Category: Health

Making a movie about the Mattel company’s doll Barbie is all very nice, but the firm has been criticized for “stealth marketing” after giving away free Barbie and Ken dolls to British schools as part of a program to teach empathy to children, according to an investigation published by the BMJ.  Investigative journalist Hristio Boytchev […]

European drug safety officials opened an investigation recently regarding Ozempic after patients receiving the popular weight-loss injections reported thoughts of suicide or self-harm. On July 10, the European Medicines Agency (EMA) told Reuters it was investigating negative side effects of the popular drug, which is generally intended to treat diabetes after Iceland’s health regulator reported […]

When mothers suffer hardship as children or during their pregnancies when they grow up, the bacterial composition of their toddler’s gut microbiome undergoes harmful changes, according to an international research team headed by psychologists at the University of California at Los Angels. It was previously understood that in rodents, prenatal stress affects microbiomes into adulthood, […]

Organic food without pesticides, hormones, fertilizers, herbicides, antibiotics, artificial chemicals, and genetically modified organisms is regarded by many as being better for human health and better for biodiversity than conventional farming. Yet the activity of bats declines as farms make the transition to organic agriculture, according to new research on insect-eating bats at citrus orchards […]

A groundbreaking study conducted by infectious diseases scientists at the University of Pittsburg has uncovered a potential breakthrough in HIV/AIDS research. The study, published in the journal JCI Insight, suggests that restoring and improving gut health could be the key to slowing HIV progression to AIDS. The research, performed with simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV), challenged […]

Depression, a widespread and debilitating condition affecting millions worldwide, has long puzzled researchers with its complex and varied manifestations. As current treatments prove ineffective for up to 30% of patients, the need for deeper insights into depression’s underlying mechanisms and novel therapeutic approaches becomes increasingly urgent. A study conducted by the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience […]

These days there are fewer and fewer cases of COVID. In fact, I rarely hear of people getting this virus. Nonetheless, the emotional fallout is far from over.  The following study focuses on consequences of COVID restrictions, which include social anxiety. Reuben Kindred and Glen W. Bates, in a comprehensive and systematic global review of […]

Nine children and teens have died in drowning accidents since the beginning of 2023 – 109 during the last five years. This is a 21% increase in children’s drowning cases compared to the previous five years (2013 to 2017), according to the voluntary organization Beterem, Safe Kids-Israel.  Led by the World Health Organization (WHO), World […]

Norway and Finland face record outbreaks of bird flu this year which have killed thousands of seagulls and other species, put livestock at risk and restricted travel in some areas, officials said. Avian influenza, commonly called bird flu, has circulated throughout Europe in recent years, leading to a cull in May and June of millions […]

In a recently published study, researchers followed more than ten million American soldiers over twenty years and discovered that infection with the Epstein-Barr virus almost always precedes the onset of multiple sclerosis. So how does it happen? Multiple sclerosis is an inflammatory autoimmune disease in which the immune system attacks the sheath of nerve cell […]