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Category: Health

Texas forced this woman to give birth to a stillborn son. She’s suing

Texas forced this woman to give birth to a stillborn son. She’s suing

Rolling Stone reports: After multiple miscarriages, Kiersten Hogan thought she would never be able to carry a pregnancy to term. She’d nearly given up hope when in June 2021 she learned she was pregnant. But at just 19 weeks — days after Texas’ Senate Bill 8 went into effect — Hogan woke up at 5 a.m. in excruciating pain. She called 911 and was instructed to unlock her front door and lay on the ground until EMTs arrived. “It was…

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There’s really no such thing as a ‘good microbe’ or a ‘bad microbe’

There’s really no such thing as a ‘good microbe’ or a ‘bad microbe’

Ed Yong writes: In the 1870s, German physician Robert Koch was trying to curtail an epidemic of anthrax that was sweeping local farm animals. Other scientists had seen a bacterium, Bacillus anthracis, in the victims’ tis­sues. Koch injected this microbe into a mouse – which died. He recovered it from the dead rodent and injected it into another one – which also died. Doggedly, he repeated this grim process for over 20 generations and the same thing happened every time. Koch…

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The paranoia that fuels gun-buying

The paranoia that fuels gun-buying

Christine Emba writes: At the Nation’s Gun Show in Chantilly, spirits seemed high. People wandered from booth to booth, and the scent of popcorn filled the air. It could have been mistaken for a state fair or weekend flea market were it not for the rows of weapons and accessories — gun parts, AR build kits and body armor — laid out on every surface. It was easy to overlook the one common emotion underlying the event: fear. Here were…

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Our way of life is poisoning us

Our way of life is poisoning us

Mark O’Connell writes: There is plastic in our bodies; it’s in our lungs and in our bowels and in the blood that pulses through us. We can’t see it, and we can’t feel it, but it is there. It is there in the water we drink and the food we eat, and even in the air that we breathe. We don’t know, yet, what it’s doing to us, because we have only quite recently become aware of its presence; but since we have learned of it, it has become a…

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Like hungry locusts, humans can easily be tricked into overeating

Like hungry locusts, humans can easily be tricked into overeating

Tim Vernimmen writes: This story starts in an unusual place for an article about human nutrition: a cramped, humid and hot room somewhere in the Zoology building of the University of Oxford in England, filled with a couple hundred migratory locusts, each in its own plastic box. It was there, in the late 1980s, that entomologists Stephen Simpson and David Raubenheimer began working together on a curious job: rearing these notoriously voracious insects, to try and find out whether they…

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Global epidemic of type 2 diabetes driven by consumption of refined carbohydrates

Global epidemic of type 2 diabetes driven by consumption of refined carbohydrates

Science Alert reports: Over the last forty years or so, the number of people with diabetes has jumped from around 100 million to more than 500 million, with matching rises in associated health problems like obesity and cardiovascular disease risk. It’s a significant health problem that is getting worse, which is why researchers are investigating the underlying issues behind the trend. One of those issues is likely to be diet, according to a new study into type 2 diabetes – which accounts for 95…

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Finding the origin of a pandemic is difficult. Preventing one shouldn’t be

Finding the origin of a pandemic is difficult. Preventing one shouldn’t be

W. Ian Lipkin writes: In 1999, the New York State Department of Health asked me to test ‌brain samples from‌‌ people in Queens experiencing encephalitis, or brain inflammation. Surprisingly, we found they were infected with West Nile virus, a mosquito-borne virus that had never been reported before in North America. How did a virus endemic in Africa and the Middle East end up in Queens? At the time, ‌scientists posited that there were stow‌away mosquitoes on a flight from Tel…

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‘Biological aging’ speeds up in times of great stress, but it can be reversed during recovery

‘Biological aging’ speeds up in times of great stress, but it can be reversed during recovery

Live Science reports: Our “biological age,” which reflects signs of age-related decline in our cells and tissues, doesn’t steadily increase along with our chronological age. Instead, new research suggests that biological aging can accelerate during stressful events and then reverse after those events. In other words, there are measurable biological markers linked to age-related changes in cell function, and these markers can appear in times of stress and then disappear during recovery. Scientists already knew that biological age’s relationship to…

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How Portland police blanketed parts of the city with toxic chemicals

