has been described as a silent tsunami of catastrophic proportions. We travel to countries on the frontline of the crisis, and explore how hospitals and doctors around the world are fighting back. Prognosis’ new season launches Sept. 5. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information....
Aug 26, 2019•3 min•Season 3Ep. 1
Chinese consumers, just like Westerners, are lining up for DNA tests. But unlike their American and European counterparts, the Chinese appear to have far fewer qualms about privacy and sharing their data. And what they’re expecting to glean from their genetic information goes far beyond family trees or hints of future disease. From assessing the talents of hours-old infants to making career and life decisions based on DNA tests, the Chinese have fully embraced the genetics boom. See omnystudio.c...
Jul 04, 2019•29 min•Season 2Ep. 8
Do exercise-tracking apps and gadgets like the Fitbit actually make us healthier? Or do they just create a high-tech, data-centric illusion of control over our weight, sleep and general well-being? Bloomberg's Naomi Kresge loaded up some popular apps to find the answer –- and to see if she could get a better night’s sleep than her husband. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Jun 20, 2019•21 min•Season 2Ep. 7
By now most of us understand the privacy consequences of all the data we handed over to social media and Internet companies. But what happens to the huge amount of health information we generate from health apps, DNA kits, doctors' visits, blood tests and fitness trackers? Some of it's carefully protected by law. Other data -- including intimate details about our lives -- can be sold to brokers who trade it like a commodity. How worried should we be? See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy infor...
Jun 06, 2019•28 min•Season 2Ep. 6
