Teen pregnancies have fallen to record lows. But according to a new report from Guttmacher Institute that breaks out data by each state, the decline is uneven across the country. New Mexico had the highest teen pregnancy rate in the nation in 2008 (the latest available data), followed by Mississippi, Texas, Nevada, Arkansas, and Arizona:

These states have something in common: They have poor sexual education in schools, and consequently tend to have lower rate of contraception use among teens.

New Mexico, the state that tops the list, has sex and HIV education in public schools. However, the sexual health information is not required to be medically accurate, according to the Guttmacher Institute. Wonkblog’s Sarah Kliff points out that contraceptive use is lower for New Mexico high school students too, at 60.5 percent compared to 75 percent nationally. Other states with higher teen pregnancy — Arizona, Texas, and Arkansas — do not require sex ed at all, and if it is taught, schools are required to stress abstinence:

The decline in teen pregnancy is “almost exclusively” a result of more contraceptive use, according to Guttmacher. Birth control use is up to 47 percent of sexually active teens, while teens’ use of both condoms and hormonal contraception rose from 16 percent to 23 percent in recent years.

But nationally, one in four teens have received abstinence-only education, with no instruction on birth control. Far more states still emphasize abstinence-only sex education over contraception, when they do teach teens about their own bodies at all.

After Congress’ failure to reach a deal avoiding across-the-board discretionary spending cuts, the so-called “sequester” will go into effect on Friday, meaning that funding for early childhood education, safety net programs for low-income women and children, medical research, and disaster preparedness will be slashed considerably. But last night, the Senate took action to soften the blow when it comes to states’ and the federal government’s abilities to cope with unforeseen public health disasters and emergencies.

The Senate unanimously passed the Pandemic and All-Hazards Preparedness Reauthorization Act of 2013 (PAHPRA) on Thursday. Sponsored by Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC), the bill “strengthens our nation’s preparedness for and ability to respond to medical and public health emergencies, optimizes state and local all-hazards preparedness and response efforts and collaboration, enhances medical countermeasure activities, and reauthorizes key medical and public health programs, including the BioShield Special Reserve Fund,” according to a press release on Burr’s congressional webpage.

PAHPRA updates and increases funding for a wide range of programs meant to strengthen America’s preparedness for potential public health crises, including chemical and biological attacks, nuclear meltdowns, and natural disasters such as Hurricane Sandy that place massive burdens on states’ and municipalities’ hospitals and emergency response systems. That’s welcome news considering that, even before the sequester went into effect, state budget cuts had left America woefully unprepared to deal with future public health emergencies. In fact, 35 states and the District of Columbia meet fewer than seven out of 10 key public health preparedness indicators.

Among the bill’s most important provisions are its programs to give states “the flexibility to request voluntary temporary reassignment of federally-funded state and local public health department personnel to immediately address a public health emergency.” Such flexibility would give localities some much-needed help in an era of increasingly frequent natural disasters and the rise of “superbugs” and vaccine-resistant bacteria.

Still, state and public health officials warn that governments’ tendencies to cut emergency-preparedness funding — including cuts in the sequester — are dangerous and short-sighted, as hospitals and emergency-response units have to focus their efforts on real-time crises rather than allocating precious resources to future disasters. Strengthening preparedness programs is also a smarter and more cost-effective way to approach public health emergencies than the current habit of hastily enacting relief funding bills after a crisis has already occurred — an approach that leaves emergency-responders at the mercy of a dysfunctional Congress that couldn’t even pass a Hurricane Sandy relief bill on its first try.

The rising cost of medical services is driving up the price of health care throughout the industry. There’s perhaps no better illustration of that phenomenon than hospitals’ emergency departments, since ER trips are the most expensive type of health care delivery. In fact, a new NIH-funded study finds the average cost for an ER visit was over $2,000 — about 40 percent more than most people spend on their rent each month.

The most common reasons that Americans visit an emergency department, like treating sprains or urinary tract infections, can rack up exorbitant charges. But the industry’s wide range in pricing means Americans often have no idea what kind of bill they should expect when they head to the hospital. When factoring in the IQR — the “interquartile range,” which represents the difference between the 25th and 75th percentile of charges — it becomes clear that hospitals end up charging most patients a lot more or a lot less than the average prices for these services (although these numbers don’t account for what insurance plans may end up covering):

And the researchers note that, since they focused on the most common diagnoses, these aren’t even necessarily the most costly ER services out there. If they had set out to figure out how an ER trip could be as expensive as possible for a sick American, that chart would have even higher numbers.

The study’s lead researchers ultimately conclude that Americans need to get more upfront information about ER costs before they land in an emergency department. They recommend better pricing transparency throughout the health care industry — a significant step forward that could help drive down health costs by allowing patients to be more discriminate about which unnecessary and expensive services they’d rather not pay for.

Ultimately, the rising cost of basic medical treatment is putting a big strain on the American families struggling to regain their footing in the wake of the Great Recession. Health costs have skyrocketed at the same time as workers’ wages have stagnated, and more than one in three people are forced to put off the health care they need because they can’t afford it.

