Yet it can be extremely costly to dodge issues, appease difficult people, and smooth over antagonisms; avoidance usually only worsens a problem or a relationship.
Some civic groups worry that changing the city's recycling rules could worsen a problem that had seemed to be waning in recent years: scavengers strewing litter about as they pick through trash to collect soda and beer bottles and cans, which they redeem to get back the nickel deposits.
Some researchers in the 1970s and '80s suggested that nostalgia could worsen a problem that psychologists call self-discontinuity, which is nicely defined in " Suite: Judy Blue Eyes," by Stephen Stills: "Don't let the past remind us of what we are not now". This sense of loss and dislocation has repeatedly been linked to both physical and mental ills.
Tens of thousands of civilians have fled the violence in northern Yemen in recent weeks, human rights groups say, worsening a refugee problem that has grown steadily over several years of on-and-off violence.
The recession was only worsening a fundamental problem: the industry's physical product, printed paper, was going the way of the rotary phone, and no one had yet figured out how to generate comparable revenues online.
The Chinese city of Wuhan had called off its display to avoid worsening a smog problem.
But its falloff only worsened a longstanding problem at ABC: too many seasons with too few hits.
While saying he understood that Senator Rice "honestly believes this will worsen a horrible problem," Mr. Vitale insisted that the continuing spread of disease through infected needles required an immediate solution.
Climate change is also predicted to put more stress on the Louisiana coastal wetlands and to worsen an existing problem in the Chesapeake Bay of a summer "dead zone," an area where the oxygen has been depleted.
The two countries have signed mutual extradition treaties, which human rights activists have said will worsen an existing problem of Russia deporting North Korean asylum seekers to face execution or labour camps in their homeland.
