Plants have directly contributed to the development of important drugs. The antimalarial treatment artemisinin, pain medication morphine, and cancer chemotherapy taxol are just three examples of drugs derived from plants. Africa is endowed with up to 45,000 plant species – about 25% of the world’s plant genetic resources. More than 5,000 plant species from this...
Forget covid-19, monkeypox, and other viruses for the moment and consider another threat troubling infectious disease specialists: common urinary tract infections, or UTIs, that lead to emergency room visits and even hospitalizations because of the failure of oral antibiotics. There’s no Operation Warp Speed charging to rescue us from the germs that cause these infections,...
For centuries, people have been using mindfulness meditation to try to relieve their pain, but neuroscientists have only recently been able to test if and how this actually works. In the latest of these efforts, researchers at University of California San Diego School of Medicine measured the effects of mindfulness on pain perception and brain...
Sugar-sweetened beverages are a known contributor to several health issues, including poor diet quality, weight gain and diabetes. While several studies have shown that taxing sweetened beverages significantly reduces purchasing, questions have been raised about whether the taxes place a greater economic burden on lower-income households. New research from the University of Washington, published June 2...
Led by Ziyad Ben Taleb, assistant professor of public health in the College of Nursing and Health Innovation and director of UTA’s Nicotine and Tobacco Research Laboratory (NTRL), the team will study how the size of a hookah device—also known as a water pipe—impacts its user’s health. It’s an area of research that Ben Taleb says is...
Smoking traditional or non-combustible cigarettes while wearing a surgical mask results in a two-fold rise in exhaled carbon monoxide and impaired blood vessel function compared to non-mask periods. That’s the finding of research published today in the European Journal of Preventive Cardiology, a journal of the ESC.1 “The study suggests that smoking any tobacco product has become...
Casey Malish had just pulled into an intersection in the 2nd Ward when a woman with tattoos and pinkish hair unexpectedly hopped into the back seat of his gray Mazda. He handles outreach for the Houston Harm Reduction Alliance, a nonprofit that helps drug users like her stay alive. The woman, Desiree Hess, had arranged...
Several months ago, a lab technologist at Barnes-Jewish Hospital mixed the blood components of two people: Alphonso Harried, who needed a kidney, and Pat Holterman-Hommes, who hoped to give him one. The goal was to see whether Harried’s body would instantly see Holterman-Hommes’ organ as a major threat and attack it before surgeons could finish...
Many U.S. schools were in dire need of upgrades — burdened by leaking pipes, mold, and antiquated heating systems — long before the covid-19 pandemic drew attention to the importance of indoor ventilation in reducing the spread of infectious disease. The average U.S. school building is 50 years old, and many schools date back more...
A Mass General-led team of public health modelers and substance use experts has developed a dynamic model based on national data from 1999 to 2020 that tracks the evolution of the opioid crisis for public policy analysis and development The tool, known as SOURCE, factors in the interconnecting stages of opioid use, from initiation to...