The CDC’s most recent HIV Surveillance Report contains the first-ever comprehensive data set allowing researchers to map HIV infections across the entire country. As the agency explains, their new data paints a “complete picture of diagnosed HIV infection in the U.S.,” revealing potential trends in infections across different regions. At least one clear trend emerges among Southern states, where the concentration of HIV infections tend to be higher:

It’s likely no coincidence that many of those same states lack the comprehensive sexual education requirements that would help educate their residents about HIV transmission from an early age. Health classes in Texas, Florida, South Carolina, North Carolina, Mississippi, and Louisiana aren’t required to provide any kind of medically accurate information about HIV. And in two of those states — Texas and Florida — public schools don’t have to offer any type of sexual health education whatsoever.

In fact, just 20 states across the country mandate both sex education and HIV education, while the rest of country’s youth are growing up with significant gaps in their knowledge about sexual health. That’s especially troubling amid reports that, even though new cases of HIV in the U.S. are beginning to stabilize, young people still continue to put themselves at risk for the virus.

The HIV epidemic continues to take a disproportionate toll on men who have sex with men (MSM) — 62 percent of all HIV diagnoses are attributed to male-to-male sexual behavior, even though MSM represent just two percent of the U.S. population — yet the nation’s sexual health requirements also lag behind when it comes to sexual orientation. None of the southern states with the highest rates of HIV infection require public schools to provide LGBT-inclusive information in their health classes — and Alabama, South Carolina, and Texas actually stipulate that teachers must impart negative, shame-based information about homosexuality.

From the minute that President Obama signed his landmark health reform bill into law, conservative critics have been issuing dire warnings about how expensive Obamacare will make employer-sponsored health coverage, asserting it would be cheaper for larger companies to drop coverage for their workers — and pay a fine if their employees obtain federally subsidized coverage through Obamacare’s insurance exchanges — rather than provide basic health benefits. As it turns out, those predictions aren’t actually becoming reality.

According to Modern Healthcare, a new “survey of nearly 800 large and midsize employers found that just 6 percent of respondents intend to completely exit the healthcare system over the next three to five years” over concerns about the penalty that Obamacare will level against large companies that don’t provide adequate benefits for their workers.

That assessment stands in stark contrast to some Obamacare opponents’ more outlandish claims. Major conservative institutions and healthy policy experts — including the Heritage Foundation and Douglas Holtz-Eakin, who is a former Congressional Budget Office (CBO) director — have predicted that anywhere between 20 million and 35 million Americans will lose employer-sponsored insurance because of Obamacare. Even respected consulting firm McKinsey and Co. predicted that “30 percent of employers will definitely or probably stop offering [employer-sponsored insurance] in the years after 2014,” the year that most Obamacare provisions — including the employer mandate — kick in.

In fact, that kind of mass exodus would be fraught with risks for companies, considering that approximately 70 percent of Americans receive health coverage through their employer. The prospect of losing workers over decreased benefits is a powerful disincentive for the companies that might have considered ditching health coverage to cut costs. As Jim Winkler of Aon Hewitt’s U.S. health and benefits department put it, employers’ incentive to stop sponsoring health insurance “is strong until you look at the numbers. Between the [Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act] penalties for failing to offer coverage and the ensuing talent flight risk, most employers believe they need to continue to play a role in employee health.”

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Health care settings like hospitals and nursing homes need to make preparations to prevent the spread of a rare “superbug,” the CDC is warning. There’s recently been a sharp jump in the number of reports of the potentially deadly bacteria, which is resistant to all last-resort antibiotic treatments — and the CDC is prompting health officials to act now to contain a future outbreak of the superbug:

Reports of unusual forms of CRE have nearly doubled in the U.S., the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported this month. Of 37 cases of rare forms of CRE, including the alarming NDM — New Delhi metallo-beta-lactamase — 15 have been reported since last July.

“This increase highlights the need for U.S. health care providers to act aggressively to prevent the emergence and spread of these unusual CRE organisms,” the CDC said in a health advisory.

CREs are part of a family of drug-resistant germs that have shown up in growing numbers of U.S. health care settings. They’re named for their ability to elude carbapenem antibiotics, the big guns in the medical arsenal. They usually strike people who are already ill and require devices such as ventilators or catheters or who have been taking antibiotics for a long time. But they can infect any patient.

The CDC is calling for stricter precautions in health care settings, including increasing screening of patients and immediate isolation of patients who may be at risk for spreading the bacteria. “Our main objective is to slow or stop the spread in places where we can identify them,” Dr. Alex Kallen, an outbreak response coordinator for the CDC, told NBC News. “Right now, the therapeutic options are very limited.”

Health officials have been concerned about CRE superbugs for the past decade, particularly after an outbreak near Washington, DC killed seven people last summer. CRE infections are especially serious public health threats because they have a mortality rate of up to 40 percent, much higher than other infections — and people who are carrying the CRE bacteria may not display symptoms for up to a year, which means they could unknowingly pass the infection to countless people they come into contact with.

The CDC is attempting to raise public awareness about the superbug, as well as bring the issue to the forefront of health providers’ minds. But the CRE superbug may be just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the rise of antibiotic-resistant diseases. As vaccine development has slowed over the last several decades — partly due to the fact that developing new antibiotics isn’t as profitable for Big Pharma — medical experts have begun to see a rise in drug-resistant bacteria, and warn that an impending “antibiotic apocalypse” could soon make even common infections deadly.