How to get through rest of ‘more severe’ flu season in 2026
Since October, at least 20 million Americans have gotten the flu, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports. That number includes at least 270,000 flu hospitalizations and 11,000 deaths, including 52 pediatric deaths this flu season. “That is higher, significantly higher, than the last few years,” says Dr. Tyler B. Evans, an infectious disease […]
Heatwave conditions likely to bring increase of flies and maggots
Intense heat is forecast for most of southern Australia as well as northern Western Australia from Wednesday, with severe to extreme heatwave warnings. The burst in temperatures is likely to bring with it an increase in unwanted visitors — flies and maggots. So why do they turn up with the heat, and are they problematic […]
Bad Air Is One of the Biggest Threats to Your Health. Here’s How to Protect Yourself
There’s something invisible that can put us in an early grave. And I’m not talking about sentient AI, but something much more ubiquitous and real. While AI doomers predict the existential risk that artificial intelligence poses to humanity, air pollution—specifically, ultrafine particulate matter, PM 2.5—has been an efficient killer for decades. Many people don’t realize […]
How to talk to strangers at a bar about Covid
This essay was adapted from Jess Steier’s newsletter, “Unbiased Science.” For the last few weeks of summer, my mom visited from Florida. It was amazing, as it always is, to have her here spending time with the family doing lots of things and nothing at all. Going to the lake with the kids, playing board […]
Symptoms, treatments and how to stay safe
A concerning outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease in New York City has led to several deaths and hundreds of infections this summer. In late July, an outbreak of the infection in Central Harlem was detected. Since then, six people have died and over 100 residents have been diagnosed with the disease in more than one zip […]
Culinary medicine pioneer David Eisenberg on food as means to health
To understand how David Eisenberg became one of America’s greatest champions of culinary medicine, it helps to know that his childhood is divided into a before and after. Before: He grew up amid neat rows of cream puffs and the warm smell of yeast, learning the alchemy of food at his father’s Viennese-Jewish Brooklyn bakery. […]
At AHRQ, cuts undermine federal research on how to improve health care
WASHINGTON — A small federal agency that studies how to improve the health care system has been rendered functionally “incapacitated” after much of its staff was laid off or retired, according to three people, including two former employees, who spoke with STAT. The loss of most of the workers at the Agency for Healthcare Research […]
How to become a trusted scientific messenger on social media
It’s a strange reality when more people recognize you from your videos on social media than from your peer-reviewed papers or “professional” work. During grad school, I could never have predicted that a casual one-minute video about immunology would rack up orders of magnitude more views in an hour than my published research papers would […]
How to Think About COVID-19 Vaccines in the Era of R.F.K., Jr.
On Tuesday, in a fifty-eight-second video posted on X, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the Secretary of Health and Human Services, made a remarkable announcement: under his watch, he said, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention would no longer advise healthy children and pregnant women to get vaccinated against COVID-19. For decades, the C.D.C. has […]
How to avoid measles, one of the world’s most contagious viruses
Measles immunisation rates are “suboptimal” in many parts of the US and Europe. ADVERTISEMENT Measles is raising concerns among public health experts after an unvaccinated child died in a US outbreak that has infected more than 150 people. Cases of the preventable virus are continuing to rise in the US state of Texas, but measles […]