Tag: Medicine and Health

Marking The 4-Year Anniversary of the Covid Pandemic

Jessie Thompson, a 36-year-old mother of two in Chicago, is reminded of the Covid-19 pandemic every day. Sometimes it happens when she picks up her children from day care and then lets them romp around at a neighborhood park on the way home. Other times, it’s when she gets out the shower at 7 a.m. […]

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Female Genital Cutting Continues to Increase Worldwide

More than 230 million women and girls around the world have undergone female genital cutting, according to a new analysis by UNICEF, an increase of 30 million since the organization’s last global estimate in 2016. While the data shows that in some countries a new generation of parents have chosen to forgo the practice, in […]

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Ozempic May Blow the Federal Budget

The U.S. health care system has struggled for decades with the tension between providing incentives for pharmaceutical innovation and keeping breakthroughs affordable for those who would most benefit from them. Even as countries around the world have stepped in to require lower priced drugs for their citizens, the United States has been reticent to do […]

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Four Dead At Nasser Hospital After Outage, Gaza Health Ministry Says

Gaza’s health ministry said Friday that electric generators cut out and all power was lost at a major Gaza hospital raided by Israeli forces a day earlier, leading to the deaths of four patients dependent on oxygen. The Gaza health ministry said in posts on Facebook that the Israeli military was in control of the […]

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Trans Visibility Is Nice. Safety Is Even Better.

In my childhood, trans representation was largely confined to sensationalized daytime talk shows — think “Jerry Springer” — and fictionalized stories of cisgender people reacting with disgust or violence upon learning someone was trans — think of the movies “Boys Don’t Cry,” “The Crying Game,” even “Ace Ventura: Pet Detective.” In the last several years, […]

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Brazil Has a Dengue Emergency, Portending a Health Crisis for the Americas

Brazil is experiencing an enormous outbreak of dengue fever, the sometimes fatal mosquito-borne disease, and public health experts say it is a harbinger of a coming surge in cases in the Americas, including Puerto Rico. Brazil’s Health Ministry warns that it expects more than 4.2 million cases this year, outstripping the 4.1 million cases the […]

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Oregon’s Decriminalized Drugs Debate Is Full of High Stakes

In February 2021, Oregon decriminalized possession of small amounts of all drugs, via a ballot initiative known as Measure 110. The idea was to treat addiction as a public health problem, based on overwhelming evidence that jailing people for having small amounts of drugs for personal use is both ineffective and counterproductive. Since then, decriminalization […]

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Providence Officials Approve Overdose Prevention Center

More than two years ago, Rhode Island became the first state in the nation to authorize overdose prevention centers, facilities where people would be allowed to use illicit drugs under professional supervision. On Thursday, the Providence City Council approved the establishment of what will be the state’s first so-called safe injection site. Minnesota is the […]

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Why Cholesterol Is Important For Health and How To Lower It

While 86 million adults in the United States have high cholesterol levels, one third of Americans say they haven’t had their numbers checked in the last five years. Getting your cholesterol tested — and under control — is critical to preventing heart disease and other serious health problems. But figuring out when to test and […]

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Is the Future of Medicine Hidden in Ancient DNA?

The Daily is made by Rachel Quester, Lynsea Garrison, Clare Toeniskoetter, Paige Cowett, Michael Simon Johnson, Brad Fisher, Chris Wood, Jessica Cheung, Stella Tan, Alexandra Leigh Young, Lisa Chow, Eric Krupke, Marc Georges, Luke Vander Ploeg, M.J. Davis Lin, Dan Powell, Sydney Harper, Mike Benoist, Liz O. Baylen, Asthaa Chaturvedi, Rachelle Bonja, Diana Nguyen, Marion […]

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Who Gets Left Behind When Gene Therapy Cures a Disease?

Tyler Parish thinks of himself as “the last dinosaur.” If he had been born decades earlier with the same genes, he would not have had access to the medical care and technology that allowed him to see his 43rd birthday. But if he were born today with access to gene therapy for spinal muscular atrophy, […]

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Can San Francisco Solve Its Drug Crisis? Five Things to Consider.

San Francisco is in the middle of a drug crisis. Overdose deaths reached a record high last year, topping 800. Public drug use is widespread in some neighborhoods. How did San Francisco get to this point? In part, it follows the national story: The rise of fentanyl, a synthetic opioid, and a destabilizing pandemic caused […]

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Syphilis Is Soaring in the U.S.

