Health

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman on Monday, for their discoveries that led to the development of effective vaccines against Covid-19. Together, Dr. Karikó and Dr. Weissman, who met over a copy machine at the University of Pennsylvania in 1998, transformed vaccine technology. Seven years later, they published a surprising finding about messenger RNA, also known as mRNA, which provides instructions to cells to make proteins.When mRNA was introduced to cells, the molecules were so delicate that the cells instantly destroyed it. But the scientists found that they could avert that outcome by slightly modifying the mRNA. When they added the altered mRNA to cells, it could briefly prompt cells to make any protein they chose.Up to that point...

Winning a Nobel Prize can be a life-changing event. The winners are thrust onto a world stage, and for many scientists the recognition represents the pinnacle of their careers.But what is the effect of winning such a high-profile prize on science?John Ioannidis, an epidemiologist at Stanford University, wants to find out. Awards like the Nobel Prize are “a major reputational tool,” he said, but he questions “whether they really help scientists become more productive and more impactful.”In August, a team of researchers led by Dr. Ioannidis published a study in the journal Royal Society Open Science that attempted to quantify whether major awards push science forward. Using publication and citation patterns for scientists who won a Nobel Prize or a MacArthur Fellowship — the so-called genius...

The world spends at least $22 billion every year to kill mosquitoes that spread malaria, dengue and other devastating diseases.That money buys billions of liters of insecticides, millions of kilograms of larvicides and 75 million insecticide-treated bed nets. Hundreds of millions more dollars are poured into research each year on new ways to kill mosquitoes.But as quickly as humans invent new ways to control them, the insects evolve ways to resist.What if we left mosquitoes alone? What if we focused instead on fixing the things that make people vulnerable to getting bitten?The area around the town of Ifakara has one of the highest malaria rates in the world. The Ifakara Health Institute, a tropical disease research center, has been studying ways to fight the illness for more than a half ce...

Gabrielle Glaze felt scolded and shamed when she delivered her first son in a Birmingham, Ala., hospital, forced to observe strict rules about lying stationary through her contractions and enduring countless cervical checks from “total strangers” who seemed disappointed by her body’s progress.So when Ms. Glaze, 33, gave birth to a second son in a birthing center in April, surrounded by a team of midwives who said they would let her body lead the way, it seemed as if her previous labor experience had finally been redeemed.Ms. Glaze found herself telling every woman she knew about Oasis Family Birthing Center in Birmingham, which was run by an obstetrician and midwives — many of them Black, like her — and encouraged patients through an unhurried, uninterrupted, natural labor process. She sai...

It has never been easy for Mary Cole to support herself and the 19-year-old grandson who lives with her in Bristol, Va., on her monthly $914 Supplemental Security Income check.But it’s getting harder. “I’ve been struggling a lot,” Ms. Cole said.Because benefits counselors at her local agency on aging have helped her apply for several kinds of public assistance, she pays only $158 in rent for her apartment in a subsidized Section 8 building.A federal program helps Ms. Cole, 69, with heating costs. The state underwrites her Medicare premiums, and a Medicare savings program allows her to fill prescriptions for heart disease, hypertension, pulmonary disease and diabetes.But benefits that increased in the early years of the coronavirus pandemic have been rolled back since the federal government...

The Food and Drug Administration said on Friday that it was moving to close what has widely been viewed as a loophole allowing certain lab tests — like those that determine the profile of a tumor or the genetic health of a fetus — to bypass review with virtually no tracking or oversight.The agency proposed a rule that would bring the tests under its regulatory authority, requiring laboratories conducting them to provide data on test accuracy. Hundreds of tests on the market have very little oversight and may be misleading to the public and patients seeking to learn whether they have Lyme disease, Alzheimer’s or will develop cancer.The proliferation of these tests “leaves Americans vulnerable to making important health care choices based on potentially faulty or inaccurate test results,” Dr...

More than half a million Medicaid recipients diagnosed with opioid use disorder did not receive medication to treat it in 2021, according to a new report released Friday by the inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services.The report, which examined the use of addiction treatments that almost all Medicaid programs are now required to cover, also found major disparities in medication rates across states, ages and racial groups. It said the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, an agency of the Health and Human Services Department, should work to close the gaps.“Medicaid is uniquely positioned to achieve these goals given that the program is estimated to cover almost 40 percent of nonelderly adults with opioid use disorder,” the report said.The half-million people ...

Along hundreds of miles of Lake Victoria’s shoreline in Kenya, a squadron of young scientists and an army of volunteers are waging an all-out war on a creature that threatens the health of more people than any other on earth: the mosquito.They are testing new insecticides and ingenious new ways to deliver them. They are peering in windows at night, watching for the mosquitoes that home in on sleeping people. They are collecting blood — from babies, from moto-taxi drivers, from goat herders and from their goats — to track the parasites the mosquitoes carry.But Eric Ochomo, the entomologist leading this effort on the front lines of global public health, stood recently in the swampy grass, laptop in hand, and acknowledged a grim reality: “It seems as though the mosquitoes are winning.”Less th...

The narrow wooden benches in the student health clinic at Dire Dawa University in Ethiopia’s second-largest city began to fill up in March last year: feverish students slumped against their friends, cradling aching heads in their hands.Helen Asaminew, the presiding nurse, was baffled. The students had the hallmark symptoms of malaria. But people didn’t get malaria in cities, and the students hadn’t traveled anywhere. It was the dry season. There was no malaria for hundreds of miles.Yet when Ms. Asaminew had their blood tested, the telltale ring-shaped parasite signaling malaria turned up in most of the samples. By April, one out of every two students living in the male dormitories had the disease, 1,300 cases in all.The crowded clinic was the starting point of a medical mystery that forewa...

On a warm day in early July, Ed Houlihan guided kayakers on a four-mile trip on Cape Cod from Popponesset Bay up the Mashpee River to a freshwater pond. It was three hours of paddling round trip, but afterward Mr. Houlihan, 83, felt no worse for wear — at first.Five days later, his left shin was red and sore, his body was aching, and he had fever and chills. Doctors diagnosed him with a Shewanella algae infection, a bacterium that thrives in brackish water.“Everyone worries about sharks in the water, and what got me was this tiny micro-organism,” Mr. Houlihan said.Water-borne pathogens like S. algae appear to be turning up more often in the Northeast. Another serious infection, the flesh-eating bacterium Vibrio vulnificus, killed three people in the New York area this summer. The bacterium...