There’s no denying it: Farming had a rough year. Extreme weather spun up storms and floods, unseasonal freezes and baking heat waves, and prolonged parching droughts. In parts of the world in 2023, tomato plants didn’t flower, the peach crop never came in, and the price of olive oil soared. …

The US is enduring a sharp spike in cases of babies born with syphilis, an illness that not only threatens infants’ health, but also shows that the system providing healthcare for pregnant women is fracturing. Congenital syphilis has risen to its highest rate in 30 years, according to a recent …

It’s flu season. At state health departments and academic medical centers, and at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, epidemiologists are intently watching two sets of data: the number of flu cases and the number of Americans taking flu shots. So far, the balance between them looks good. …

A deadly wave of heart attacks and strokes is headed for the US, borne by extreme heat waves spawned by climate change—and those deaths are most likely to occur in people who are older or Black. By mid-century, according to research published Monday, cardiovascular deaths linked to extreme heat could …

In the last hard days of World War I, just two weeks before world powers agreed to an armistice, a doctor wrote a letter to a friend. The doctor was stationed at the US Army’s Camp Devens west of Boston, a base packed with 45,000 soldiers preparing to ship out …

The world at last has a public health tool it has been seeking for more than a century: a reliable vaccine against malaria that can protect at least two-thirds of the children who receive it from developing the deadly disease. In fact, in an embarrassment of riches, the world now …

Fall has arrived, flu shots are rolling out in pharmacies, and pediatricians are watching for an uptick in respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV. In other words, it’s virus season. Covid deaths and hospitalizations also began rising at the end of July, and wastewater surveillance that looks for the virus has …

The World Health Organization (WHO) is taking on the world’s worst killer, laying out its first plan to conquer hypertension—a level of high blood pressure that affects one in every three adults globally. That figure has doubled since 1990. It’s now up to 1.3 billion people. High blood pressure might …

If you were planning on a shore vacation this year, you might have kept track of great white sharks. The apex predator made famous by Jaws (and, OK, by The Meg and Sharknado) has been spotted on East Coast beaches from South Carolina up past Cape Cod, leaving potential beachcombers …

In February, a dermatologist in New York City contacted the state’s health department about two female patients, ages 28 and 47, who were not related but suffered from the same troubling problem. They had ringworm, a scaly, crusty, disfiguring rash covering large portions of their bodies. Ringworm sounds like a …