Health

Respiratory disease season is in full swing, with influenza, RSV, and COVID-19 case counts rising in various parts of the U.S. Hospitals in some states are also reporting upticks in pediatric pneumonia diagnoses, which experts say seems to be unrelated to the recent spike of pneumonias reported in China.On the heels of last year’s severe flu and RSV reason, all this contagion has some people wondering if SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, may be to blame. Some studies suggest the virus leaves its mark on the immune system even after an acute illness passes, raising an important question: does having COVID-19 increase your risk of getting sick from other viruses in the future?“Any time that we get an infection, it changes us,” says Dr. David Smith, chief of infectious diseases and ...

WASHINGTON — White House officials will take more time to review a sweeping plan from U.S. health regulators to ban menthol cigarettes, an unexpected delay that anti-tobacco groups fear could scuttle the long-awaited rule.Administration officials indicated Wednesday the process will continue into next year, targeting March to implement the rule, according to an updated regulatory agenda posted online. Previously, the rule was widely expected to be published in late 2023 or early January.The Food and Drug Administration has spent years developing the plan to eliminate menthol, estimating it could prevent 300,000 to 650,000 smoking deaths over several decades. Most of those preventable deaths would be among Black Americans, who disproportionately smoke menthols.Previous FDA efforts on mentho...

Every COVID-19 vaccine is a step behind the virus. In the time it takes companies to make the shot, SARS-CoV-2 is already busy mutating into different versions that can evade the immune response produced by it.But even though the latest vaccine targets XBB.1.5, a variant no longer dominant in the U.S., it seems to be doing a decent job at warding off some of the emerging variants. In a study published on the preprint server bioRxiv, scientists led by Dr. David Ho, director of the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center at Columbia University, report that the vaccine can generate strong antibodies that can neutralize not just XBB but variants such as HV.1, which now accounts for 31% of U.S. infections, and HK.3, which contributes to half of new infections in Asia (and about 7% in the U.S.).The t...

Panera Bread is confronting a second wrongful death lawsuit after a customer allegedly died from consuming its popular caffeinated “charged lemonade” beverage. The lawsuit, filed on Monday, details the death of Dennis Brown, a 46-year-old Florida man who passed away in October after consuming three servings of the drink.According to the wrongful-death lawsuit filed by Brown's family in Superior Court in Delaware, Brown suffered a "cardiac event" while walking home from a Panera Bread in Fleming Island, Fla. on Oct. 9. The lawsuit alleges that Panera "knew or should have known" that the charged lemonade could pose risks, particularly to children, pregnant and breastfeeding women, and individuals sensitive to caffeine.Charged lemonade, which has more caffeine in its large size than a 12-ounc...

As we head into winter, health experts expect that cases of flu and COVID-19 will start to creep up. One piece of good news: if you do get sick, there’s a way to get tests and treatments for both—without paying a cent.The National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have teamed up with digital health company eMed to create an at-home test-to-treat program that offers free tests for both flu and COVID-19, and, if you are positive, free telehealth visits and antiviral treatments that are sent to your home.For now, there are some restrictions about who can enroll and receive the free tests. After the program officially launched last month, following a flood of requests from people eager to s...

There’s a long-enduring idea in the media that suicide rates peak in the winter months, when days get darker earlier, stress levels seem to rise, and the so-called “holiday blues” set in. The sentiment is so prevalent that 40% of stories published by news organizations about suicide during the 2022-2023 holiday season made this claim. There’s just one problem with these stories: no such seasonal trend exists in actual suicide data. In fact, December often sees a lull in suicide numbers worldwide. Dan Romer, a research director at Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, has spent decades chasing the origins of this myth and working to correct it. In a new report out Dec. 4, he shares the results of worldwide survey data that shows the extent of the myth and new evi...

Hospitals are such important places in our lives. It's where we are born, where we go for help when we’re not well, and where we turn to when cancer, a heart attack, or major injury leaves us hanging by a thread. It’s also where our loved ones spend their time anxiously waiting for us to get better, to hear good or bad news.So then, why are hospitals such miserable places?Most hospitals are so poorly designed, you feel their negative effects the moment you walk through the front door. The unintuitive layout immediately disorients you. The stark, cold lighting and hard surfaces create a feeling of sterility. There’s no soothing music to put you at ease, just the beeping of machines and rushing of hospital staff. It always feels like something is wrong. Like the worst is about to happen—whic...

Some 6.9 million 23andMe customers had their data compromised after an anonymous hacker accessed user profiles and posted them for sale on the internet earlier this year, the company said on Monday. The compromised data included users’ ancestry information as well as, for some users, health-related information based on their genetic profiles, the company said in an email. Privacy advocates have long warned that sharing DNA with testing companies like 23andMe and Ancestry makes consumers vulnerable to the exposure of sensitive genetic information that can reveal health risks of individuals and those who are related to them. Read More: DNA Testing Kits Are on Everyone's Holiday List. 5 Things to Know If You Get OneIn the case of the 23andMe breach, the hacker only directly accessed about 14,...

Over the past several decades, there have been many supporting studies of the health-promoting effects of an optimistic personality. Much research has been done on the connection between a high level of optimism and good health, described well in clinical psychologists Burel R. Goodin and Hailey W. Bulls' 2014 research paper, appropriately titled, “Optimism and the Experience of Pain: Benefits of Seeing the Glass as Half Full.” The authors state that optimism “is linked to both enhanced physiological recovery and psychosocial adjustment to coronary artery bypass surgery, bone marrow transplant, postpartum depression, traumatic brain injury, Alzheimer’s disease, lung cancer, breast cancer, and failed in vitro fertilization.” Newer research demonstrates that high levels of hope have been fou...

Humans rely on a bevy of strange natural chemicals to liven up our food and drink, to endure pain, and to change our perspective. We use caffeine from coffee, tea, and yerba mate to stimulate our bodies and minds, capsaicin from red pepper flakes or isothiocyanates in horseradish or wasabi to enliven our food with spice, and codeine or morphine to endure the pain of injuries and surgeries.Lately, though, some have also turned to psychedelics like psilocybin to change their perspectives. In fact, researchers are beginning to test if they could serve as new treatments for mental health disorders.That said, the bigger question is why plants, mushrooms, microbes and even some animals make chemicals like these with life-saving, life-enhancing, and even life-ending properties. My job as an evolu...