Public health

Public health

Shortages of medicine in Botswana forced me to declare a public health emergency last year. Patients went without treatment not because health workers failed them, but because the system did. For a nation committed to universal healthcare, free at the point of use, it was a moment of hard truth. Even outwardly strong public health systems can be fragile. As donor assistance bites across the continent, governments cannot afford to delay building resilience.

A potent neurotoxin capable of causing lifelong damage to the lungs, brain, skin and other organs, mercury is strictly regulated worldwide. Children, in particular, can suffer severe developmental impairment when exposed. A trace element that occurs naturally in rocks such as limestone, as well as in coal and crude oil, mercury remains locked underground for millions of years, largely entering the ecological cycle through human activity.

"As a father to three young children and as a physician who took an oath to do no harm, I failed to speak up, and I just want to thank President Trump for having more clarity on this," Dr. Ira Savetsky said Thursday on "Fox & Friends." His expression of regret comes just days after the Manhattan hospital pulled the plug on its youth transgender treatment program after the Trump administration threatened to pull federal funding over the controversial medical care.

The San Francisco Department of Public Health said in a news release that among the 1,261 students and staff at the high school, 219 people, or about 17%, tested positive for TB. Subsequently, 204 of those people had confirmed cases of latent TB. The number is a major increase from the 50 latent cases detected by the end of January as testing was ramping up among the school's students and staff.

The government, and health service leaders, must pay attention to the chaos inside Emergency Departments this winter, which are buckling under the pressure because of a failure to prepare for predictable surges in seasonal illnesses. That's the key takeaway from NHS England's latest stats on the pressures the Urgent and Emergency Care system is under in England, published today, according to the Royal College of Medicine (RCEM).

The truth, of course, is that anyone can contract HIV, given the right circumstance, and according to the Yale University Library's online exhibition " We Are Everywhere: Lesbians in the Archive," by 1991 roughly 40% of HIV-positive people and 12% of AIDS patients in the U.S. were women. But a combination of longstanding bias in the medical field and the perception of HIV/AIDS as a gay epidemic led to women being excluded from research studies and clinical trials.

A 20-year-old woman, listed in legal documents with the initials KGM, launched a lawsuit against social media giants YouTube, Meta (parent company of Instagram), TikTok, and Snapchat. The case alleges that these apps were designed to be as addictive as possible and that addiction from a young age spurred lasting mental health damage. Facebook founder and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg took the stand to answer questions at the trial this week. He denied that there was conclusive proof that social media created mental health challenges.

It affects nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord, causing loss of muscle control and getting worse over time. ALS causes nerve cells in the upper and lower parts of the body to stop working and die. Nerves no longer trigger specific muscles, eventually leading to paralysis. People with ALS may develop problems with mobility, speaking, swallowing and breathing.

The trial lawsuit against Meta and Google argues that Instagram and YouTube were designed to keep teens engaged at the expense of their mental health, prioritizing user engagement over the devastating human toll of social media addiction. This trial could decide whether social media companies can be sued for how their apps and algorithms are designed, not just for what users post.

Cold conditions with temperatures as low as 33 degrees expected. Colder temperatures as low as 27 degrees for elevations above 2500 feet. Cold conditions will be hazardous to sensitive populations such as unhoused individuals. Prolonged exposure to the cold conditions will lead to hypothermia for people, pets, and livestock. Cold conditions may damage or kill sensitive crops, plants, and vegetation if appropriate precautions are not taken, according to the NWS.

When Ph.D. student LaShae Rolle felt a pain in her chest, she didn't think much of it at first. A little soreness made sense: she was working hard in the gym, preparing to bench press nearly 300 pounds for a powerlifting competition. The pain came and went, but then Rolle noticed a lump in her breast, a textbook warning sign of breast cancer. It was a red flag she was deeply familiar with from her own studies on cancer prevention and treatment.

If you were excited about the Trader Joe's fried rice waiting for you in your freezer at home, we're sorry to burst your bubble, but a recall may mean it needs to be tossed pronto. This recall was just announced by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and Ajinomoto Foods North America, Inc., the manufacturer of the Trader Joe's product in question. According to the USDA recall notice, two products, including Trader Joe's Chicken Fried Rice, may be contaminated with glass.

Some experts have mischaracterized smoking fentanyl as "safer" than injecting, seeking to reduce risks among users. Narrowly considered, the statement is accurate, as inhalation avoids needle-sharing, reducing risks for HIV, hepatitis C, bacteremia, abscess formation, and infective endocarditis among users. However, there's no clinical-trial-level evidence (randomized trials with real patients) showing smoking illicit fentanyl is safer than injecting it. It isn't, and that conclusion is unsupported by toxicology, environmental exposure science, or emerging data.

