Health

With COVID-19 rates rising around the country, and an updated vaccine now available, researchers are still trying to understand how immunity to COVID-19 works, and the best ways to build and sustain it.One of the possibly richest areas of research might be infections among the very young, who tend to be spared from more serious COVID-19 disease. Hospitalization rates for infants four years old or under dropped to under 1 per 100,000 earlier this year, and have recently inched up slightly to 2 per 100,000 in the middle of September, compared to rates for people over 65 years old, which hit a low of 6 per 100,000 earlier this year and climbed up to 17.6 in September.In a study published recently in the journal Cell, researchers led by Bali Pulendran, a professor of pathology, microbiology, a...

Congress narrowly avoided—at least for now—a federal shutdown thanks to a stopgap funding bill approved on Sept. 30. But throughout the whirlwind of activity on Capitol Hill to keep the government running, the deadline passed to reauthorize a vital global health program that’s been credited over the last two decades with saving more than 25 million lives across some 50 countries.The long-term prospects for the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR)—launched in 2003 by President George W. Bush and reauthorized with broad bipartisan support in 2008, 2013, and 2018—are now uncertain. Reauthorization has become mired in a political fight over abortion, as House Republicans seek to stop PEPFAR funding from going to organizations that offer abortion-related services, something the D...

The news reports are alarming to say the least. Paris, the city known for its style, cuisine, and amour, has a bed bug problem. Video of the insects crawling over Metro seats, in hotels, and swarming buses and movie theaters swept the internet, and bed bug anxiety reached a new high.But what’s behind the Parisian invasion? How did bed bugs launch such a widespread infestation of the city? With Paris hosting the first Olympics in the post-COVID-19 era next summer, those questions aren’t just matters for idle conversation.The reality is that the infestation didn’t happen overnight. It’s likely that Paris, as well as other cities and even less-densely populated areas around the world, harbor a consistent, and persistent bed bug problem. And with the boom in travel since the pandemic, people i...

At this point, life in the U.S. has largely returned to pre-pandemic normal. The COVID-19 public health emergency is over, mask mandates are mostly gone, and offices and schools are open again.But one hallmark of the pandemic remains in place: The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) still directs anyone who tests positive for COVID-19 to isolate themselves from other people for at least five full days. Once those five days are up, the CDC recommends wearing a high-quality mask, such as an N95 or KN95, around other people when indoors for an additional five days.It’s good to be up-to-date on that guidance at a time when many people are testing positive for COVID-19—and when the winter respiratory disease season is just around the corner. Here’s what you need to know about ...

This project was supported by the Pulitzer CenterKrzysztof Sowinski has cried every day since his wife Marta, who was five months pregnant, died of sepsis in 2022; he believes doctors put Marta’s life in danger by not giving them the option to terminate the pregnancy while the fetus’ heart was still beating. Janusz Kucharski also lost his partner Justyna to sepsis in the fifth month of a pregnancy. She left behind two boys.It is likely, reproductive-rights advocates say, that these women would be alive if not for Poland's increasingly restrictive abortion laws. Abortion has been illegal in the country since 1993, but a 2020 ruling by Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal, which went into effect the next year, removed one of the exceptions to the law—fetal abnormalities—and imposed a near-total ...

Allie Phillips never wanted to be a politician, but she had always wanted to be a mom of two. Whenever Phillips asked her 5-year-old daughter, Adalie, what she wanted to be when she grew up, Adalie would say, "A big sister." So when Phillips found out she was pregnant again in Nov. 2022, Adalie was thrilled. "Her eyes got big and her jaw just dropped open," Phillips recalled. "Every night after that, she sang Twinkle Twinkle, Little Star to my belly. She’d kiss my belly every night before bed." Phillips and her husband planned to name the new baby Miley Rose. But at a routine anatomy scan when she was around 19 weeks pregnant, doctors told Phillips that the fetus had significant problems with its kidney, stomach, bladder, heart, lungs, and brain. These conditions were "not compatible with...

From the moment COVID-19 reached pandemic designation, Joe McDougall had nightmares. Not, like others, about the potential path of the virus, but about the seemingly inevitable moment at which he’d be asked—or held down and forced—to receive a vaccine. McDougall, now 39, is terrified of needles and a global pandemic meant that for the first time since adolescence, he might not be able to avoid them. Of all of the challenges facing mass COVID-19 vaccination, fear of needles is one of the least acknowledged by public-health campaigns. Even what we know about it is limited. It’s likely that at least 16% of adults worldwide have skipped some medical treatment—mainly annual flu vaccines)—due to concerns about needles. For an estimated quarter or more of those people, the level of anxiety and te...

The problem with writing a book about current events is events don’t stay current for long. I finished writing my book, Big Vape: The Incendiary Rise of Juul, in January 2021, at a time when the future of both mega-popular vaping brand Juul Labs and the entire U.S. e-cigarette industry were in flux. Each time news broke after the draft was done, I wished I could go back and update it—but of course that wasn’t possible. I got some closure when my book was adapted into a Netflix docuseries, Big Vape: The Rise and Fall of Juul, which premiered Oct. 11. The series’ producers worked on it long after my book came out, allowing them to weave in big developments that hadn’t happened when I finished writing—but even still, the story of Juul and vaping is ongoing, and no one knows how it will end...

Adaptations in Hollywood are nothing new, but they've been at the center of many of this year's biggest pop-culture conversations. Any intellectual property seems up for reimagining, from books to toys to video games. There are many reasons behind their appeal to studios, among them that they tend to come with built-in audiences—but as I learned firsthand over the past few years, they can also give projects new depth and complexity.On Oct. 11, an adaptation of my 2021 book, Big Vape: The Incendiary Rise of Juul, premiered as a Netflix series called Big Vape: The Rise and Fall of Juul. In addition to being interviewed on camera, I served as a consulting producer on the series. My role involved helping translate from page to screen the wild tale of Juul Labs, the vaping company that set out ...