Health

Extreme weather can be deadly, and the deadliest of all is extreme heat. Approximately 1,220 Americans die every year due to extreme heat, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And more Americans die from heat than any other weather-related hazards—including floods, tornadoes, hurricanes, and cold—per the National Weather Service.That’s why the CDC and NWS have teamed up to roll out two experimental tools nationwide that will help public health officials and citizens to better prepare for dangerous heat.“Heat-related illness and death are preventable,” CDC Director Mandy Cohen said when announcing the new HeatRisk initiative.HeatRisk, which combines public health and historical temperature data to provide an index forecasting the potential impacts of heat on the huma...

It’s common to meet the idea of intuition with an eye roll. We tend to value reason over everything else, using expressions like “think before you act,” “think twice,” and “look before you leap.” We don’t trust intuition. In fact, we believe it’s flawed and magical thinking, either vaguely crazy or downright stupid. After all, good decisions should always be reasoned. What we don’t realize, however, is that intuition is a form of cognition that can actually improve our decision-making.What is intuition? You can think of it as an instinct or gut feeling. A knowing or inner wisdom. The internal compass that guides you. Our instincts are meant to keep us away from danger and near safety in a complex world—and even save your life.It’s an elegant, fine-tuned, and incredibly rapid form of percep...

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — On a recent morning at a hospital in the heart of gang territory in Haiti’s capital, a woman began convulsing before her body went limp as a doctor and two nurses raced to save her.They stuck electrodes to her chest and flipped on an oxygen machine while keeping their eyes on a computer screen that reflected a dangerously low oxygen level of 84%.No one knew what was wrong with her.Even more worrisome, the Doctors Without Borders hospital in the Cite Soleil slum was running low on key medicine to treat convulsions.“The medication she really needs, we barely have,” said Dr. Rachel Lavigne, a physician with the medical aid group.It’s a familiar scene repeated daily at hospitals and clinics across Port-au-Prince, where life-saving medication and equipment is dwindling o...

Public health officials are warning about the dangers of counterfeit botox products, which have been circulating and causing individuals to fall ill in several U.S. states. As of Friday, April 18, 22 people across California, Colorado, Florida, Illinois, Kentucky, Nebraska, New Jersey, New York, Tennessee, Texas, and Washington, have reported adverse reactions to a counterfeit version of Botox (botulinum toxin). All of the individuals are female, ranging in age from 25 to 59. Symptoms of the fake botox include blurred or double vision, difficulty swallowing, dry mouth, constipation, incontinence, shortness of breath, weakness and difficulty lifting one’s head following the injection of these products. The symptoms are similar to those seen when botulism, a rare and serious illness caused b...

Scotland’s only gender clinic for young people has paused prescribing puberty blockers for new patients under 18 years old after the National Health Service (NHS) in England banned children from receiving the gender treatment last month. Puberty blockers are used to delay puberty changes by stopping the body from making sex hormones including testosterone and estrogen. They can be prescribed to treat gender dysphoria, the clinical term for psychological distress that results from an incongruence between one’s sex assigned at birth and one’s gender identity. The Sandyford Clinic, based in Glasgow, announced that new patients aged 16 and 17 “will no longer be prescribed gender affirming hormone treatment until they are 18 years old,” the clinic wrote in an update on its website. Existing pat...

Get ready to see cicadas everywhere.More than a trillion of the critters are expected to surface in parts of the United States this year in a rare co-emergence event the likes of which hasn’t been seen in over two centuries.Known for their deafening mating calls, which can be as loud as lawnmowers, cicadas emerge after more than a decade underground, offering a tasty meal to birds—and even the occasional human.That’s right, cicadas, like many insects, have been hailed as an eco-friendly and high-protein alternative to poultry and cattle. They’re low in cholesterol, crunchy, and carry what has been described as a nutty flavor and shrimp-like quality. Restaurants have featured the bugs in experimental menus, while several cookbooks have even been published dedicated to recipes involving cica...

A suggestion for the masses: Now would be a good time to check in on your favorite Taylor Swift fan. After months of feverish anticipation, the superstar delivered her 11th studio album, The Tortured Poets Department, on Friday—and Swifities everywhere are losing their minds.From a neuroscience perspective, the response makes sense. Research suggests that music activates the brain’s reward system, triggering the release of the neurotransmitter dopamine. “We know that music is highly tied to emotion for a variety of reasons,” says Lindsay Halladay, an associate professor in neuroscience and psychology at Santa Clara University. “The tempo of music can actually modulate neural oscillations, which are sometimes called brain waves. It can alter the way the whole brain is communicating.” That’s...

On April 24, the Supreme Court will hear arguments weighing whether Idaho politicians have the power to block doctors from giving emergency medical care to patients experiencing pregnancy complications—a case that will open the door for other states to prohibit emergency reproductive care and worsen medical infrastructure for people across the board. Once again, politicians have set up a case that could have devastating impacts on the ability of doctors to provide--and for pregnant women to receive--essential reproductive health care.I’m a family physician who’s practiced medicine in rural Idaho for more than 20 years, where I’ve had the opportunity to guide hundreds of patients through their pregnancies. It’s no exaggeration when I say that my state’s health care system is in crisis, than...

April 18, 2024 9:30 PM EDTA Covid-19 patient with a weakened immune system incubated a highly mutated novel strain over 613 days before succumbing to an underlying illness, researchers in the Netherlands found.The patient, a 72-year-old man with a blood disorder, failed to mount a strong immune response to multiple Covid shots before catching the omicron variant in February 2022. Detailed analysis of specimens collected from more than two dozen nose and throat swabs found the coronavirus developed resistance to sotrovimab, a Covid antibody treatment, within a few weeks, scientists at the University of Amsterdam’s Centre for Experimental and Molecular Medicine said. It later acquired over 50 mutations, including some that suggested an enhanced ability to evade immune defenses, they said.The...

Whether fictional or fact-based, Munchausen syndrome by proxy grips the public. Media depictions in The Sixth Sense and Sharp Objects and real-life news coverage of Gypsy Rose Blanchard’s December 2023 release from jail are hard to look away from. The most well-known cases—real or dramatized—are often the starkest ones, but Munchausen by proxy comes in subtler, harder-to-detect forms too.“The media are fascinated, but they tend to depict the most extreme cases,” says Dr. Marc D. Feldman, distinguished life fellow of the American Psychiatric Association and author of Dying to Be Ill: True Stories of Medical Deception.So how do more health care providers develop the skills to recognize this form of medical child abuse and report it to the appropriate authorities? What Is Munchausen by proxy?...