Browsed by
Category: Health

Poland shows the risks for women’s lives when abortion is banned

Poland shows the risks for women’s lives when abortion is banned

The New York Times reports: It was shortly before 11 p.m. when Izabela Sajbor realized the doctors were prepared to let her die. Her doctor had already told her that her fetus had severe abnormalities and would almost certainly die in the womb. If it made it to term, life expectancy was a year, at most. At 22 weeks pregnant, Ms. Sajbor had been admitted to a hospital after her water broke prematurely. She knew that there was a short…

Read More Read More

Rural America reels from violent crime

Rural America reels from violent crime

The Wall Street Journal reports: Local prosecutor Rebecca McCoy used to think of her home in central Arkansas as a place where the worst crimes were usually stolen tractors and lawn mowers. In March 2020, she was called to the trailer of a 72-year-old man who had been bludgeoned to death with a baseball bat. It was White County’s first homicide in almost two years. By that December, there were 11 more. In Marion County, a swampy stretch of South…

Read More Read More

Video: Covid and the brain — a neurological health crisis

Video: Covid and the brain — a neurological health crisis

  Brain fog. Memory lapses. Difficulties focusing or sustaining attention. All these cognitive issues have plagued some who have otherwise recovered from a bout of Covid-19. In this video, Stanford neurologist Michelle Monje describes her work showing how even mild respiratory infections with the SARS-CoV-2 virus may lead to lingering problems with the brain. Monje, who has long treated and studied cancer patients with similar symptoms following chemotherapy, says that the damage isn’t necessarily caused by the virus itself. Instead,…

Read More Read More

Average liver is no more than three years old, no matter the age of the person carrying it

Average liver is no more than three years old, no matter the age of the person carrying it

Gizmodo reports: Our liver stays plenty youthful even as we get older, new research this week suggests. Using a form of radioactive dating, the researchers estimate that the average age of our liver’s cells is around three years. Some cells seem to live longer than others, however, a finding that may one day help scientists better understand how and why conditions like liver cancer can happen. The new study was led by scientists at the Dresden University of Technology in…

Read More Read More

Pollution from Russia’s war will poison Ukraine for decades

Pollution from Russia’s war will poison Ukraine for decades

Vox reports: In late May, a large plume of pink smoke erupted from a chemical plant and rose above apartment buildings in Ukraine’s eastern city of Severodonetsk. The smoke was toxic — it came from a tank of nitric acid that was struck by Russian military forces. “Do not come out of shelters!” the region’s governor, Sergiy Gaiday, said on Telegram, following the attack. “Nitric acid is dangerous if inhaled, swallowed, and in contact with skin.” Since Russia invaded Ukraine,…

Read More Read More

Unprecedented bird flu outbreaks sweeping the world are concerning scientists

Unprecedented bird flu outbreaks sweeping the world are concerning scientists

Nature reports: A highly infectious and deadly strain of avian influenza virus has infected tens of millions of poultry birds across Europe, Asia, Africa and North America. But scientists are particularly concerned about the unprecedented spread in wild birds — outbreaks pose a significant risk to vulnerable species, are hard to contain and increase the opportunity for the virus to spill over into people. Since October, the H5N1 strain has caused nearly 3,000 outbreaks in poultry in dozens of countries….

Read More Read More

Viruses that were on hiatus during Covid are back — and behaving in unexpected ways

Viruses that were on hiatus during Covid are back — and behaving in unexpected ways

STAT reports: For nearly two years, as the Covid pandemic disrupted life around the globe, other infectious diseases were in retreat. Now, as the world rapidly dismantles the measures put in place to slow spread of Covid, the viral and bacterial nuisances that were on hiatus are returning — and behaving in unexpected ways. Consider what we’ve been seeing of late. The past two winters were among the mildest influenza seasons on record, but flu hospitalizations have picked up in…

Read More Read More

Global food supply: ‘An absolute crisis is unfolding before our eyes’

Global food supply: ‘An absolute crisis is unfolding before our eyes’

Simon Tisdall reports: Apocalypse is an alarming idea, commonly taken to denote catastrophic destruction foreshadowing the end of the world. But in the original Greek, apokálypsis means a revelation or an uncovering. One vernacular definition is “to take the lid off something”. That latter feat is exactly what Andrew Bailey, governor of the Bank of England, achieved last week, possibly inadvertently, when he suggested Britain was facing “apocalyptic” levels of food price inflation. Tory ministers fumed over what they saw…

