Health & Wellness

Infographic: History’s 11 deadliest plagues, from the Antonine epidemic in ancient Rome to COVID-19
The novel coronavirus took just a few months to sweep the globe. More than 2.5 million people around the world ...

Navigating advertising landmines on the path to egg freezing
More women in the UK than ever before are considering freezing their eggs, with the sharp rise in inquiries at ...

‘Spread like wildfire’: Conspiracy theories undermining COVID vaccine efforts spreading from Western countries to Africa
Anti-vaccine sentiment, often fed by rumours spread on social media, is already thriving in the West. But a similar dynamic ...

Taking Vitamin C or zinc to fight a cold or COVID? New study shows they have no effect
Over the years, scientific studies have not conclusively shown that [zinc or vitamin C] can help overcome illnesses such as ...

Is the flu more dangerous than COVID, as many people believe? Study shows risk of COVID death is 3.5 times higher
"We can now say definitively that COVID-19 is much more severe than seasonal influenza," said… Dr. Amol Verma, a researcher ...

Viewpoint: New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof again echoes scientifically dubious fears about falling sperm counts and ‘endocrine disrupting’ chemicals
The New York Times' Nicholas Kristof has shown an admirable commitment over the years towards highlighting under-reported stories. He fights ...

Why cousin marriages can wreak genetic havoc on children
The link between cousin marriages and genetic disorders in offspring is a growing problem in several countries ...

Viewpoint: Let them eat cheese: Evidence shows this ‘guilty pleasure’ doesn’t deserve its unhealthy reputation
A large body of research suggests that cheese’s reputation as a fattening, heart-imperiling food is undeserved. When it comes to ...

Hundreds of novel coronaviruses likely lurking in animal species around the world
[New research] identifies hundreds of animal species that may become infected with known coronaviruses, although many of these infections haven't ...

Long COVID: Some people may never fully recover
They hadn’t been hospitalized. They were relatively young and otherwise in good health, without the underlying conditions like obesity and ...

Reality dawning: COVID will alter how we live for years or decades to come
The ease with which the coronavirus spreads, the emergence of new strains and poor access to vaccines in large parts ...

COVID might be amplifying teenage suicide rates. Here’s how to help
Even during normal times, many mental health problems tend to emerge in adolescence, and young people in this group are ...

Viewpoint: An open economy by April? Why the US could reach COVID herd immunity by spring
[COVID] cases are down 77% over the past six weeks. If a medication slashed cases by 77%, we’d call it ...

Coffee reduces risk of heart failure? What are we to make of a new study based on artificial intelligence (AI)
When I was starting out in epidemiology in the early 1980’s I attended a lecture by Thomas Pearson, a cardiologist, ...

Video: Developing embryos show an immune response
Incredible new research has shown that long before the development of organs or specialized immune cells, this simple protective layer, ...

4.5 million Americans affected: Peanut allergies often don’t develop until adulthood, study shows
[A] report, believed to be the first to provide an estimate of peanut allergy in adults, suggests that at least ...

Infographic: How dangerous COVID mutant strains develop
Sometime in 2019, probably in China, SARS CoV-2 figured out a way to interact with a specific "spike" on the ...

‘Wait and see?’ 41% of Black women have reservations about COVID shots, 50% of African Americans don’t trust US healthcare system
The latest from the KFF COVID-19 Vaccine Monitor finds that Black men (45%) and women (41%) are more likely than ...

Catching COVID from food: A year’s worth of research dispels panic
When the COVID-19 pandemic began, not much was known about SARS-CoV-2 (the coronavirus) and its survival in food, on various materials ...

Can anything be done to counter anti-vaccination activists?
Recently, anti-vaxxers protests shut down the mass vaccination program underway at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles. In Israel, the global poster child ...

Viewpoint: Toxic masculinity vs. toxic femininity — An evolutionary view
History bears testimony to the danger of demonising groups of people based on their immutable characteristics. Not only did this ...

Politics and COVID: Why are Republicans more hesitant to get the vaccine?
Unfortunately, a partisan split on receiving a Covid-19 vaccine has reemerged and widened over the last few months. This partisan ...

25 years of GM crops: Biotechnology a blessing to many farmers, but not without costs
Brent Rendel, who started farming in the early 1990s, easily remembers how magical Roundup Ready crops seemed and the awe ...

New Zealand farmers experience 25% lower cancer rates than city dwellers, study shows, challenging misleading environmentalist claim they face higher pesticide cancer risks
The good news [in the 2020 New Zealand] State of Cancer report is that the overall incidence of cancer is ...

COVID vaccine hesitancy vs vaccine refusal? Many nursing home staff take a wait-and-see position
In North Carolina, the health secretary has said more than half of nursing home workers are declining the vaccine. A ...

GMOs and nutrition: Disease-resistant, biofortified cassava could boost Africa’s access to essential minerals
For the first time, an international team of scientists… have developed cassava displaying high-level resistance to cassava mosaic disease (CMD), ...

Reversing aging: We can turn back cognitive decline in mice. Will the same techniques work on humans?
The ageing global population is the greatest challenge faced by 21st-century healthcare systems. Even COVID-19 is, in a sense, a ...

Top 10 biotech propagandizers: Who are the science deniers and snake oil peddlers undermining science in agriculture and medicine?
Anti-science beliefs are proliferating, particularly on the biotechnology and genetics front, covering a range of issues from vaccine denialism to ...