Health

Last year, cases of measles—a serious, vaccine-preventable disease that's highly contagious—jumped by 79% around the world. Most of them were in children. That trend is continuing this year, threatening to reverse an impressive 73% drop in measles deaths worldwide from 2000 to 2018. Cases in the U.S. are climbing, too. In just the first two months of 2024, 35 cases have already been reported in 15 states including California, Minnesota, Florida, New York, and Louisiana; in 2023, 58 cases were reported over the entire year. Why are measles cases taking off, and how can people protect themselves? Why measles cases are climbingNot enough kids are getting vaccinated. For herd immunity, about 95% or more of a population needs to be vaccinated, but most countries around the world have been below...

In the spring of 2023, after her third case of COVID-19, Jennifer Robertson started to feel strange. Her heart raced all day long and she could barely sleep at night. She had dizzy spells. She felt pins and needles in her arm, she says, a “buzzing feeling” in her foot, and pain in her legs and lymph nodes. She broke out in a rash. She smelled “phantom” cigarette smoke, even when none was in the air.Robertson, 48, had a feeling COVID-19 might have somehow been the trigger. She knew about Long COVID, the name for chronic symptoms following an infection, because her 11-year-old son has it. But “he didn’t have anything like this,” she says. “His set of symptoms are totally different,” involving spiking fevers and vocal and motor tics. Her own experience was so different from her son's, it was ...

If you watched Lifetime's Wendy Williams docuseries that premiered over the weekend and felt uncomfortable, you weren't alone.“Where is Wendy Williams?” premiered over the weekend and featured numerous scenes of the former talk show host unsteady, belligerent, confused and also drunk. Her manager would regularly find liquor bottles hidden throughout her apartment, behavior that producers say unnerved them while filming. But they say they didn't know at the time that Williams had dementia, which the public learned late last week.“We all became very concerned for her safety. To be honest, I was so concerned she would fall down the stairs and for numerous different reasons," said Erica Hanson, an executive producer who can be seen and heard speaking to Williams at certain moments in the serie...

LIMA, Peru — Peru declared a health emergency in most of its provinces on Monday due to a growing number of dengue cases that are occurring at a time of higher than usual temperatures caused by the El Nino weather pattern.According to the nation’s health ministry, the number of dengue cases registered during the first seven weeks of this year is twice as high as during the same period in 2023 – with more than 31,000 cases recorded.“This is a grave problem,” health minister Cesar Vásquez said last week, before the emergency was declared. “And it is getting out of hand.”The health emergency will enable the nation’s government to transfer funds faster to the affected regions and also transport doctors and nurses. It will cover 20 of the country’s 24 provinces, including regions that surround ...

Not every major medical innovation breaks through to the general public. But the buzzy weight loss drugs for people with obesity or Type 2 diabetes certainly have. About 75% of Americans have heard of Ozempic, Wegovy and other brands of anti-obesity drugs, according to the results of a new Pew Research Center survey. (Wegovy and Zepbound are specifically approved to treat obesity, while Ozempic and Mounjaro are approved to treat people with Type 2 diabetes and can help them lose weight.)The survey included more than 10,000 people of different ages, genders, races, ethnicities, education levels and political affiliations who were randomly recruited to answer online questions about obesity and the new class of anti-obesity medications.Among those familiar with the drugs, 53% said they were g...

About 20 million people in the U.S.—including four million children—have food allergies. Now, there's a new way to reduce their risk of severe allergic reactions. A study published in the New England Journal of Medicine reports that the drug omalizumab, or Xolair, allows people with food allergies to tolerate higher doses of allergenic foods before developing a reaction after an accidental exposure. It also leads to milder reactions if they are exposed.The drug was originally approved more than two decades ago to treat allergic asthma. But because of this new study and other data, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration expanded the approval of Xolair on Feb. 16 to include treatment of food allergies in anyone one year or older. It's now the first drug approved to treat allergies to multipl...

In the digital age, we have the technology to document our lives in extraordinary detail via photographs, voice recordings, and social media posts. In theory, this ability to effortlessly capture the important moments of our lives should enrich our ability to remember those moments. But in practice, people often tell me they experience the opposite.I study the neuroscience of memory and one question I hear again and again is whether technology is making us “dumber”—or, more precisely, whether it’s hurting our ability to remember. For some, the question is motivated by worry about the amount of time their children spend on screens or mobile devices. For others, it reflects concerns about their own memory problems.A common fear is that there might be a “use it or lose it” principle at play—t...

When I got diagnosed with Stage 3b Hodgkin Lymphoma at age 32, it was almost impossible to process. Without a family history or lifestyle risk factors that put cancer on my radar, I stared at the emergency room doctor in utter disbelief when he said the CT scan of my swollen lymph node showed what appeared to be cancer—and lots of it. A few days away from a bucket list trip to Japan, I’d only gone to the emergency room because the antibiotics CityMD prescribed to me when I was sick weren’t working.I didn’t want to be sick in a foreign country. So when the doctor told me of my diagnosis, the  only question I could conjure was: “So Tokyo is a no-go?”Around the world, cancer rates in people under 50 are surging, with a recent study in BMJ Oncology showing that new cases for young adults have ...

You wouldn’t think it would be easy to get nearly 4.5 million Americans—the equivalent of the entire state of Louisiana or Kentucky—to give up smoking. But it can be done in a single, straightforward step: prohibiting the sale of menthol cigarettes. That’s the conclusion of a new study in the journal Nicotine & Tobacco Research.The study is one more piece of evidence in favor of a nationwide menthol ban, the authors say. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) proposed just such a ban in 2022, but in Dec. 2023, the Biden Administration postponed implementation following intense lobbying by tobacco company lobbyists and convenience store owners, who complained that the action could cost untold jobs and billions of dollars in sales. “The FDA has done its work,” says Sarah Mills, the ...

“We stumbled upon your post…and it looks like you are going through some challenging times,” the message begins. “We are here to share with you materials and resources that might bring you some comfort.” Links to suicide help lines, a 24/7 chat service, and stories of people who overcame mental-health crises follow. “Sending you a virtual hug,” the message concludes.This note, sent as a private message on Reddit by the artificial-intelligence (AI) company Samurai Labs, represents what some researchers say is a promising tool to fight the suicide epidemic in the U.S., which claims almost 50,000 lives a year. Companies like Samurai are using AI to analyze social media posts for signs of suicidal intent, then intervene through strategies like the direct message.There is a certain irony to har...