Federal prosecutors have charged hundreds of people with allegedly defrauding the US government’s health care system out of a combined $2 billion. And many of the charged are doctors who are also being accused of aiding the opioid crisis by illegally prescribing more than 13 million doses of powerful, addictive…
The death toll of the US opioid crisis has been seriously lowballed, suggests a new study published Wednesday in Public Health Reports. It found that many states have failed to identify fatal drug overdoses specifically caused by opioid use over the past two decades. Since 1999, there might have been as many as 70,000…
Nearly 30 workers at an e-cigarette plant in Salem, Massachusetts were hospitalized following a mysterious incident.
The wide assortment of flavorings used to spice up your vaping experience could be damaging your cardiovascular system, suggests new research released Thursday. The study, published in the journal of Arteriosclerosis, Thrombosis, and Vascular Biology, found that several common e-cigarette flavorings can directly harm…
On Tuesday, the National Institutes of Health revealed its new plan to tackle the opioid crisis, which it dubbed the Helping to End Addiction Long-term, or HEAL, initiative. Among the ideas presented are research programs devoted to better understanding chronic pain, developing new non-opioid painkillers and addiction…
The annual rate of death by suicide has steadily risen in the US since the turn of the millennium, according to a new report released this week by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In many cases, those who died had not been diagnosed with any mental health condition—though the data does not specify…
It’s no secret that opioids kill more Americans annually than ever before. But a new study published Friday in JAMA Network Open highlights just how devastating the crisis has been to certain age groups. In 2016, it found, opioid overdoses were responsible for a fifth of all deaths among people in their mid-20s to…
As anyone who’s made a habit of ordering late-night delivery well knows, these meals typically aren’t too healthy. And when it comes to heaping amounts of salt in these foods, there’s perhaps no greater culprit than Chinese takeout. But a new study published Wednesday in Public Health Reports details a strategy that…
Certain aspects of a neighborhood, including its ethnic diversity and the availability of public transit, are associated with better reported well-being among residents, according to a study published Wednesday in PLOS One.
An ongoing outbreak of Ebola in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) in Africa has become much more worrying, the World Health Organization (WHO) reported Thursday. While previous cases of the often fatal viral disease had been found in rural areas during this most recent outbreak, the first urban case of Ebola…
The World Health Organization has announced a comprehensive plan to eliminate industrially produced trans-fatty acids from the global food supply by 2023. It’s a good idea—but the five-year plan may be overly ambitious.
A new study published Thursday in the New England Journal of Medicine reveals that it took more than $40 million over a 15-month period to screen nearly every blood donation sent to the American Red Cross for the mosquitoborne Zika virus. The report found that the massive effort—which went into effect following Zika…
State laws that mandate universal background checks for buying guns and ammunition may save young lives, suggests new research presented this week at the annual meeting of the Pediatric Academic Societies. The study found that states with stricter gun laws had lower rates of gun-related deaths among children compared…
Amidst the worsening opioid crisis—which killed more than 42,000 Americans in 2016 and even shortened US life expectancy—the federal head of public health has come out with a plea to the public: Learn how to use naloxone, the nasal spray that can reverse an opioid overdose, and carry around as much of it as you can.
It’s a sentence that just about sums up 2018 so far: Illinois is dealing with an outbreak of synthetic weed that makes its users bleed from their eyes and ears.
A new study published Monday in the New England Journal of Medicine offers a clear reminder that you can get a lot of good done by meeting people where they are, rather than where you’d like them to be. It found that a health program organized through barbershops was very effective at helping non-Hispanic black men…
Gun advocates often argue that guns are only dangerous to the public when wielded by amateurs, criminals, and the mentally ill. But a study this week in the New England Journal of Medicine suggests that people are a little bit safer from guns when tens of thousands of experienced gun owners pack up for the annual…
The specter that is America’s opioid crisis claimed a record high number of lives—more than 40,000—this past year, a new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has found. And the collective destruction of the epidemic has helped lower the nation’s life expectancy for the second time in two years.
Since the earliest days of mobile phones, a small but steady contingent of environmental activists, conspiracy-inclined folks, and some scientists have warned about the hidden damage they could be causing to our bodies, due to the radio frequency energy cellphones use to communicate with cell towers. They fear that…
The scale of the opioid crisis gripping the United States is hard to fathom. Since 2000, lethal overdoses from opioid use have tripled, and the problem is so widespread Centers for Disease Control researchers have concluded it is dragging down the national life expectancy. Though President Donald Trump has declared…
