Health

Jordyn Bristow can’t remember how or why she became unbearably repulsed by feet. All she knows is that starting about three years ago, when she caught a glimpse of someone’s bare feet, she wanted to vomit. The urge hasn’t let up. “I start gagging—it’s horrible,” says Bristow, 18, who lives in Tasmania, Australia. She was recently at a grocery store when her dad pointed out an older man wearing flip-flops, which accentuated his cracked and apparently infected ingrown toenails. She started dry-heaving and had to leave the store and sit outside, struggling to catch her breath.Bristow has podophobia: an overwhelming fear of feet. While it’s unclear exactly how many people share this aversion, experts agree it’s rare. (It’s basically nonexistent in scientific literature.) That means it’s often ...

Most people are familiar with the best things to eat for a healthy heart: vegetables, low-fat dairy, and lean proteins like fish. Some fish like salmon also have the added benefit of being full of omega-3 fatty acids, which are healthy fats that can help to raise good cholesterol and lower triglycerides.Or so we thought. Studies on the benefits of fish oil, and fish oil supplements, haven’t been as conclusive when it comes to actually preventing heart disease for people who aren’t at higher risk. In the latest, published in BMJ, researchers report that people with no history of heart problems who regularly took fish oil supplements actually increased their risk of atrial fibrillation.The study involved more than 415,000 men and women in the health-data hub UK Biobank who agreed to share th...

For years, federal physical activity guidelines have told Americans how much time they should spend moving each week: at least 150 minutes, or 75 minutes if workouts are particularly vigorous. But the popularity of wearable fitness devices has made many people obsessively track their step counts instead, often shooting for the goal of 10,000 per day (even though some studies suggest that number is arbitrary).Is the length of your workout or your daily step count a better measure of wellness?“Both are good metrics,” says Dr. Rikuta Hamaya, a preventive-medicine researcher at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and lead author of the new study. But Hamaya and his colleagues wanted to know if one was better than the other, so they designed a head-to-head comparison. The resulting study, pu...

(WASHINGTON) — Cyberattacks against water utilities across the country are becoming more frequent and more severe, the Environmental Protection Agency warned Monday as it issued an enforcement alert urging water systems to take immediate actions to protect the nation's drinking water.About 70% of utilities inspected by federal officials over the last year violated standards meant to prevent cyberthreats, the agency said. Officials urged even small water systems to improve protections against cyberattacks, noting that recent assaults from adversarial nation states like Russia and Iran have impacted water systems of all sizes.Some water systems are falling short in basic ways, the alert said, including failure to change default passwords or cut off system access to former employees. Because ...

People with HIV can breastfeed their babies, as long as they are taking medications that effectively suppress the virus that causes AIDS, a top U.S. pediatricians’ group said Monday in a sharp policy change.The new report from the American Academy of Pediatrics reverses recommendations it had in place since the start of the HIV epidemic in the 1980s.It recognizes that routinely prescribed drugs can reduce the risk of transmitting HIV via breast milk to less than 1%, said Dr. Lisa Abuogi, a pediatric HIV expert at the University of Colorado and lead author of the report.“The medications are so good now and the benefits for mom and baby are so important that we are at a point where it is important to engage in shared decision-making,” Abuogi said.The drugs, known as antiretroviral therapy, d...

The summer of 2023 was the hottest on record since 1850, and this summer could be just as sweltering. That puts older adults—a group especially vulnerable to heat-related illnesses—at elevated risks for a number of health conditions and outcomes. Older people are less able to regulate changes in body and environmental temperatures, and higher temperatures put them at increased risk of dehydration, heat stroke, blood pressure changes, muscle cramps, and dizziness.These issues are likely to become far more prevalent than they currently are. From now until 2050, the number of people 60 years or older will double to nearly 2.1 billion, making up 21% of the global population, according to projections from the World Health Organization. Giacomo Falchetta, a scientist at the Euro-Mediterranean Ce...

BOSTON — A Massachusetts teen who participated in a spicy tortilla chip challenge on social media died from eating a large quantity of chile pepper extract and also had a congenital heart defect, according to an autopsy report obtained by The Associated Press.Harris Wolobah, a 10th grader from the city of Worcester, died on Sept. 1, 2023, after eating the chip manufactured by Paqui. The cause of death was listed as cardiopulmonary arrest “in the setting of recent ingestion of food substance with high capsaicin concentration,” according to the autopsy from the Chief Office of the Medical Examiner.Paqui, pulled the product from store shelves shortly after Harris’ death. The Associated Press sent an email seeking comment Thursday to the Hershey Co., which owns Paqui.Read More: Why Your Diet N...

Through the ages, humans have fueled their most physically demanding efforts with meaty proteins. Ancient Greeks loaded up on red meat before Olympic contests, and medieval knights recovered from war with venison and pork. The tradition continues today, with world-record-setting weightlifters breakfasting on chicken thighs, eggs, and bacon.But experts recommend that the modern, average person eat several other foods before and after tough workouts, even if the knights may have tossed them from their castle windows.The missing ingredientsDuring exercise, blood carries the nutrients we’ve consumed to our strained muscles, where they’re absorbed. “We are what we eat,” says Keith Baar, a molecular exercise physiologist at the University of California, Davis. “And when we exercise, we’re more o...

Cases of a new group of mpox viruses are rising, potentially posing a risk to people around the world, according to health officials at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). So far, the cases have been centered in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and have not spread beyond Central African countries where the virus remains endemic, the CDC wrote in a report on May 16. But health officials are concerned because this group of viruses—known as clade I mpox viruses—is known to cause more severe illness than the clade II viruses responsible for the previous mpox outbreaks in 2022, which originated in Nigeria. Clade I mpox viruses have a higher fatality rate—killing anywhere from 1.4% to more than 10% of infected people—than clade II, which has a 0.1% to 3.6% mortality ...

If you’re an undocumented immigrant in Tennessee, you don’t have a lot of options when it comes to birth control. You can’t get an abortion—it’s been banned with very limited exceptions since 2022. You can’t get services from state public-health clinics, which lost federal funding with the abortion ban. The state has backfilled the funding, but a Tennessee law prohibits that money from being used for family-planning services for people without legal status. One thing you can do is reach out to a nonprofit called A Step Ahead, which will pay for you to get a long-acting reversible contraceptive (LARC), like an intrauterine device (IUD) or an implant that goes into your arm. But there’s a problem, some reproductive justice advocates say. In many regions of the state, including Memphis and N...