Health

In the pharmaceutical world, where ideas far outnumber marketable products, executives adhere to the motto of “fail often, and fail early,” with the understanding that to do so requires the discipline to know when to cut their losses and say no. But Ivan Cheung followed other advice as CEO of Eisai, Inc. “The opposite is also true,” he says. “You have to have the discipline to say yes when everybody is trying to tell you to say no.”Cheung took a big risk in 2019 when he decided to continue developing lecanemab—which became the second treatment approved to address the root causes of Alzheimer’s disease—when data from aducanumab, which works in a similar way, showed conflicting results and experts questioned the approach. But Cheung’s team showed him promising early results on their drug, an...

The U.K.-based nonprofit Medical Aid for Palestinians was founded 40 years ago to improve health care for all Palestinian people. So when war between Israel and Hamas broke out in the fall of 2023, CEO Melanie Ward knew her group would need to respond. “This is what the organization was built for,” she says.Ward and her team started working immediately following Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel, arranging for Medical Aid for Palestinians’ warehouses in Gaza to begin distributing more than $500,000 worth of medical supplies over the next two days in anticipation of an Israeli response. Since then, the group has provided food, hygiene kits, blankets, mattresses, and around $7 million in medical supplies to people in Gaza. It has also sent six teams of international health care workers into Gaz...

Newly powerful weight-loss drugs became the biggest story in health in the past year—and Dr. Jens Juul Holst, Dr. Joel Habener, Svetlana Mojsov, and Dr. Daniel Drucker played pivotal roles in making those medications possible. The scientists conducted the early work, beginning in the 1970s, on glucagon-like peptides, or GLPs, that first transformed the treatment of diabetes and now that of obesity. As with many groundbreaking medical developments, it was a group effort. Holst, at the University of Copenhagen (where he’s now professor of endocrinology and metabolism), noticed that after intestinal surgery, patients’ levels of insulin soared while their blood-sugar levels dropped; he attributed the changes to several gut-related hormones, including glucagon, which is made in the pancreas. Ar...

Sometimes all it takes is a cold email to start a revolution. Dr. Alex Oshmyansky, a radiologist who had become incensed by the runaway prices of prescription drugs, decided to email billionaire and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban, who famously makes his contact info public. He included a business plan for a small company he had created in 2018 that made drugs and sold them at cost. Intrigued, Cuban responded in five minutes, and was quickly drawn in by Oshmyansky’s passion and outrage over how consumers were getting “ripped off.” Cuban provided an initial investment and his name, and Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drug Co. was launched in 2022. The name is as transparent as the company’s mission—which involves selling more than 2,500 generic medications at cost, plus 15% to cover shipping and han...

Bird flu, or avian influenza, can be deadly in birds but normally doesn’t infect people. While some strains have caused serious disease and even death in humans, most cause relatively mild symptoms.In the U.S., two people have been known to be infected with avian influenza: one person in 2022, and another earlier this year. In a report published Friday in the New England Journal of Medicine—amid growing concern over infections jumping from birds to cows—health officials from the U.S.Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and Texas Department of State Health Services provide details on the latest human case.According to the report, a dairy farm worker in Texas developed redness and some drainage from his right eye in late March. Because the Texas Animal Health Commission and the U...

In a fast-food culture, there may be few things better for your health than making a simple home-cooked meal. But while the meal itself may be a good idea, the cooking part can be a problem—at least if you own a natural gas or propane stove. That’s the conclusion of a new study in Science Advances, showing that dangerous levels of nitrogen dioxide (NO2) are emitted by both kinds of stoves.The findings are a result of new work conducted at Stanford University by environmental scientist Rob Jackson and graduate researcher Yannai Kashtan. Jackson has been on the trail of the gas-stove problem for a while now—having co-authored a 2022 paper showing that the methane leaking from U.S. residential stoves is equivalent to the emissions of half a million cars a year. Gas and propane stoves create N...

In a dramatic example of government yielding to public opinion the Senate has introduced legislation to legalize cannabis on the federal level. Though passage before the November election is unlikely, this long overdue legislative action seeks to update a statute stemming [pun intended] from marijuana’s demonized image as depicted in the 1936 documentary film “Reefer Madness” and better reflect public opinion and liberal social trends. Currently, under the Federal Controlled Substances Act (CSA) of 1970, cannabis is considered to have “no accepted medical use” and a high potential for abuse and physical or psychological dependence. This Federal statute contrasts with the claims of therapeutic benefits of cannabis’ biochemical constituents such as cannabidiol and THC (tetra-hydro-cannabinol...

In 2018, we worked with Bill Gates on a special issue of TIME dedicated to the power of optimism. Gates’ view, shared by many of the issue’s contributors, was that people are wired to focus on when things go wrong and when they don’t work. Sometimes this attention distracts us from the moments when progress is being made. Journalists fall prey to this phenomenon as much as anyone else.As we put together this issue, I was reminded of the conversations with Gates that led to that project. With guidance from Dr. David Agus and Arianna Huffington, our team of health correspondents and editors, led by Emma Barker and Mandy Oaklander, spent months consulting sources and experts around the world to select the 100 individuals who are most influential in the world of health right now. The result is...

(WASHINGTON) — An orangutan appeared to treat a wound with medicine from a tropical plant— the latest example of how some animals attempt to soothe their own ills with remedies found in the wild, scientists reported Thursday.Scientists observed Rakus pluck and chew up leaves of a medicinal plant used by people throughout Southeast Asia to treat pain and inflammation. The adult male orangutan then used his fingers to apply the plant juices to an injury on the right cheek. Afterward, he pressed the chewed plant to cover the open wound like a makeshift bandage, according to a new study in Scientific Reports.Previous research has documented several species of great apes foraging for medicines in forests to heal themselves, but scientists hadn't yet seen an animal treat itself in this way.“This...

The first calls that Dr. Barb Petersen received in early March were from dairy owners worried about crows, pigeons and other birds dying on their Texas farms. Then came word that barn cats — half of them on one farm — had died suddenly.Within days, the Amarillo veterinarian was hearing about sick cows with unusual symptoms: high fevers, reluctance to eat and much less milk. Tests for typical illnesses came back negative.Petersen, who monitors more than 40,000 cattle on a dozen farms in the Texas Panhandle, collected samples from cats and cows and sent them to Dr. Drew Magstadt, a friend from college who now works at the veterinary diagnostic laboratory at Iowa State University.The samples tested positive for a bird flu virus never before seen in cattle. It was the first proof that the bird...