Joseline de Lima was wandering the dusty alleys of her working-class neighborhood in the capital of Togo one day last year, when a disturbing thought crossed her mind: Who would take care of her two boys if her depression worsened and she were no longer around to look after them? Ms. de Lima, a single […]
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Large outbreaks of diseases that primarily kill children are spreading around the world, a grim legacy of disruptions to health systems during the Covid-19 pandemic that have left more than 60 million children without a single dose of standard childhood vaccines. By midway through this year, 47 countries were reporting serious measles outbreaks, compared with […]
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The World Health Organization said that China had shared data about a recent surge in respiratory illnesses in children, one day after the agency said it was seeking information about the possibility of undiagnosed pneumonia cases there. The Chinese data indicated “no detection of any unusual or novel pathogens,” according to a W.H.O. statement on […]
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A 38-year-old woman with ovarian cancer who started a campaign to help people pay off their medical debt has raised more than $200,000 in the week since she died. Two days after the woman, Casey McIntyre, died on Nov. 12, a post appeared on her social media accounts, saying: “A note to my friends: if […]
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Climate change continues to have a worsening effect on health and mortality around the world, according to an exhaustive report published on Tuesday by an international team of 114 researchers. One of the starkest findings is that heat-related deaths of people older than 65 have increased by 85 percent since the 1990s, according to modeling […]
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She lives in a French town near St.-Tropez that she calls “paradise,” where she and her young son have taken refuge from the war back home in Ukraine. But when Liudmyla Gurenchuk and her son needed to see doctors this fall, they made the 1,300-mile trek back to Kyiv, leaving the picturesque tranquillity of the […]
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On June 24, 1983, Byllye Avery welcomed busloads of Black women to the campus of Spelman College in Atlanta. She was in a state of disbelief. The women had traveled from Mississippi, New York, Pennsylvania — even as far away as California — for a three-day event billed as the First National Conference on Black […]
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At least two million low-income children have lost health insurance since the end of a federal policy that guaranteed coverage through Medicaid earlier in the Covid-19 pandemic, according to new analyses by researchers at the Georgetown Center for Children and Families and KFF, a health policy research organization. The figures, which are likely a significant […]
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The rise in sexually transmitted infections in the United States has taken a particularly tragic turn: More than 3,700 cases of congenital syphilis were reported in 2022, roughly 11 times the number recorded a decade ago, according to data released on Tuesday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Syphilis during pregnancy can lead […]
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At Kaneshie Polyclinic, a health center in a hardscrabble neighborhood of Accra, the capital of Ghana, there is a rule. Every patient who walks through the door — a woman in labor, a construction worker with an injury, a child with malaria — is screened for tuberculosis. This policy, a national one, is meant to […]
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Gov. Ron DeSantis had hoped that his response to the coronavirus pandemic, which helped propel him to a resounding re-election in Florida last year, would produce similar results in the Republican presidential primary. But despite leaning into his record on Covid-19, Mr. DeSantis remains adrift in the polls and badly trailing former President Donald J. […]
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The number of American babies who died before their first birthdays rose last year, significantly increasing the nation’s infant mortality rate for the first time in two decades, according to provisional figures released Wednesday by the National Center for Health Statistics. The spike is a somber manifestation of the state of maternal and child health […]
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In medicine, the cautionary tales about the unintended effects of artificial intelligence are already legendary. There was the program meant to predict when patients would develop sepsis, a deadly bloodstream infection, that triggered a litany of false alarms. Another, intended to improve follow-up care for the sickest patients, appeared to deepen troubling health disparities. Wary […]
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Cases of dengue fever, a mosquito-borne viral illness that can be fatal, are surging around the world. The increase is occurring both in places that have long struggled with the disease and in areas where its spread was unheard-of until the last year or two, including France, Italy and Chad, in central Africa. Last week, […]
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Why run? I ask myself this question as I lace up my shoes, as I confront an approaching hill, as I coax one more lap out of my aching calves. The obvious answer is that we run to be healthy, to improve our cardiovascular systems and our moods, to become fitter and stronger. But sometimes […]
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Quetcy M. Lozada, a first-term Philadelphia City Council member, stood on a September evening near an elementary school just off Kensington Avenue, the epicenter of a sprawling fentanyl market in a city that saw a record 1,413 drug overdose deaths last year. Just a block away, the street and sidewalks were dotted with used syringes […]
