Approximately a million people in the U.S. are living with HIV and up to 15 percent may not even know they are infected. In Februrary, the U.S. Department of Health and Humans Services announced a new initiative, Ending the HIV Epidemic: A Plan for America, to reduce new infections by 75 percent in the next five years and by 90 percent in the next ten years, averting more than 250,000 HIV infections in that span.

With a tricky disease like multiple sclerosis, where symptoms and MRI testing results can look like other conditions, such as stroke, migraines and vitamin B12 deficiency, it's common to be misdiagnosed with other things first. A new analysis of patients diagnosed with multiple sclerosis before being referred to two major Los Angeles medical centers flipped the script; it found that 18 percent didn't have the autoimmune disease at all.  

The results showed that nearly 18 percent of patients diagnosed with multiple sclerosis before being referred to two major Los Angeles medical centers for treatment actually had been misdiagnosed with the autoimmune disease. The patients spent an average of four years being treated for MS before receiving a correct diagnosis.

Canine leishmaniosis is a potentially fatal infection caused by the parasite Leishmania infantum, carried by the female sand fly and transmitted in its bite. It is zoonotic, so can be passed on to people but dogs have been known to pick up the infection after being bitten or wounded by another infected dog.

That's rare, and in the UK cases to-date have only been associated with blood transfusion, breeding programs, or overseas travel but a 3 year old neutered male shih tzu cross, which had been with its owner since a puppy and had none of the known risk factors for infection, was recently diagnosed with leishmaniosis in Hertfordshire.

Blood pressure and stroke risk increase steadily with sedentary lifestyle, obesity and of course the biggest risk is age. Many want to optimize their time living to prevent debilitating injuries and epidemiologists are happy to find a statistical correlation for everything; that is why some embrace supplements, some embrace organic food, and some embrace alcohol use.

For a recent paper, researchers examined monthly data on U.S. background checks for gun purchases and permits from November 1998 through April 2016, looking for purchasing trends after shootings during that time. 

When media coverage highlighted shootings, they found there were increases in handgun purchases. Only after high-fatality shootings were there decreases. The authors segmented results by the shooter’s race/ethnicity, the region where the shooting occurred, if a shooting was school related, fatalities, if it was a handgun or rifle, automatic or semiautomatic, the extent of media coverage level, and state political affiliation.

Ageism, discrimination against the elderly, has been reported in The Lancet Public Health journal as a problem for 25 percent of older people in England. And that is not truly old people, even those in their 50s face it. The repercussions are not just emotional, the study links the discrimination to worse health outcomes.