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Category: Health

A Texas case shows that abortion ban exemptions are a sham

A Texas case shows that abortion ban exemptions are a sham

Michelle Goldberg writes: Soon after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last year, horror stories started emerging of women denied medically urgent abortions for pregnancies gone dangerously awry. In response, the anti-abortion movement developed a sort of conspiracy theory to rationalize away the results of their policies. Abortion rights activists, they argued, were deliberately misconstruing abortion laws, leading doctors to refuse to treat women who obviously qualified for exceptions. “Abortion advocates are spreading the dangerous lie that lifesaving care…

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The Texas abortion case blows up the abortion ban rationale

The Texas abortion case blows up the abortion ban rationale

Jennifer Rubin writes: Abortion rights activists, medical professionals and ordinary women warned the Supreme Court in advance of the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision: Legislatures cannot dictate medical decisions without creating horrendous injustices and medical travesties. A recent case from Texas, which has a ban on abortions after six weeks, leaves no doubt about the merits of that argument. The Texas case undermines the rationale for abortion bans and adds to Republicans’ political liability on an issue uppermost…

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Your organs might be aging at different rates

Your organs might be aging at different rates

Scientific American reports: The number of birthdays you’ve had—better known as your chronological age—now appears to be less important in assessing your health than ever before. A new study shows that bodily organs get “older” at extraordinarily different rates, and each one’s biological age can be at odds with a person’s age on paper. The new research, published on Wednesday in Nature, identified about one in five healthy adults older than 50 years old as an “extreme ager”—a person with…

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What we get when we give

What we get when we give

Molly McDonough writes: From where in the body might kindness flow? Folklore and belief systems far and wide point to the heart. Ancient Egyptian mythology, for example, maintained that the leap to the afterlife required a test. Before the deceased could enter, their heart had to be weighed, placed on a balance under the watchful eyes of the gods. The dead person’s heart wasn’t beating, but it wasn’t considered dead weight; it held proof of virtue. If the person had…

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In the gut’s ‘second brain,’ key agents of health emerge

In the gut’s ‘second brain,’ key agents of health emerge

Yasemin Saplakoglu writes: From the moment you swallow a bite of food to the moment it exits your body, the gut is toiling to process this strange outside material. It has to break chunks down into small bits. It must distinguish healthy nutrients from toxins or pathogens and absorb only what is beneficial. And it does all this while moving the partially processed food one way through different factories of digestion — mouth, esophagus, stomach, through the intestines and out….

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U.S. coal power plants killed at least 460,000 people in past 20 years, report finds

U.S. coal power plants killed at least 460,000 people in past 20 years, report finds

The Guardian reports: Coal-fired power plants killed at least 460,000 Americans during the past two decades, causing twice as many premature deaths as previously thought, new research has found. Cars, factories, fire smoke and electricity plants emit tiny toxic air pollutants known as fine particulate matter or PM2.5, which elevate the risk of an array of life-shortening medical conditions including asthma, heart disease, low birth weight and some cancers. Researchers analyzed Medicare and emissions data from 1999 and 2020, and…

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Gaza’s next tragedy: Disease risk spreads amid overcrowded shelters, dirty water and breakdown of basic sanitation

Gaza’s next tragedy: Disease risk spreads amid overcrowded shelters, dirty water and breakdown of basic sanitation

By Yara M. Asi, University of Central Florida After more than a month of being subjected to sustained bombing, the besieged people of the Gaza Strip are now confronted with another threat to life: disease. Overcrowding at shelters, a breakdown of basic sanitation, the rising number of unburied dead and a scarcity of clean drinking water have left the enclave “on the precipice of major disease outbreaks,” according to the World Health Organization. As an expert in Palestinian public health…

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Climate change is putting the health of billions at risk

Climate change is putting the health of billions at risk

Grist reports: Eight years ago, the medical journal the Lancet began compiling the latest research on how climate change affects human health. It was the first coordinated effort to highlight scientific findings on the health consequences of climate change, published in the hopes of making the topic more central to global climate negotiations. The Lancet’s annual reports on this topic, which summarize research conducted by dozens of scientists from leading institutions around the world, have become increasingly dire in tone….

