A new study in The Lancet has some tough news for the U.S. health system.
Alzheimer's. Brain cancer. Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease. Diabetes. One could sweep through the alphabet naming diseases that we don't yet know how to cure.
But doctors do know how to cure, prevent, or successfully manage (at least for a while) a much longer list of ailments. Even the deadly Ebola virus kills roughly only half of the people it infects. (During the recent outbreak, case-fatality rates—a rare piece of medical jargon that actually means what it sounds like—ranged from a low of 37% to a high of 74%, depending on when and where people were treated.)