New research has uncovered how Londoners reacted in real time to the Great Plague of 1665, revealing that people reshaped their daily lives around published death figures - using them to decide where to go, who to meet, and whether to remain in the city or flee. The study, from the University of Portsmouth, shows that weekly death reports, known as the Bills of Mortality, served as a practical guide to survival.

To some extent, Americans are talking about alcohol more than ever. We're having open conversations about the negative health impacts of drinking. People are consuming less booze overall and examining strategies to moderate, even as each drink packs more punch. There is one aspect of alcohol we're still not talking about: addiction, and, more precisely, the medical treatments available to combat it. What's even odder - your doctor may not know much about them, either.

The New South Wales premier, Chris Minns, on Thursday said the growing pressure on the public mental health system needed to be addressed, including by implementing recommendations from the Bondi Junction stabbings inquest. He said he was concerned about the security failing that led to patients to abscond and that there needs to be a full investigation into the circumstances relating to these patients.

"So whenever people think about hot weather, they always talk about the temperature," he says. "There's two issues with that. First of all, most people don't realise that the temperature is measured in the shade. So if you're in direct solar radiation, the amount of heat stress you're exposed to is much greater as it will stress your body out a lot more."

The federal agency tasked with regulating drugs in the United States has said it will review a flu vaccine application from the pharmaceutical giant Moderna, one week after it declined to do so in an unusual move. Moderna announced on Wednesday that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) had accepted a revised application seeking full approval for a new flu shot to be offered to patients between the ages of 50 and 64 and expedited approval for those over 65.

The cuts to foreign aid ordered by the United States government have wreaked havoc on the fight against hepatitis in Africa. Clinics dedicated to treating hepatitis B and C have been forced to close, thousands of aides who provided free diagnostic testing have been laid off, and medication supplies have been disrupted. The impact on the 72.5 million people in Africa living with hepatitis B and C

Currently there is no regulation over who can provide procedures that do not involve incisions. The committee said this had created a "wild west" market with procedures, including liquid breast enlargements, reportedly being done in Airbnbs, hotels rooms, garden sheds and public toilets. In early 2024, Sasha Dean, from Bedfordshire, was left in a coma after receiving a liquid BBL.

More than 10,000 people have enrolled in Nevada's new public-option health plans, which debuted last fall with the expectation that they would bring lower prices to the health insurance market. Those preliminary numbers from the open enrollment period that ended in January are less than a third of what state officials had projected. Nevada is the third state so far to launch a public option plan, along with Colorado and Washington state.

Hilary Hodge suffers from severe allergic asthma. But in 2012, she saw hope in biologic medication. There was one catch: She was living in the United States at the time, and biologics would cost her $36,000 a year. A few years later, she moved to Angers, France, with her husband. Across the pond, that same medical treatment was 12 times cheaper.

One major driver of these costs is hospital pricing abuse, which often goes unnoticed but is devastating to California's small business communities. Large hospital systems have used their market dominance to drive up the prices they charge commercial payers, often billing them more than three times what Medicare pays for the same care. Those inflated costs fall squarely on the shoulders of small businesses and working families through higher premiums and lower take-home pay.

Canada's worst school shooting happened on February 12 in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, a small western community of 2,000. Eight are dead. A community is in mourning. A nation paused to remember those killed, as a few days later, leaders of the five major political parties in Canada all came together to offer their collective support to the community. They, like the entire population of Tumbler Ridge, and many others across Canada, were bystanders to a senseless act of violence.

Scientists from the European ToxFree LIFE for All project tested commercially available headphones for 'endocrine-disrupting' chemicals. These compounds include the so-called 'forever chemicals' bisphenol A (BPA) and the similar bisphenol S (BPS), which mimic the effects of the sex hormone oestrogen inside our bodies, leading to the early onset of puberty in girls, feminisation of males, and cancer. Worryingly, despite well-reported biological effects, the researchers found that 'hazardous substances were detected in every product tested'.

February is a time to honor Black history, resilience, and progress. It is also a moment to confront an uncomfortable truth: in New York City, equity in health, family stability, and community well-being is still shaped by race and zip code. For too many Black families, structural inequities continue to limit access to care, not because of individual choices, but because of where people live and how our systems are designed.

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That we don't even know how many women taken their lives because of men's violence is to our society's shame and reflects how little women's lives matter. Every woman who ends her own life will have taken many other steps to try to end the abuse before she reaches that point. We need to stop letting women down and make sure there are adequate routes to safety.

"If you use drugs on our streets we will arrest you, but with this new resource we will also give those suffering from addiction a real chance to choose recovery," said San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie.