Tag Archives: health

THIS ARTICLE IS republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. A 10-month-old boy in the Gaza Strip was recently paralyzed by poliovirus—the first such case in the region this century. Israel and Hamas have agreed to a limited ceasefire to allow 640,000 children in the enclave to be …

As mpox continues to spread in Central Africa, a promising antiviral drug to treat the infection has failed to improve patients’ symptoms in a trial in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the epicenter of the outbreak. In the trial, the drug tecovirimat, also known as TPOXX, did not alleviate …

On a recent Thursday afternoon, researchers Lanuza Faccioli and Zhiping Hu wheeled an inconspicuous black and white plastic cooler from an operating room at a hospital in downtown Pittsburgh. Inside was a badly scarred liver, just removed from a 47-year-old man undergoing a transplant to receive a new one from …

Amid a summer surge of Covid-19 infections, the US Food and Drug Administration just approved updated mRNA vaccines that more closely target the currently circulating variants of the coronavirus. The updated vaccines, from Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech, target a variant of Omicron called KP.2, one of the several so-called FLiRT variants …

With the US experiencing a relatively large summer wave of Covid-19, the Food and Drug Administration is considering signing off on this year's strain-matched Covid-19 vaccines as soon as this week, according to a report by CNN that cited unnamed officials familiar with the matter. Last year, the FDA gave …

Through local papers and word of mouth, volunteer Daya Shankar keeps track of a very specific cause of death. As soon as he receives news of someone being struck by lightning around his neighborhood in Jharkhand, East India, he picks up his motorcycle and heads to the destination. Sometimes he …

Roeland Decorte grew up in a nursing home in Belgium, where he learned to spot the subtle early signs of mental decline in small changes to how residents walked or talked. When Decorte was 11, his father, who owned and managed the care home, started waking up in the middle …

For a while, it looked like the psychedelic drug MDMA was poised to become an approved treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder. Now, after being rejected by the US Food and Drug Administration, MDMA faces an uphill battle to becoming legalized as medicine. In 2017, the FDA granted MDMA “breakthrough therapy” …

In May 2023, the World Health Organization released a statement declaring the end of mpox—formerly known as monkeypox—as a public health emergency. Just over a year later, the agency has been forced to backtrack, with a far more serious epidemic brewing across much of sub-Saharan Africa. Statistics show that more …

This image could be hung in a gallery, but it started life as a tiny chunk of a woman’s brain. In 2014, a woman undergoing surgery for epilepsy had a tiny chunk of her cerebral cortex removed. This cubic millimeter of tissue has allowed Harvard and Google researchers to produce …