TimeMagazine 
HARTFORD, Conn. — Electronic cigarette maker Juul Labs will pay nearly $440 million to settle a two-year investigation by 33 states into the marketing of its high-nicotine vaping products, which have long been blamed for sparking a national surge in teen vaping. Connecticut Attorney General William Tong announced the deal Tuesday on behalf of the … Read more
Sometimes numbers tell a story, but sometimes they obscure one. According to the latest figures from the National Cancer Institute, the death rate for people diagnosed with bladder cancer has hardly budged during the past 30 years. But experts who treat the disease tell a different and more hopeful tale—and they credit a surge in … Read more
During the past 60 years, experts have documented a steep rise in the incidence of both ulcerative colitis and Crohn’s disease—the two medical conditions that make up most cases of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). For decades, this rise was confined to North America, Western Europe, and other industrialized nations. While there’s some evidence that the … Read more
How long does a work break need to be to make you feel better? Not very long at all, according to a new research review on “micro-breaks,” which the authors defined as a break of 10 minutes or less. The findings were published on Aug. 31 in the journal PLOS ONE. People who took breaks … Read more
In two votes, each 13-1, the immunization committee of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommended that Americans receive an Omicron-specific booster dose of the COVID-19 vaccine. Following a day-long discussion of the available data on Sept. 1, the panel recommended boosters from two manufacturers—Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, both of whom make mRNA-based … Read more
BEIJING — Chinese authorities have locked down Chengdu, a southwestern city of 21 million people, following a spike in COVID-19 cases. Residents have been ordered to stay home, and about 70% of the flights have been suspended to and from the city, which is a major transit hub in Sichuan province and a governmental and … Read more
The recent return of polio has hit like something of an epidemiological thunderclap. It was in 1979 that polio was officially declared eradicated in the U.S.—an early step in a multi-generational effort to wipe out the disease around the world. On July 21, however, the New York State Department of Health announced a case of … Read more
Americans’ life expectancy continued to slide in 2021. According to provisional data from the National Center for Health Statistics released on Aug. 31, life expectancy dropped by 0.9 years in 2021, leading to a total decrease of about 2.7 years between 2019 and 2021—the largest two-year decline in a century. Once again, COVID-19 was the … Read more
WASHINGTON — The U.S. on Wednesday authorized its first update to COVID-19 vaccines, booster doses that target today’s most common omicron strain. Shots could begin within days. The move by the Food and Drug Administration tweaks the recipe of shots made by Pfizer and rival Moderna that already have saved millions of lives. The hope … Read more
In the years following World War II, physicians in the U.S. and Europe noticed a surprising phenomenon: rates of heart attack and stroke fell dramatically in many places. Autopsies from this period also revealed reduced rates of atherosclerosis, which is a buildup of fatty arterial plaques that causes cardiovascular disease. At first, experts were perplexed. … Read more