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Category: Health

Inside conservative activist Leonard Leo’s long campaign to gut Planned Parenthood

Inside conservative activist Leonard Leo’s long campaign to gut Planned Parenthood

KFF Health News reports: A federal lawsuit in Texas against Planned Parenthood has a web of ties to conservative activist Leonard Leo, whose decades-long effort to steer the U.S. court system to the right overturned Roe v. Wade, yielding the biggest rollback of reproductive health access in half a century. Brought by an anonymous whistleblower and later joined by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, the suit alleges the Planned Parenthood Federation of America and three Planned Parenthood affiliates defrauded the…

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The phageome: A hidden kingdom within your gut

The phageome: A hidden kingdom within your gut

By Amber Dance, Knowable Magazine You’ve probably heard of the microbiome — the hordes of bacteria and other tiny life forms that live in our guts. Well, it turns out those bacteria have viruses that exist in and around them — with important consequences for both them and us. Meet the phageome. There are billions, perhaps even trillions of these viruses, known as bacteriophages (“bacteria eaters” in Greek) or just “phages” to their friends, inside the human digestive system. Phageome…

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Dozens of pregnant women, some bleeding or in labor, are turned away from ERs despite federal law

Dozens of pregnant women, some bleeding or in labor, are turned away from ERs despite federal law

The Associated Press reports: Bleeding and in pain, Kyleigh Thurman didn’t know her doomed pregnancy could kill her. Emergency room doctors at Ascension Seton Williamson in Texas handed her a pamphlet on miscarriage and told her to “let nature take its course” before discharging her without treatment for her ectopic pregnancy. When the 25-year-old returned three days later, still bleeding, doctors finally agreed to give her an injection to end the pregnancy. It was too late. The fertilized egg growing…

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Long COVID is a $1 trillion problem with no cure. Experts plead for governments to wake up

Long COVID is a $1 trillion problem with no cure. Experts plead for governments to wake up

Fortune reports: For months, governmental officials around the world have appeared to want to forgo discussing the specter of long COVID. As a new review makes clear, that is wishful thinking—and the latest COVID variants may well kick long COVID into overdrive, a scenario that researchers and experts have been warning about for some time. “I think they (government agencies) are itching to pretend that COVID is over and that long COVID does not exist,” says Ziyad Al-Aly, director of…

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Cells across the body talk to each other about aging

Cells across the body talk to each other about aging

Viviane Callier writes: Aging can seem like an unregulated process: As time marches along, our cells and bodies inevitably accumulate dings and dents that cause dysfunctions, failures and ultimately death. However, in 1993 a discovery upended that interpretation of events. Researchers found a mutation in a single gene that doubled a worm’s life span; subsequent work showed that related genes, all involved in the response to insulin, are key regulators of aging in a host of animals, from worms and…

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Links between pathogens and Alzheimer’s spur new projects searching for causal evidence

Links between pathogens and Alzheimer’s spur new projects searching for causal evidence

Science reports: This week, thousands of researchers are flocking to downtown Philadelphia for what’s billed as the largest international conference dedicated to Alzheimer’s disease. But several kilometers away a much smaller group congregated for an alternative meetup: a daylong dive into whether and how pathogens might cause the fatal dementia. Saturday’s gathering of about 80 scientists on the city’s periphery is something of a metaphor for where the idea sits in the larger Alzheimer’s community, long dominated by the view…

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How decline of Indian vultures led to 500,000 human deaths

How decline of Indian vultures led to 500,000 human deaths

BBC News reports: Once upon a time, the vulture was an abundant and ubiquitous bird in India. The scavenging birds hovered over sprawling landfills, looking for cattle carcasses. Sometimes they would alarm pilots by getting sucked into jet engines during airport take-offs. But more than two decades ago, India’s vultures began dying because of a drug used to treat sick cows. By the mid-1990s, the 50 million-strong vulture population had plummeted to near zero because of diclofenac, a cheap non-steroidal…

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WHO ‘extremely worried’ about possible Gaza polio outbreak

