Health

February 15, 2024 3:43 PM ESTNEW YORK — Lyme disease cases in the U.S. jumped nearly 70% in 2022, which health officials say is not due to a major increase of new infections but instead a change in reporting requirements.Reported cases surpassed 62,000 in 2022, after averaging about 37,000 a year from 2017 through 2019, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in a report released Thursday. Numbers for 2023 will be released later this year.Lyme disease is the most common tick-borne infection in the U.S., occurring mostly in the Northeast, Midwest and mid-Atlantic states.Read More: What Happened to the Lyme Disease Vaccine?An estimated 476,000 Americans are diagnosed with it each year, but only a fraction are officially reported.Traditionally, health departments received positive...

As employees and employers adjust to new working conditions, including more flexible remote or hybrid schedules, they are also prioritizing something else that hasn’t traditionally been part of the workplace environment: mental health.In a new poll conducted by the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), researchers found encouraging signs that workers and their managers are more comfortable addressing mental health issues such as burnout and stress. But there are still gaps when it comes to creating a supportive mental-health environment in the workplace.More than 2,000 people, including executives, completed the survey. All worked at companies with at least 100 employees. The participants answered questions about how comfortable they felt bringing up mental-health issues at work, wha...

Warning: This post contains spoilers for Madame Web.Three Spider-Man movies are hitting theaters in 2024, but none of those three movies are actually about Spider-Man—or even feature the friendly neighborhood web-slinger as a character at all. Madame Web, which is now in theaters, is an entry in Sony’s Spider-Man Universe, a collection of films that take full advantage of the studio’s ownership of Spidey film rights even as the main character is primarily making live-action appearances in the Disney-owned Marvel Cinematic Universe where Tom Holland plays him. And yet, Madame Web, like Morbius before it, and presumably like this year’s upcoming Kraven the Hunter and another Venom sequel after it, does have connections to Spider-Man. Madame Web’s connections to Spider-Man are quite explicit,...

Since premiering on Netflix four years ago, Love Is Blind has produced eight marriages, two soon-to-be babies, a couple of divorces, too many messy breakups to tally, and dozens of hours of entertaining—occasionally appalling—reality television.On Feb. 14, the show’s sixth season starts streaming, this time set in Charlotte, N.C. Hosts Nick and Vanessa Lachey will once again guide a group of people eager to find love—and/or social-media followers—through a dating scenario designed to determine if love really is blind. After getting to know each other through a wall in small isolation rooms called pods for about 10 days, participants get engaged without ever having seen each other, and then spend a month living together before meeting at the altar to commit or break it off.If you already kn...

Alaska’s health department reports that the first person in the state has died from a recently discovered virus called Alaskapox. The elderly man—who was immunocompromised due to cancer treatments—first noticed an unusual lesion in his right armpit last September, according to Alaska health officials who spoke to TIME about the case. He was prescribed antibiotics at his local emergency room on the Kenai Peninsula, but after multiple visits and a worsening, painful infection, he was transferred to a hospital in Anchorage.The patient tested positive for orthopoxvirus, but extensive testing ruled out cowpox, mpox, and chickenpox, which are members of the same viral family. Doctors sent a sample to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, where scientists confirmed...

When it’s dark outside in Anchorage, Alaska, therapist Karen Cunningham pulls on long johns, one of her 16 pairs of snow pants, a hat, gloves, her warmest coat, and snow boots, and lies down in a pile of fresh snow. “It’s pitch black, and these white things are just floating down so gently,” she says. “It’s hope for me. From the darkness comes all these infinite possibilities and creations.”Snow lovers like Cunningham are prone to wax poetic about how they fall for sparkling flakes again and again—even this year, as a record-setting 100-plus inches have already hit Anchorage. A humming anticipation takes hold of the city on the eve of potential storms, and “everybody prays for a snow day,” she says. “Everybody’s like, ‘Let’s shut the city down for a little bit, and go outside and play in i...

A case of the bubonic plague has hit Oregon, and the likely cause was a cat.Health officials in Deschutes County announced last week that a resident, who has not been identified, had been diagnosed with the plague, in the state’s first human case in eight years. The individual was likely infected by their cat, the department says. “All close contacts of the resident and their pet have been contacted and provided medication to prevent illness,” said Dr. Richard Fawcett, the Deschutes County Health Services Officer.  The disease is often spread through a bite from an infected flea or contact with an infected animal. Human to human transmission can occur, but is rare. The Oregon case was identified early and the person was treated swiftly, according to officials. They added the case doesn’t p...

WASHINGTON — In Utah, more of Dr. Cara Heuser’s maternal-fetal medicine patients are requesting early ultrasounds, hoping to detect serious problems in time to choose whether to continue the pregnancy or have an abortion.In North Carolina, more obstetrics patients of Dr. Clayton Alfonso and his colleagues are relying on early genetic screenings that don’t provide a firm diagnosis.The reason? New state abortion restrictions mean the clock is ticking.Since Roe v. Wade was overturned, many health care providers say an increasing number of patients are deciding the fate of their pregnancies based on whatever information they can gather before state bans kick in. But early ultrasounds show far less about the condition of a fetus than later ones. And genetic screenings may be inaccurate.When you...

One of the hallmarks of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) is its unpredictability. Flares come and go, often with little rhyme or reason. Especially for people with moderate-to-severe IBD, most conventional forms of treatment—namely prescription drugs—are not enough to prevent flares or symptoms entirely. In an effort to better control their IBD, many people with the condition turn to complementary and alternative treatments, also known as “CAM.” Definitions of CAM vary, but it usually includes herbal medicines or supplements, mind-body techniques like meditation, and Eastern medicine practices such as acupuncture. By some estimates, up to 60% of IBD patients have attempted to treat their condition with one or more of these CAM approaches. A broader definition of CAM could also include life...

Novo Nordisk A/S has a successor waiting in the wings for the generation of weight-loss shots it pioneered: a pill that helps people shed pounds without the drawbacks of an injection.The medicine is the next frontier in the obesity fight, promising further billions in revenue, and Novo is leading once again. Trouble is, it can’t launch the drug widely without endangering its existing best-sellers.The pill helps patients lose roughly as much weight as the blockbuster Wegovy. But the oral version requires far more of the same active ingredient, called semaglutide, and Novo already can’t make enough of it to meet demand.That leaves Novo in a bind. Either it finds a way to further ramp up production or it curtails the pill’s launch, ceding ground to rivals rushing to develop competing products...