DEAR MAYO CLINIC: My 39-year-old brother was just diagnosed with gastric cancer. The diagnosis was especially shocking because of his age. Is this becoming more common? Does age affect the approaches to treatment?

ANSWER: Stomach cancer, also referred to as gastric cancer, was once thought of as a disease of older adults. However, it is ...Read more

MIAMI — Iguanas are becoming a growing health concern in South Florida, with doctors and residents warning that the invasive reptiles can spread salmonella through their droppings and even their bites. The issues has already sent some children to the hospital and pushed one South Florida father to rethink his career.

“He was just really off...Read more

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump on Tuesday gave his sharpest rebuke of congressional Democrats’ efforts to extend expiring Affordable Care Act enhanced tax credits, saying he would not support legislation to do so.

The announcement, made through a post on Truth Social, comes as Senate Republicans and the White House had promised to ...Read more

ST. LOUIS — Among the 16 building trades in the St. Louis area, a network is forming to focus on the mental health of workers.

The increasingly critical effort aims to draw out a group with a reputation for being tough as nails — and tight-lipped about personal problems.

The motivation to join forces can be found in statistics. ...Read more

More than three-quarters of American adults didn’t get a COVID shot last season, a figure that health care experts warn could rise this year amid new U.S. government recommendations.

The COVID vaccine was initially popular. About 75% of Americans had received at least one dose of the first versions of the vaccine by early 2022, Centers for ...Read more

PHILADELPHIA — When Jefferson Einstein Philadelphia Hospital began offering new mothers who gave birth there a follow-up visit with a nurse at home, Ebony Durant worried that the idea would be a hard sell for patients.

“I thought that families would not be receptive — they wouldn’t want us in their homes,” said Durant, a city health ...Read more

CHICAGO — Out on his farm in Dundee Township, Cliff McConville sees geese landing in the fields where his turkeys and chickens graze. It’s a sight that often unnerves poultry producers, as migratory waterfowl carry and spread a highly infectious strain of bird flu that has been resurging in the United States for the last three years.

So far...Read more

CHICAGO — Out on his farm in Dundee Township, Cliff McConville sees geese landing in the fields where his turkeys and chickens graze. It’s a sight that often unnerves poultry producers, as migratory waterfowl carry and spread a highly infectious strain of bird flu that has been resurging in the United States for the last three years.

So far...Read more

Antimicrobial Awareness Week, Nov. 18–24, serves as a global call to action to address antimicrobial resistance (AMR) — a growing public health concern that occurs when bacteria, viruses, fungi and parasites stop responding to the drugs designed to be effective against them.

This resistance makes infections harder to treat and increases ...Read more

Removing the most dire warning from hormonal therapies to treat menopause is likely the right call, women’s health experts say, but exuberance for the treatments could be getting ahead of the evidence.

Since 2003, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration required a “black box” warning — reserved for the most-serious side effects — on ...Read more

For years, the two patients had come to the Penn Memory Center at the University of Pennsylvania, where doctors and researchers follow people with cognitive impairment as they age, as well as a group with normal cognition.

Both patients, a man and a woman, had agreed to donate their brains after they died for further research. “An amazing ...Read more

A 47-year-old man from New Jersey died within hours of eating a hamburger at a barbecue in the summer of 2024.

He had no major medical problems before, nor did his autopsy find a cause of death.

But several months later, researchers at the University of Virginia pieced together a diagnosis: severe anaphylaxis linked to alpha-gal syndrome. It ...Read more

Ethiopia confirmed its first outbreak of Marburg virus disease after sending samples from a cluster of suspected cases of viral hemorrhagic fever for testing earlier this week.

The virus is the same strain reported in previous outbreaks in other East African nations, the World Health Organization said late Friday. Nine cases, including health ...Read more

NEW YORK — The Adams administration is planning to resign the city’s non-police mental health response team program, or B-HEARD, shifting it from the purview of the FDNY.

Under the changes announced by City Hall, NYC Health + Hospitals, which currently operates the program with FDNY, would entirely run the program.

“This new model for B-...Read more

Sen. John Fetterman was hospitalized Thursday after suffering injuries to his face in a fall due to a serious heart condition, ventricular fibrillation. This life-threatening condition is the 56-year-old’s latest health issue in recent years, following a 2022 stroke on the campaign trail that nearly killed him.

Like atrial fibrillation, which...Read more

Health officials say a person in the state of Washington has a presumed case of bird flu virus and they do not know how the person was infected.

Epidemiologists and virologists worry that avian flu could become a pandemic if allowed to spread and mutate. The virus circulating in dairy cattle in North America is one mutation away from being able...Read more

I remember the knot in my stomach when I had to tell one of my best workers at Miramar Group that we might not be able to keep offering affordable health coverage. He’s been with me for years — reliable, hardworking, with two kids. The look on his face said everything: Without decent health insurance, his family is one accident away from ...Read more

PHILADELPHIA -- Bracken Babula starts patient visits these days by closing the exam room door, and asking if they mind him recording their conversation. He hits a button on his mobile phone, checks that it is recording, and sits back in his seat to listen.

In the past, the Jefferson Health primary care doctor would have spent the visit ...Read more

Generative AI could save hundreds of thousands of lives, make health care affordable for every American, and let clinicians spend more time with their patients. But this won’t happen unless our nation embraces the opportunities this technology makes possible.

The need for swift and bold action has never been greater. With average medical ...Read more

SEATTLE — A Grays Harbor County resident has tested preliminarily positive for avian influenza in the first human case recorded in Washington state this year.

The resident, an older adult with underlying health conditions, was hospitalized in early November with a high fever, confusion and respiratory distress, the state Department of Health ...Read more