Tag Archives: Medicine and Health

The Biden administration unveiled a proposal on Wednesday to cut the level of nicotine in cigarettes, a last-minute push on a plan that could meaningfully cut cancer rates nationwide and extend the lives of millions of cigarette smokers. If finalized, the proposal would require cigarette makers to significantly reduce the levels of nicotine in their products in an effort to …

The Food and Drug Administration on Tuesday proposed requiring new nutrition labels on the front of food and beverage products, a long-awaited move aimed at changing eating habits associated with soaring rates of obesity and diet-related illness that are responsible for a million deaths each year. The new label, a small black-and-white box similar to the Nutrition Facts box on …

“We will make Americans healthy again,” Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has declared. A political action committee that has promoted Mr. Kennedy, President-elect Donald J. Trump’s pick for health and human services secretary, says his movement is “igniting a health revolution in America.” But the word “again” presumes a time in the country’s past when Americans were in better health. Was …

The number of people in the United States who develop dementia each year will double over the next 35 years to about one million annually by 2060, a new study estimates, and the number of new cases per year among Black Americans will triple. The increase will primarily be due to the growing aging population, as many Americans are living …

Most American parents hardly give thought to polio beyond the instant their child is immunized against the disease. But there was a time in this country when polio paralyzed 20,000 people in a year, killing many of them. Vaccines turned the tide against the virus. Over the past decade, there has been only one case in the United States, related …

Water fluoridation is widely seen as one of the great public health achievements of the 20th century, credited with widely reducing tooth decay. But there has been growing controversy among scientists about whether fluoride may be linked to lower I.Q. scores in children. A comprehensive federal analysis of scores of previous studies, published this week in JAMA Pediatrics, has added …

Reports of a surge in cases of a respiratory virus in China have evoked dark echoes of the start of the Covid-19 pandemic almost exactly five years ago. But despite the surface similarities, this situation is very different, and far less worrisome, medical experts say. The Chinese cases are reported to be infections with human metapneumovirus, known to doctors as …

“This replicates and reinforces what we already know about sugar-sweetened beverages,” he said, “but the findings highlight their severe costs on health and productivity, especially in Africa and Latin America.” The study detailed intriguing patterns in the consumption of sugary drinks. For example, researchers found that men had modestly higher rates of soda consumption than women. Intake was higher among …