Category: Health

A prescription drug that helps Lore Wilkinson walk and talk despite a rare muscle disease cost her so little for more than a decade that she didn’t even use her insurance to pay for it. But now, her Medicare insurance is shelling out about $40,000 for a one-month supply of the drug, and she fears […]

All day and sometimes into the night, buses and vans pull up to three state-funded medical screening centers near California’s southern border with Mexico. Federal immigration officers unload migrants predominantly from Brazil, Cuba, Colombia, and Peru, most of whom await asylum hearings in the United States. Once inside, coordinators say, migrants are given face masks […]

Fred Clasen-Kelly Jimmy Dee Stout was serving time on drug charges when he got grim news early last year. Doctors told Stout, now 62, the sharp pain and congestion in his chest were caused by stage 4 lung cancer, a terminal condition. “I’m holding on, but I would like to die at home,” he told […]

The Medicare wars are back, and almost no one in Washington is surprised. This time it’s Democrats accusing Republicans of wanting to maim the very popular federal health program that covers 64 million seniors and people with disabilities. In the past, Republicans have successfully pinned Democrats as the threat to Medicare. Why do politicians persistently […]

The oil washed ashore every day, globs of tarlike ooze blighting sugar-white sand beaches. Rodney Boblitt’s job was to report it. A special agent for the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, he was assigned to patrol 14 miles of Panhandle beaches on an all-terrain vehicle, alerting cleanup crews to new slicks from the BP Deepwater […]

Curious Kids is a series for children of all ages. If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, send it to [email protected]. Were there already viruses on Earth when the first living cells appeared billions of years ago? – Aayush A., age 16, India How life on Earth started has puzzled scientists […]

The 39th Expert Review Committee (ERC) for Polio Eradication and Routine Immunization has expressed optimism that the Nigerian programme is on course to stop the transmission of the circulating Variant Polio Virus (cVPV2) with ‘impressive progress’ recorded. The ERC meets periodically to evaluate progress toward the attainment of a polio-free Nigeria. The monitoring body comprising […]

The African Development Bank Group (www.AfDB.org) and the Islamic Development Bank have signed a joint partnership action plan for the development of the pharmaceutical industry sector within their African member countries. The plan offers a new framework for strengthened cooperation and mutual development priorities, with a strong emphasis on boosting the continent’s health defense systems. […]

Senators are eying the growing shortage of health care workers in the United States as one of the few problems where there is room for bipartisan solutions, even in a deeply divided Congress gearing up for a presidential election cycle. The shortage that’s only worsened since the pandemic is a prescription for skyrocketing costs, suffering, […]

Mark Kreidler About four years ago, Dr. Gene Dorio sat on the ethics committee of a Southern California hospital whose administrators insisted they could decide whether to disconnect a ventilator from an unconscious patient — even though the man’s wife and adult children wanted to continue life support. The problem, Dorio told California lawmakers last […]