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One day in February, an invitation from Harvard University arrived in the inbox of Rachel Havekost, a TikTok mental health influencer and part-time bartender in Seattle who likes to joke that her main qualification is 19 years of therapy. The same email arrived for Trey Tucker, a.k.a. @ruggedcounseling, a therapist from Chattanooga, Tenn., who discusses […]
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An advisory committee for the Food and Drug Administration recently concluded that a popular oral decongestant sold over the counter was no better than placebo. The agency now faces the question of whether to pull medications that use the ingredient — called phenylephrine — off store shelves. The news spurred shock and anger over how […]
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We have become fluent in the new language of pharmacology, diabetes, and weight loss. Ozempic, Wegovy and Mounjaro are part of our public lexicon. Glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) receptor agonists are lifesaving drugs, created to help the hundreds of millions of people with Type 2 diabetes and clinical obesity. They promise to rid the United States […]
Read MoreClearly, a five-year goal post isn’t enough. Success in pediatric cancer must be rethought not as a short-term cure but as a lifelong recovery. “Our goal should be the next 10, 20, 30, 40 years,” said Dr. Douglas Hawkins, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Washington and chair of the Children’s Oncology Group, […]
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Humankind has never been better at fighting diseases. Researchers are coming up with new vaccines and treatments at an astounding speed. But climate change is making public health gains a lot harder to achieve and undoing some of the world’s hard-earned progress. Consider the mosquito, which kills more humans than any other creature. Until very […]
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The Nobel Prize in Physiology of Medicine was awarded to Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman on Monday, for their discoveries that led to the development of effective vaccines against Covid-19. Together, Dr. Kariko and Dr. Weissman, who met over a copy machine at the University of Pennsylvania in 1998, transformed vaccine technology. Seven years later, […]
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On a recent July evening in Midtown Manhattan, a trio of teenage girls swooped into the feminine care aisle at Target. Skipping over the boxes of Always and Tampax tampons, they made a beeline to a shelf with sanitary pads from the Honey Pot Company. One asked her friend if she was going to pick […]
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Gabrielle Glaze felt scolded and shamed when she delivered her first son in a Birmingham, Ala., hospital, forced to observe strict rules about lying stationary through her contractions and enduring countless cervical checks from “total strangers” who seemed disappointed by her body’s progress. So when Ms. Glaze, 33, gave birth to a second son in […]
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It began with a £1 contract. In the hours after a pandemic was declared in March 2020, Palantir, the secretive American data analytics company, was invited to 10 Downing Street along with other tech groups, including Amazon, Google and Meta, to discuss how it could help the British government respond. Within days, Palantir’s software was […]
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Along hundreds of miles of Lake Victoria’s shoreline in Kenya, a squadron of young scientists and an army of volunteers are waging an all-out war on a creature that threatens the health of more people than any other on earth: the mosquito. They are testing new insecticides and ingenious new ways to deliver them. They […]
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The narrow wooden benches in the student health clinic at Dire Dawa University in Ethiopia’s second-largest city began to fill up in March last year: feverish students slumped against their friends, cradling aching heads in their hands. Helen Asaminew, the presiding nurse, was baffled. The students had the hallmark symptoms of malaria. But people didn’t […]
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When I ask my patients about their long-term health goals, they seldom say they want to live to be 100. Instead they talk about aging with independence and dignity, being free from aches and pains or having the strength to play with their grandchildren. “I’d just like to blow out the candles on my birthday […]
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Lea Iodice was thrilled to hear that the Peace Corps had accepted her application and was sending her to Senegal as a community health care worker. She shared the good news with her roommates, her family and her favorite professor and daydreamed about her last day at her job, managing a gym called SnapFitness. She […]
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Nearly 500,000 people, many of them children, will keep Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Program coverage after state officials discovered major errors in their procedures for reviewing eligibility for the programs, federal officials said on Thursday. After a pandemic-era policy that guaranteed Medicaid coverage lapsed in April, states began checking to see whether tens of […]
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On a given work day, Misra Yusuf might vaccinate a child against polio, inject a woman with a long-acting contraceptive, screen a man for tuberculosis, hang a bed net to protect a family from malaria and help dig a pit latrine. Over the past few years, she has administered some 10,000 coronavirus vaccines in her […]
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