The cigarette is the only legal consumer product that – when used as intended – causes the premature death of half of long-term users. To address this long-standing health threat, in late June 2022, the Biden-Harris administration announced a plan to move forward with a new standard for cigarettes and other combusted tobacco products that...
Kathryn H. Jacobsen, University of Richmond After news broke that the U.S. declared monkeypox to be a public health emergency, friends and family started asking me, an infectious disease epidemiologist, if monkeypox is about to begin causing widespread death and chaos. I assured them that the Aug. 4, 2022, public health emergency declaration is about...
Racial discrimination increases the risk for physical and mental illnesses, and Black women suffer from diseases at significantly higher rates than White women. How traumatic experiences such as discrimination increase vulnerability to illness remains the topic of intense research. Now, a new study shows that the experience of racial discrimination affects the microstructure of the brain, as...
As the strength or potency of cannabis products has increased internationally over the years, so have rates of people being treated for cannabis addiction, say the authors of a new study. Researchers from the Addiction and Mental Health Group at the University of Bath (UK) systematically analysed the relationship between the types of cannabis people use and...
Estimates suggest that more than 160 million women and adolescents who wanted to avoid pregnancy were not using contraceptives in 2019, despite significant progress in the use of modern contraceptives globally over the previous 50 years. Major disparities in contraceptive use still exist between regions – with more than half the women with unmet need...
We often hear the phrase ‘growing pains’ used by the general public to describe muscle or joint pain in young people and the term is also used by health professionals. However researchers have found there is no consistent medical definition of the condition behind a diagnosis. A broad review of medical literature by University of...
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...
