News Articles

The booster dose of either the BNT162b2 mRNA (Fosun-BioNTech, equivalent to Pfizer-BioNTech outside China) or CoronaVac (Sinovac) COVID-19 vaccine was correlated to a 90 percent reduction in death in people with multiple co-morbidities compared to 2 doses, according to a new study.

Reducing the risk of transfusion-transmitted HIV from blood donations is important for public health and the U.S. currently uses time-based deferrals to assess donor eligibility. Now the FDA is proposing individual risk-based questions to reduce the risk of transfusion-transmitted HIV similar to policies in place in countries like the United Kingdom and Canada.Blood donations are important and FDA believes the implementation of the proposed individual risk-based questions will not compromise the safety or availability of the blood supply. The new draft recommendations are based on data from other countries with similar HIV epidemiology that have instituted this approach, as well as ongoing surveillance of the U.S. blood supply.

Food is not medicine, anyone claiming it is medicine is selling you something, like a diet plan, but nutrients can impact cancer cells.How that applies consistently is unknown so a new tool hopes to create an exploratory method using mice. Mice don't translate well to humans, they are not little people, but they can exclude effects in humans and that has value also. 

Sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) is a diagnosis of exclusion, a general term for death during the first year of life that lacks an obvious cause. Though it is a leading cause of death, its etiology is complex and remains largely unknown so assumptions are things like sleeping in a dangerous position, a general failure during the critical development period, or an unknown underlying biological vulnerability.

Many parents say they are worried about the negative effects of screen time on children. Too much of anything can have negative effects, from books to music to TV, but the solution is to impose diversity so they eventually enjoy different activities.The screen time problem got even worse due to government lockdowns imposed during the COVID-19 pandemic. Rather than wear masks in a park, it generally led to more screen time and less outdoor time for children. 

Empathy is critical to having supportive conversations about mental health. But this skill can be tricky to learn, especially in the moment when a person is sharing something hard. 

Antibiotics are popular in America among everyone but pharmaceutical companies. Part of the reason is cultural; everyone wants antibiotics to be cheap, but want to be able to sue companies if anything new causes a side effect. Meanwhile, the government has doubled the cost and red tape to put anything on the market this century (COVID-19 vaccines and a few other products exempted) and research for new molecules is costly. That adds up to little interest.

The Abu Dhabi enirate is a religious dictatorship and may be tired of western countries noting that women may suffer from legalized domestic violence, among other contradictions in a state that says women are equal, because a new analysis says that the western world is sexist too. At least when it comes to how many female editors at science journals there are.Since scientific editors shape the content of academic journals and set standards for their fields, gender disparity can influence opportunities for women to publish in these journals, receive recognition for their research, and advance their careers.

Legal marijuana has meant a boost for government accountants, and ended the need for fake "medical" marijuana claims, but it is often still dangerous in both the short and long term.

California gives free medical care to a lot of people but that doesn't mean they are getting access. Many doctors won't accept new patients at all due to the increased number of patients, while an alarming number of offices ask what kind of insurance people have before declaring someone can't get an appointment for six months if it's California state insurance.

The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is funding basic research on non-genetic drugs that can temporarily enhance the human body’s ability to endure extreme cold exposure.The human body’s response to cold involves two biological processes known as thermogenesis. Shivering is something everyone has experienced, it raises your body temperature in a direct fashion, with movement. The second uses brown adipose tissue, brown fat, which regulates body temperature by breaking down blood sugar and other fat molecules  The first is physical and the second chemical, but the second happens first. It just doesn't generate as much heat.

Since 1975, stroke mortality plummeted from 88 to 31 per 100,0000 for women and 112 to 39 per 100,0000 for men, but since 2020 it has been creeping back up. Strokes haven't seen a huge resurgence yet because Baby Boomers, and soon Generation X, have the biggest risk for it like aging is for most diseases. For example, a 10 percent reduction in the fatality rate for 75-year-olds would more than offset a doubling of the fatality rate among 35-year-olds because strokes are 100 times more common in 75-year-olds. Yet that Millennials are seeing higher numbers than previous generations at their ages is a concern.