Worldwide healthcare access and quality improved remarkably from 2000-2016 but there are unsurprising disparities between wealthy and poor countries - and countries like the United States which showed high quality but varying levels of access before the federal government took control of medical access with the controversial Obamacare law passed by Democrats.

Diagnoses of Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) skyrocketed in the 1990s, leading to concern that teachers wanted all kids to be automatons in classrooms and too many older parents were concerned about kids just being kids.

Pharmaceutical industry marketing of opioid products to physicians through non-research payments, which can include speaking fees and meals, was associated with greater opioid prescribing in a recent JAMA Internal Medicine article.

There is no existing cure for the common cold. The reason is simple: it is caused by a family of viruses with hundreds of variants, making it nearly impossible to become immune to or vaccinate against all of them. On top of that, the viruses evolve rapidly, meaning they can quickly gain resistance to drugs.

But there may be some new hope. A paper in Nature Chemistry discusses a new molecule, IMP-1088, that dual inhibits human N-myristoyltransferases NMT1 and NMT2 protein. Viruses 'hijack' NMT from human cells to construct the protein 'shell', or capsid, which protects the virus genome.

The litigation group Earthjustice, the sue-and-settle arm of Sierra Club, has joined other controversial environmental trial lawyer groups, such as Center for Biological Diversity, Environmental Defense Fund, Natural Resources Defense Council, and Union of Concerned Scientists, in a lawsuit to try and force EPA to keep Obama-era standards that environmental lawyers helped write. The now discarded additional regulations would have further limited carbon dioxide emissions from cars and light trucks for the model years 2022-25.

American government-funded science likes to declare wars. War on cancer, war on obesity, during the Obama administration there were seven different "Manhattan Projects" related to science and health. It connotes action, it makes the public feel like something important is happening with taxpayer money, revolutionary, instead of being iterative and slow.

Plants are more practical. They developed an evolutionary strategy to "tolerate" rather than "resist" infection to maintain health.  And that may be the roadmap for tuberculosis.