Read More Read More

As monkeypox goes global, scientists are on high alert

As monkeypox goes global, scientists are on high alert

Nature reports: More than 120 confirmed or suspected cases of monkeypox, a rare viral disease seldom detected outside of Africa, have been reported in at least 11 non-African countries in the past week. The emergence of the virus in separate populations across the world where it doesn’t usually appear has alarmed scientists — and sent them racing for answers. “It’s eye-opening to see this kind of spread,” says Anne Rimoin, an epidemiologist at the University of California Los Angeles, who…

Read More Read More

The banks collapsed in 2008. Our food system is about to do the same

The banks collapsed in 2008. Our food system is about to do the same

George Monbiot writes: For the past few years, scientists have been frantically sounding an alarm that governments refuse to hear: the global food system is beginning to look like the global financial system in the run-up to 2008. While financial collapse would have been devastating to human welfare, food system collapse doesn’t bear thinking about. Yet the evidence that something is going badly wrong has been escalating rapidly. The current surge in food prices looks like the latest sign of…

Read More Read More

What is our hidden consumption of microplastics doing to our health?

What is our hidden consumption of microplastics doing to our health?

Katharine Gammon writes: Martin Wagner was annoyed that his colleagues were always talking about microplastics in the ocean. It was 2010 and the Great Pacific Garbage Patch had been headline news. Here was this massive gyre, formed by circular ocean currents in the Pacific Ocean, reportedly brimming with plastic particles, killing sea turtles and seagulls. Wagner, a professor of biology at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, whose lab focuses on the impact of plastics on human and ecosystem…

Read More Read More

Study identifies outdoor air pollution as ‘largest existential threat to human and planetary health’

Study identifies outdoor air pollution as ‘largest existential threat to human and planetary health’

Inside Climate News reports: Since the turn of the century, global deaths attributable to air pollution have increased by more than half, a development that researchers say underscores the impact of pollution as the “largest existential threat to human and planetary health.” The findings, part of a study published Tuesday in The Lancet Planetary Health, found that pollution was responsible for an estimated 9 million deaths around the world in 2019. Fully half of those fatalities, 4.5 million deaths, were…

Read More Read More

A million Covid deaths represent ‘a failure of an American ideology’

A million Covid deaths represent ‘a failure of an American ideology’

The Guardian reports: David Rosner continually talks to colleagues who are distraught about the American response to the Covid-19 pandemic. “When you are in a school of public health and a public health environment, people really feel when they are failing,” said Rosner, who studies public health and social history at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health. That defeated feeling is compounded by the fact that 1 million people in the US have died from Covid-19 – the…

Read More Read More

Covid-era babies are ‘talking’ less, signaling future reading challenges

Covid-era babies are ‘talking’ less, signaling future reading challenges

Natalie Wexler reports: We know the pandemic has had a serious negative impact on the academic achievement of school-age children. But recent evidence shows we also need to worry about Covid-era babies and toddlers. Because of Covid-related disruptions, about a third of early elementary students will likely need intensive support to become proficient readers, according to one study. Now two additional studies suggest that many children born during the pandemic will also be at risk for academic failure. It seems…

Read More Read More

Ukrainian women face harsh reality of Poland’s abortion laws

Ukrainian women face harsh reality of Poland’s abortion laws

The Guardian reports: When the first Russian bombs fell on Ukraine, Myroslava Marchenko was a gynaecologist at a private clinic in Kyiv. The next day, one of her patients was due to have an abortion after prenatal tests showed a high chance of Down’s syndrome. Instead, like millions across the country, Marchenko and her patient fled to safety, crossing the border into Poland where abortions due to foetal abnormalities – or “on eugenic grounds” in the language of the country’s…

Read More Read More

Tiny channels discovered inside the human skull could be vital for the brain

Tiny channels discovered inside the human skull could be vital for the brain

Science Alert reports: A shortcut between the skull and the brain could be a possible way for the human immune system to bypass the blood-brain barrier. Researchers recently discovered a series of tiny channels in mice and human skulls, and in mice at least, these little pathways represent an unexpected source of brain immunity. Previously, scientists assumed that the immune system connects with the brain by slipping through a kind of neurological customs gate – a barrier separating blood channels…

Read More Read More