Health

As you make your shopping list, plan travel, and schedule parties this holiday season, there’s something else you should add to your to-do list: making sure you’re up-to-date on the latest guidance around COVID-19, the flu, and RSV, as respiratory disease season hits full swing.“It's always important to factor in the possibility of either transmitting an infection to other people or becoming infected, especially when getting together in large groups,” says Matthew Binnicker, director of clinical virology at the Mayo Clinic. “There are ways to safely gather and enjoy the holiday season,” but it requires taking the right precautions.Here’s what to know about—and how to say safe from—COVID, the flu, and RSV this holiday season.Will there be a COVID-19 surge this winter? What about flu and RSV...

November 15, 2023 3:55 AM ESTThey’re a global nightmare. First they haunted Paris last month, before panic over potential outbreaks gripped Europe and the U.S. Now, bedbugs are terrifying a number of countries in Asia, where surges in infestations of the pest are fueling fresh anxieties among the public and stirring governments to action.Read More: Bed Bugs Aren’t Just a Problem in Paris. Here’s WhySince the start of November, South Korea has embarked on a fierce campaign against the bloodsucking critters. Bedbugs had been largely eradicated there during a national extermination drive in the 1960s, but the country is now experiencing a worrying revival in cases. Besides the establishment of an interministry task force dedicated to tackling bedbugs, both national and regional governments ki...

The health outlook for Long COVID sufferers is no better today than it was when the condition was first recognized in early 2020. This has been attributed in large measure to the disappointing results of clinical research, particularly when compared to the magnitude of the problem. Now with hundreds of published results emerging from federally conducted or sponsored research, outraged experts and patient advocates say that there is little to show for it. The critique is that the pace of the work is slow and opaque, and that little has emerged that directly impacts prevention or patient care. The biomedical community has been under steady attack for lack of progress in prevention and treatment underlying a failure to help patients.There is a lot at stake in getting the U.S.’s Long COVID res...

COVID-19 has become less of an urgent threat than it was in 2019 largely because of vaccines and growing immunity from natural infections, but antiviral treatments have also changed the course of the disease. The most popular of these is nirmatrelvir-ritonavir, sold under the brand name Paxlovid, which the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommends for older people and anyone over age 12 who is at higher risk of COVID-19 complications. But people taking the drug have reported incomplete recovery, or testing positive again after testing negative once they finished the five-day course of the oral medication.In a study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, researchers led by Dr. Mark Siedner, at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital, investiga...

U.S. women are now projected to live about six years longer than U.S. men, as COVID-19 and drug overdoses claim more male than female lives, according to research published Nov. 13 in JAMA Internal Medicine.Overall U.S. life expectancy has declined in recent years and, as of the latest estimate, sits at around 76 years. But as the new research details, women are expected to live significantly longer than men. As of 2021, the latest year with federal data available, life expectancy among U.S. men was 73.5 years, compared to 79.3 years among women.Across the world, women tend to live longer than men for a variety of reasons, some biological—such as hormonal differences—and some behavioral. Women tend to visit doctors more frequently and are less likely to smoke and drink excessively, for exa...

Popular weight loss drugs have dominated news headlines and social media, mostly for their ability to help people shed pounds and control diabetes. But now there is evidence that one of the drugs, semaglutide, can also help reduce the risk of dying from heart disease in some patients. The drug semaglutide is sold under the brand names Wegovy, Ozempic, and Rybelsus. This trial, however, only studied the effects of Wegovy, which is semaglutide at 2.4mg in injectable form, and currently approved for weight management. The results of a much-anticipated study, sponsored by semaglutide’s maker Novo Nordisk, investigating the drug’s effects on the heart were presented at the annual meeting of the American Heart Association in Philadelphia and published in the New England Journal of Medicine.The s...

It’s unusual for a medication to become a household name; even more uncommon for its branding to become, like Advil, shorthand for an entire class of products; and rarest of all, for it to change not just U.S. medicine, but U.S. culture.Ozempic has done all three.Approved in 2017 as a type 2 diabetes medication, Ozempic has largely made its name—and a fortune for its manufacturer, Novo Nordisk—as a weight-loss aid. Novo Nordisk knew early on that diabetes patients often lost weight on the drug, but even company executives couldn’t have guessed how widely it would eventually take off as both an off-label anti-obesity treatment and a vanity-driven status symbol for those simply looking to shed a few pounds. Its runaway success mirrors that of similar medications, including Eli Lilly’s Mounja...

For many people, stress is part of everyday life. The demands of work, family, and other quotidian pressures can leave one feeling angry, agitated, anxious, downtrodden, or burned out. While these kinds of day-to-day challenges are often described as mild forms of stress, the reality is that some people will experience them more often and more significantly than others. And there’s mounting evidence linking these and other forms of stress to heart-related health problems.“We know from several studies in different populations that emotional and psychological stress is associated with an increased likelihood of developing and dying of cardiovascular disease,” says Dr. Beth Cohen, a stress researcher and professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. For example, resear...

Social media can be harmful. That's something all behavioral researchers can agree on. There is much less consensus on how exactly its harmful use is defined, and whether or not there’s a corresponding beneficial way to use social media. And at the very center of this academic debate is the question: Can a person become addicted to social media? Settling on an answer to this question has a surprising number of implications: for the internet, for policy (most notably in a recent lawsuit against Meta), and even for people who suffer from or treat more well-defined forms of addiction. Attempts to do so have resulted in fairly conflicting findings, explains Niklas Ihssen, an associate psychology professor at Durham University in the U.K. In particular, some studies suggest abstaining from soci...

Weight loss drugs have dominated the headlines over the past year, and now there’s a new medication that may be the most effective one yet.On Nov. 11, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved tirzepatide (which will be sold under the brand name Zepbound), to treat overweight and obesity. Made by Eli Lilly and Co., the drug is already approved, in different doses, for type 2 diabetes, as Mounjaro, and its effectiveness in those patients is due in part to its weight loss effects.About 70% of Americans are overweight, with a body mass index (BMI) between 27 and 30, or obese, with a BMI over 30—which increase the risk of a host of other health problems, including heart disease, diabetes, osteoarthritis and more. Yet there really haven’t been effective medications to treat obesity. ...