Syphilis, once nearly eliminated in the United States, continues to resurge, reaching the highest rate of new infections recorded since 1950, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Tuesday. More than 207,000 cases were diagnosed in 2022, the last year for which data are available. That represents an 80 percent increase since 2018, […]

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Chinese Scientists Shared Coronavirus Data with US Before Pandemic

In late December 2019, eight pages of genetic code were sent to computers at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md. Unbeknown to American officials at the time, the genetic map that had landed on their doorstep contained critical clues about the virus that would soon touch off a pandemic. The genetic code, submitted […]

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What to Know About the Federal Law at the Heart of the Latest Supreme Court Abortion Case

One of the newest battlefields in the abortion debate is a decades-old federal law called the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, known by doctors and health policymakers as EMTALA. The issue involves whether the law requires hospital emergency rooms to provide abortions in urgent circumstances, including when a woman’s health is threatened by continuing […]

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When Public Health Loses the Public

“Put on your masks!” My son and I were cycling during the pandemic when a passerby furiously screamed that in our direction. I shouted back something too long about updated recommendations on masking outdoors and was left yelling into the wind, my kid giving me the “Calm down, mom” look. We all had our uncalm […]

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Workplace Wellness Programs Have Little Benefit, Study Finds

Employee mental health services have become a billion-dollar industry. New hires, once they have found the restrooms and enrolled in 401(k) plans, are presented with a panoply of digital wellness solutions, mindfulness seminars, massage classes, resilience workshops, coaching sessions and sleep apps. These programs are a point of pride for forward-thinking human resource departments, evidence […]

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New State Laws Will Affect Americans Starting Jan. 1, 2024

A spate of new state laws, including on guns, minimum wage and gender transition care, went into effect as the calendar flipped to 2024. Perhaps the most significant change bans programs that promote diversity, equity and inclusion at publicly funded colleges and universities in Texas. Conservative politicians have targeted these diversity initiatives, known as D.E.I., […]

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We Need a Global Immune System to Stop Future Public Health Crises

The thing that has surprised me most since I began my job leading foreign assistance for global health at the U.S. Agency for International Development is how much emergencies have defined my work. The bureau I oversee focuses on reducing the global burden of mortality and disease and on protecting the United States from health […]

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New Hope — and an Old Hurdle — for a Terrible Disease With Terrible Treatments

Three years ago, Jesús Tilano went to a hospital in a thickly forested valley in Colombia with large open lesions on his nose, right arm and left hand. He was diagnosed with leishmaniasis, a parasitic disease that is spread in the bite of a female sand fly and which plagues poor people who work in […]

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Behind the Shortage Keeping Cancer Patients From Chemo

Stephanie Scanlan learned about the shortages of basic chemotherapy drugs this spring in the most frightening way. Two of the three drugs typically used to treat her rare bone cancer were too scarce. She would have to go forward without them. Ms. Scanlan, 56, the manager of a busy state office in Tallahassee, Fla., had […]

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The Destruction of Gaza’s Health Care Promises Grave Consequences

I started training to be a doctor in the aftermath of the gulf war. It was a dark time to commit to a career of healing. U.S. sanctions and relentless bombings had decimated our medical infrastructure and endangered our access to medical supplies. Surrounded by devastation, we fought to heal, to operate, to comfort — […]

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Mandy Cohen, New CDC Director, Tries to Foster Trust in a Battered Agency

Dr. Mandy K. Cohen dropped by the Fox affiliate in Dallas in November, just days after the governor of Texas signed a law barring private employers from requiring Covid-19 shots. If she thought promoting vaccination would be a tough sell in a ruby-red state, Dr. Cohen, the new director of the Centers for Disease Control […]

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‘We Are All Sick’: Infectious Diseases Spread Across Gaza

Infectious diseases are ravaging the people of the Gaza Strip, the World Health Organization said Monday, as more people flee to overcrowded shelters in the south where dire conditions and a scarcity of food and clean water have set off a public health crisis. Limited sanitation facilities and overcrowding in shelters are causing the spread […]

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Britons Love the N.H.S. Some Will Also Pay to Avoid It.

For David Haselgrove, it was a battle each day to get out of bed, then another struggle to put on his socks. Stairs were often impossible, and the pain made him tetchy and difficult to live with. But when he sought medical help for his arthritis, Mr. Haselgrove was told the wait for a specialist […]

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White House Delays a Decision on Banning Menthol Cigarettes

The Biden administration delayed a decision on Wednesday about whether it would ban menthol cigarettes amid intense lobbying from tobacco companies, convenience stores and industry-backed groups that contend that billions of dollars in sales and jobs will be lost. The proposal has also generated concerns that Black smokers will become the targets of aggressive police […]

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Scientists in Discredited Alcohol Study May Advise U.S. on Drinking Guidelines

Five years ago, the National Institutes of Health abruptly pulled the plug on an ambitious study about the health effects of moderate drinking. The reason: The trial’s principal scientist and officials from the federal agency’s own alcohol division had solicited $60 million for the research from alcohol manufacturers, a conflict of interest and a violation […]

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China Respiratory Illness: U.S. Health Officials Say Cause is Known

A small group of Republican senators on Friday called on President Biden to ban travel from China to protect against an outbreak of respiratory illnesses in children there, even as scientists and global and American health officials said there were no signs of a threatening new pathogen. Instead, those experts said, the evidence so far […]

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