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How Republican state politics are shaving years off American lives

How Republican state politics are shaving years off American lives

The Washington Post reports: Mike Czup unspooled the hose to wash his hearse. It was time to pick up the body of yet another neighbor who had died in the prime of life. Since he started working at 15 in the funeral business, Czup has seen plenty of tragedies. But the 52-year-old said he’s still coming to grips with a disturbing fact about the bodies he washes, embalms and entombs: About a quarter of the people he buries are younger…

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Progress in the long fight against mosquito-borne disease

Progress in the long fight against mosquito-borne disease

The New York Times reports: Five decades ago, entomologists confronting the many kinds of suffering that mosquitoes inflict on humans began to consider a new idea: What if, instead of killing the mosquitoes (a losing proposition in most places), you could disarm them? Even if you couldn’t keep them from biting people, what if you could block them from passing on disease? What if, in fact, you could use one infectious microbe to stop another? These scientists began to consider…

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Merck’s COVID treatment drug may be creating transmissible mutated viruses

Merck’s COVID treatment drug may be creating transmissible mutated viruses

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists reports: A drug used to treat patients at risk of severe COVID-19 infection may have led to the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 viruses bearing a distinct pattern of mutations, researchers reported Monday in Nature. The new paper raises the stakes over concerns about whether molnupiravir use could lead to the emergence of new dangerous variants and extend the pandemic. Molnupiravir, which is sold as Lagevrio, works by mutating SARS-CoV-2 and causing changes that should knock out…

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Why sewage may hold the key to tracking diseases far beyond COVID-19

Why sewage may hold the key to tracking diseases far beyond COVID-19

Betsy Ladyzhets writes: The future of disease tracking is going down the drain — literally. Flushed with success over detecting coronavirus in wastewater, and even specific variants of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, researchers are now eyeing our collective poop to monitor a wide variety of health threats. Before the pandemic, wastewater surveillance was a smaller field, primarily focused on testing for drugs or mapping microbial ecosystems. But these researchers were tracking specific health threats in specific places —…

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Cheese consumption might be linked to better cognitive health, study suggests

Cheese consumption might be linked to better cognitive health, study suggests

PsyPost reports: A recent scientific publication by the Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute (MDPI)’s Nutrients journal suggests there might be a correlation between regular cheese consumption and better cognitive health in the elderly population. Over the years, the nexus between dietary habits and their impact on physical well-being has been firmly established. However, the realm of cognitive health and its relation to food intake is an area that’s still being actively explored. Dairy products, especially milk and cheese, have previously been…

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The ‘Hispanic Paradox’ intrigues a new generation of researchers determined to unravel it

The ‘Hispanic Paradox’ intrigues a new generation of researchers determined to unravel it

Usha Lee McFarling reports: For 40 years, researchers have unsuccessfully tried to explain — or debunk — the “Hispanic Paradox,” the finding that Hispanic Americans live several years longer than white Americans on average, despite having far less income and health care and higher rates of diabetes and obesity. Now, armed with more comprehensive data, powerful genomic tools, and a rich cultural awareness of the communities they study, a new generation of scientists is finally making headway. These researchers, many…

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MDMA as PTSD treatment moves closer to U.S. approval

MDMA as PTSD treatment moves closer to U.S. approval

Nature reports: The psychedelic drug MDMA, also known as ecstasy or molly, has passed another key hurdle on its way to regulatory approval as a treatment for mental illness. A second large clinical trial has found that the drug — in combination with psychotherapy — is effective at treating post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The results allow the trial’s sponsor to now seek approval from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for MDMA’s use as a PTSD treatment for the…

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Threads blocks searches related to covid and vaccines as cases rise

Threads blocks searches related to covid and vaccines as cases rise

The Washington Post reports: Instagram’s text-based social platform Threads last week rolled out its new search function, a crucial step toward the platform’s expansion and one that would give it more parity with X, formerly known as Twitter. Tech is not your friend. We are. Sign up for The Tech Friend newsletter. Not even 24 hours later, the company was embroiled in controversy. When users went to Threads to search for content related to “covid” and “long covid,” they were…

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