WHO ‘extremely worried’ about possible Gaza polio outbreak

BBC News reports: The World Health Organization is “extremely worried” about the possibility of an outbreak of the highly infectious polio virus in Gaza after traces were found in wastewater. Dr Ayadil Saparbekov, head of the WHO’s team in the Palestinian territories, told reporters a risk assessment was being implemented and that in the meantime health workers were providing protection advice to Gaza’s 2.3 million population. But, he added, it would be “very difficult” for people to follow it, given…

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Project 2025 poses far-reaching threats to science

Project 2025 poses far-reaching threats to science

Scientific American reports: Project 2025, the sweeping right-wing blueprint for a new kind of U.S. presidency, would sabotage science-based policies that address climate change, the environment, abortion, health care access, technology and education. It would impose religious and conservative ideology on the federal civil service to such an extent that Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has, dubiously, tried to distance himself from the plan. But in 2022 Trump said the Heritage Foundation—the think tank that authored Project 2025—would “lay the…

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What it’s like living through a 121 degree day

What it’s like living through a 121 degree day

NPR reports: If you ask Ansar Khan, he will tell you that the heat killed his baby daughter Ina. She didn’t wake up from her afternoon nap in late May, on the dusty scrap of land she knew as home, with only a blue plastic sheet to shade her. It was the hottest day he’d ever experienced, and a hot wind blew. It was 121 degrees in New Delhi that day. “She was crying a bit, so we gave her…

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Inside the $100 million plan to restore abortion rights in America

Inside the $100 million plan to restore abortion rights in America

Politico reports: A new coalition of abortion-rights groups is marking the second anniversary of the fall of Roe v. Wade with a pledge to spend $100 million to restore federal protections for the procedure and make it more accessible than ever before. In plans shared first with POLITICO, groups including Planned Parenthood, the ACLU and Reproductive Freedom for All are banding together to form Abortion Access Now — a national, 10-year campaign that will both prepare policies for the next…

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Texas ‘pro-life’ abortion ban linked to stark rise in infant deaths

Texas ‘pro-life’ abortion ban linked to stark rise in infant deaths

HuffPost reports: Texas’ six-week abortion ban, a 2021 law whose GOP backers claimed would “protect innocent human life,” is linked to a staggering rise in infant deaths, a new study published Monday in the Journal of the American Medical Association found. The study, published on the second anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade, found that the Texas ban was “associated with unexpected increases in infant and neonatal mortality in 2022,” suggesting that despite Republican sermonizing on…

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WARNING: Social media can be harmful to your mental health

WARNING: Social media can be harmful to your mental health

Dr. Vivek H. Murthy, the U.S. surgeon general, writes: One of the most important lessons I learned in medical school was that in an emergency, you don’t have the luxury to wait for perfect information. You assess the available facts, you use your best judgment, and you act quickly. The mental health crisis among young people is an emergency — and social media has emerged as an important contributor. Adolescents who spend more than three hours a day on social…

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Wildfire smoke killed more than 50,000 Californians over a decade

Wildfire smoke killed more than 50,000 Californians over a decade

Yale E360 reports: A new study finds that more than 50,000 Californians died from exposure to wildfire smoke over a little more than a decade. Smoke contains tiny particles, small enough to enter the bloodstream when inhaled, that can raise the risk of dying from heart or lung disease. For the study, researchers modeled particulate pollution from wildfires across California from 2008 to 2018. They then compared their model with local mortality numbers to infer the number of deaths from…

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Pentagon ran secret anti-vax campaign to undermine China during pandemic

Pentagon ran secret anti-vax campaign to undermine China during pandemic

Reuters reports: At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. military launched a secret campaign to counter what it perceived as China’s growing influence in the Philippines, a nation hit especially hard by the deadly virus. The clandestine operation has not been previously reported. It aimed to sow doubt about the safety and efficacy of vaccines and other life-saving aid that was being supplied by China, a Reuters investigation found. Through phony internet accounts meant to impersonate Filipinos, the…

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What causes long COVID? Case builds for rogue antibodies

What causes long COVID? Case builds for rogue antibodies

Nature reports: Antibodies isolated from people with long COVID increase pain sensitivity and reduce movement in mice when transferred to the animals, research shows. The findings suggest that antibodies might drive some symptoms of long COVID — although how that process works is unclear, and the results will need to be replicated in larger studies. “I think this will be a beacon of a paper that we can take forwards to further understand long COVID,” says Resia Pretorius, an immunologist…

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