Health

After scrapping a plan several months ago to ban people born after 2008 from buying tobacco cigarettes, the New Zealand government on Wednesday announced a total ban on single-use e-cigarettes—also known as disposable vapes—and said it will increase the fines on retailers selling cigarettes and vapes to those under 18, in the country’s latest approach to discourage smoking among youth.“The rapid rise in youth vaping has been a real concern for parents, teachers, and health professionals,” Associate Health Minister Casey Costello said when announcing the changes to New Zealand’s Smokefree Environments and Regulated Products Act. She added that reusable vapes would remain available for adults as they are “a key smoking cessation device” but that too many teenagers use disposable vapes becaus...

Every day, people with foot pain hobble into Dr. Priya Parthasarathy’s podiatry office, and she asks them the same three questions: “What do you do for work? Where do you work? And what do you put on your feet when you’re working?”More often than not, they work from home, barefoot. Over the past few years, there’s been a “significant increase” in people experiencing foot pain, says Parthasarathy, a podiatrist with Foot and Ankle Specialists of Mid-Atlantic in Silver Spring, Md. A rise in remote work is partly to blame, she believes. There is a solution to the aches, strains, and even stress fractures, though it’s not one patients like to hear: Start wearing shoes inside. “It makes such a big difference,” she says.Hard floors are bad for your feetThere are lots of reasons why people go bare...

As winter ends, several viruses are still continuing to rise across the U.S., according to data from WastewaterSCAN, a network of wastewater surveillance sites. Norovirus, one type of influenza, and another respiratory virus are all increasing or have recently peaked in samples from the network's 190 wastewater treatment facilities, which are located in 41 states. “What we’re seeing right now for the major viruses we are monitoring is that there are similar patterns across the country,” says Marlene Wolfe, assistant professor of environmental health at Emory University and one of WastewaterSCAN's program directors. “We’re not seeing widely divergent patterns geographically.”When people are infected, they shed viruses in their excretions, and analyzing samples from wastewater treatment plan...

WASHINGTON — An array of advanced tests found no brain injuries or degeneration among U.S. diplomats and other government employees who suffer mysterious health problems once dubbed “Havana syndrome, ” researchers reported Monday.The National Institutes of Health’s nearly five-year study offers no explanation for symptoms including headaches, balance problems and difficulties with thinking and sleep that were first reported in Cuba in 2016 and later by hundreds of American personnel in multiple countries.But it did contradict some earlier findings that raised the specter of brain injuries in people experiencing what the State Department now calls “anomalous health incidents.”“These individuals have real symptoms and are going through a very tough time,” said Dr. Leighton Chan, NIH's chief ...

Once I finally tuck my kids into bed, clean the kitchen, and shoot off my last work email of the night, it’s “me” time. It’s also, cruelly, bedtime. I know I should sleep, but instead I stay up way too late binge-watching Love Is Blind or mindlessly scrolling on Reddit. I need rest, but I push it off. This is my only uninterrupted time, and I want to maximize it. This phenomenon is so universal that there’s a scientific name for it: “bedtime procrastination.” According to the researchers who coined it in a 2014 study, bedtime procrastination is “failing to go to bed at the intended time, while no external circumstances prevent a person from doing so.”People with stressful days and little control over their time are the ones most likely to procrastinate going to sleep, says Lynelle Schneebe...

Olivia Munn has revealed that she was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2023 and had a double mastectomy. Munn shared the health update in an Instagram post that included a statement about receiving the diagnosis and photos from her treatment in the last year.“In the past ten months, I have had four surgeries, so many days spent in bed I can’t even count and have learned more about cancer, cancer treatment and hormones than I ever could have imagined,” she wrote. “Surprisingly, I’ve only cried twice. I guess I haven’t felt like there was time to cry. My focus narrowed and I tabled any emotions that I felt would interfere with my ability to stay clearheaded.”She writes that she kept the diagnosis private because she “needed to catch my breath and get through some of the hardest parts before s...

A blood test for colon cancer performed well in a study published Wednesday, offering a new kind of screening for a leading cause of cancer deaths.The test looks for DNA fragments shed by tumor cells and precancerous growths. It's already for sale in the U.S. for $895, but has not been approved by the Food and Drug Administration and most insurers do not cover it. The maker of the test, Guardant Health, anticipates an FDA decision this year.In the study, the test caught 83% of the cancers but very few of the precancerous growths found by colonoscopy, the gold standard for colon cancer screening. Besides spotting tumors, colonoscopies can prevent the disease by removing precancerous growths called polyps.But some people avoid the exam because of the hassle of getting time off work or the da...

NEW YORK — U.S. marriages have rebounded to pre-pandemic levels with nearly 2.1 million in 2022.That's a 4% increase from the year before. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released the data Friday, but has not released marriage data for last year.In 2020, the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, there were 1.7 million U.S. weddings—the lowest number recorded since 1963. The pandemic threw many marriage plans into disarray, with communities ordering people to stay at home and banning large gatherings to limit the spread of COVID-19.Read More: Why You Shouldn't Love Your Kids More Than Your PartnerMarriages then rose in 2021, but not to pre-pandemic levels. They ticked up again in 2022 and surpassed 2019 marriage statistics by a small margin.New York, the District of Columbia, ...

The popularity of farmed Atlantic salmon on dinner tables worldwide has been a disaster for the king of fish. A new study determined that 865 million farmed salmon have died in mass die-offs in the last decade. The scientists blame the deaths on several factors, from ocean warming caused by climate change to the aquaculture industry’s overuse of antibiotics and pesticides and its aggressive attempts to increase production. Beyond the staggering number of dead fish, the findings raise questions about the future of growing salmon in cages on the ocean—and aquaculture in general.Salmon farming has expanded rapidly in the past 25 years into a $20 billion-a-year industry. Farmed salmon are advertised as an environmentally friendly and sustainable solution to the need for animal protein for the ...

WASHINGTON — The Environmental Protection Agency is imposing stricter limits on a chemical used to sterilize medical equipment after finding a higher-than-expected cancer risk at facilities that use ethylene oxide to clean billions of devices including catheters and syringes.A rule finalized Thursday will reduce ethylene oxide emissions by about 90% by targeting nearly 90 commercial sterilization facilities across the country, the EPA said. The companies will also have to test for the antimicrobial chemical in the air and make sure their pollution controls are working properly.The new rule will "safeguard public health from this pollution–including the health of children, who are particularly vulnerable to carcinogens early in life,'' said EPA Administrator Michael Regan. “We’ve arrived at...