How Portland police blanketed parts of the city with toxic chemicals

The Guardian reports: Investigators have created a 3D simulation of the Portland police bureau’s (PPB) extraordinary use of teargas during a major protest event on 2 June 2020. Forensic Architecture (FA), a research agency that investigates human rights violations, worked with weapons experts to analyze hundreds of videos from that evening, along with internal police files, invoice records, manufacturer data and photos of teargas canisters. The analysis reveals that the city’s downtown was blanketed with gas at more than 50 times the level federal regulators…

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Cold temperatures seem to have a mysterious effect on longevity

Cold temperatures seem to have a mysterious effect on longevity

Science Alert reports: Lower temperatures might not warm your heart, but they could make for a longer life. Past research has proposed a few reasons behind this intriguing phenomenon. Now scientists from the University of Cologne in Germany have used experiments on worms to identify another possible reason: coldness drives a process through which damaged proteins are removed from cells. Several neurodegenerative diseases that can take hold as we get older – including Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s – are linked to…

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In counties with more Black doctors, Black people live longer, ‘astonishing’ study finds

In counties with more Black doctors, Black people live longer, ‘astonishing’ study finds

STAT reports: Black people in counties with more Black primary care physicians live longer, according to a new national analysis that provides the strongest evidence yet that increasing the diversity of the medical workforce may be key to ending deeply entrenched racial health disparities. The study, published Friday in JAMA Network Open, is the first to link a higher prevalence of Black doctors to longer life expectancy and lower mortality in Black populations. Other studies have shown that when Black patients are treated…

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Mifepristone should not only remain in use, but it should be easier to get

Mifepristone should not only remain in use, but it should be easier to get

Elizabeth Janiak writes: Even before [U.S. District Court Judge Matthew] Kacsmaryk’s decision, existing federal regulations on mifepristone also reinforced abortion stigma. The drug, which works by blocking a hormone needed to sustain pregnancy, held promise of improving access to abortion care when it was introduced over 20 years ago. Before mifepristone’s approval, most pregnancy terminations in the U.S. used vacuum aspiration, a brief and safe procedure with high patient satisfaction, but one that requires specific clinical training many clinicians do…

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Research with exotic viruses risks a deadly outbreak, scientists warn

Research with exotic viruses risks a deadly outbreak, scientists warn

The Washington Post reports: Some of the workers received booster shots to prevent infection by common rabies, and none of them reported illness, according to their supervisor. But the incidents raised disturbing questions about the research: What if they encountered an unknown virus that killed humans? What if it spread to their colleagues? What if it infected their families and neighbors? As if to underscore the risks, in 2018 another lab on the same Bangkok campus — a workspace built…

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Giant study pinpoints specific gut bacteria linked to Alzheimer’s

Giant study pinpoints specific gut bacteria linked to Alzheimer’s

Science Alert reports: Tensions between the brain, the gut, and the makeup of its microbial inhabitants appear to play a critical role in the development of neurodegenerative conditions. While evidence favoring a link between the microbiota-gut-brain axis (MGBA) and Alzheimer’s disease continues to grow, the exact mechanism behind the relationship is still poorly understood. The puzzle pieces have so far been frustratingly incoherent, involving seemingly unrelated factors as tangled proteins inside nervous tissue to suspect gut microbes to subtle differences…

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How Cigna saves millions by having its doctors reject claims without reading them

How Cigna saves millions by having its doctors reject claims without reading them

ProPublica reports: When a stubborn pain in Nick van Terheyden’s bones would not subside, his doctor had a hunch what was wrong. Without enough vitamin D in the blood, the body will pull that vital nutrient from the bones. Left untreated, a vitamin D deficiency can lead to osteoporosis. A blood test in the fall of 2021 confirmed the doctor’s diagnosis, and van Terheyden expected his company’s insurance plan, managed by Cigna, to cover the cost of the bloodwork. Instead,…

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Seabirds that swallow ocean plastic waste have scarring in their stomachs – scientists have named this disease ‘plasticosis’

Seabirds that swallow ocean plastic waste have scarring in their stomachs – scientists have named this disease ‘plasticosis’

Scientists have identified a condition they call plasticosis, caused by ingesting plastic waste, in flesh-footed shearwaters. Patrick Kavanagh/Wikipedia, CC BY By Matthew Savoca, Stanford University As a conservation biologist who studies plastic ingestion by marine wildlife, I can count on the same question whenever I present research: “How does plastic affect the animals that eat it?” This is one of the biggest questions in this field, and the verdict is still out. However, a recent study from the Adrift Lab,…

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