Health Advice
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Conflicting advice on COVID shots likely to ding already low vaccine rates, experts warn
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
Home visits are helping new moms get health care, support, and diapers in the weeks after they give birth
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
Mayo Clinic scientists create tool to predict Alzheimer's risk years before symptoms begin
ROCHESTER, Minn. — Mayo Clinic researchers have developed a new tool that can estimate a person's risk of developing memory and thinking problems associated with Alzheimer's disease years before symptoms appear. The research, published in The Lancet Neurology, builds on decades of data from the Mayo Clinic Study of Aging— one of the world's ...Read more
Bird flu cases are on the rise again, including 2 million turkeys. Will that affect your Thanksgiving dinner?
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
Bird flu cases are on the rise again, including 2 million turkeys. Will that affect your Thanksgiving dinner?
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
Understanding and preventing antimicrobial resistance
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
Menopause hormone therapy no longer has the FDA's most-dire warning. Now what?
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
What the air you breathe may be doing to your brain
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
New Jersey man is first documented death from tick-related red meat allergy
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 confirms first outbreak of Marburg virus after testing
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
Ahead of Mamdani taking office, Mayor Adams makes changes in NYC response to mental health calls
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's health issues, explained
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
Another person in US is hospitalized with bird flu. Officials don't know how they got it
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
Commentary: When health insurance tax credits disappear, so does my family's peace of mind
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
At some doctors' offices, AI is listening in the exam room
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
How generative AI could save 371,000 lives and slash US health care costs
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
Washington confirms first bird flu case in a resident this year
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
Penn and CHOP will test gene therapy for rare diseases with a new FDA trial protocol
Earlier this year, researchers at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and Penn created a first-of-its-kind drug customized to a unique genetic mutation to save an infant named Baby KJ from dying of a rare liver disorder.
KJ Muldoon’s doctors used CRISPR, the buzzy shorthand for a scientific tool that works like a find-and-replace command, to ...Read more
Bird flu slams seals and sea lions at the bottom of the world but spares Pacific Coast so far
For the last year and a half, Americans have watched and worried as H5N1 bird flu racked dairy herds and killed hundreds of millions of commercially raised chickens, turkeys and ducks.
But far less widely known is that the virus has devastated wildlife across the globe, killing millions of wild birds and mammals.
Few animals have been harder ...Read more
Farmers, barbers and GOP lawmakers grapple with the fate of ACA tax credits
John Cleveland is ready to pay a lot more for his health insurance next year.
He hasn’t forgotten the pile of hospital bills that awaited him after he had a seizure while tending to customers in his Austin, Texas, barbershop four years ago. Once doctors hurriedly removed the dangerous tumor growing on his brain, a weeklong hospital stay, ...Read more
Popular Stories
- Understanding and preventing antimicrobial resistance
- Bird flu cases are on the rise again, including 2 million turkeys. Will that affect your Thanksgiving dinner?
- New Jersey man is first documented death from tick-related red meat allergy
- What the air you breathe may be doing to your brain
- Mayo Clinic scientists create tool to predict Alzheimer's risk years before symptoms begin








