Health

NEW YORK — Smoking has surpassed injecting as the most common way of taking drugs in U.S. overdose deaths, a new government study suggests.The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention called its study published Thursday the largest to look at how Americans took the drugs that killed them.CDC officials decided to study the topic after seeing reports from California suggesting that smoking fentanyl was becoming more common than injecting it. Potent, illicit versions of the painkiller are involved in more U.S. overdose deaths than any other drug.Some early research has suggested that smoking fentanyl is somewhat less deadly than injecting it, and any reduction in injection-related overdose deaths is a positive, said the study’s lead author, Lauren Tanz.But “both injection and smoking carry ...

It’s not unusual to fast before a medical test to avoid skewing the results. But Dr. Zoë Gottlieb’s patients often skip meals for a different reason.Gottlieb, a gastroenterologist and assistant professor of medicine at Mount Sinai’s Icahn School of Medicine in New York City, specializes in treating inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), an umbrella term for conditions involving chronic inflammation of the gastrointestinal tract, specifically Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis. People with IBD have “unreliable bowel habits,” meaning they may need to use the bathroom frequently or urgently, Gottlieb says. So when a patient doesn’t eat before their appointment, it can be a sign that they’re afraid they’ll be caught without a restroom when they need one, she says.That fear is warranted in the U...

When medical treatments or vaccines are hard to get, it's usually because of too much demand and not enough supply. But in the case of COVID-19 vaccines for kids, it’s the other way around: low demand for the shot is tanking supply.While the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends that anyone ages six months and older get vaccinated against COVID-19, parents are finding it hard to track down kid-sized doses. Usually, they would rely on their pediatricians for all childhood vaccines, but many are not stocking the latest COVID-19 shot.Why not? And how can you secure a shot for your tot?Stocking the shot is now financially risky for pediatriciansWhen the COVID-19 vaccine was first authorized for kids, it was during the public health emergency, so the federal government boug...

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...