For how we live.
A surveillance analysis of WHO data from January 2024 to February 2026 tracks the clade Ib emergency from declaration to its end, and finds reported spread continued after the emergency was formally lifted.
A Global Burden of Disease analysis finds the share of female breast-cancer deaths tied to high fasting plasma glucose rose from 1990 to 2023 and is projected to keep rising — but the design cannot prove causation.
Pooling 19 studies, researchers found all-cause mortality raised about 1.7-fold in people with ADHD, with suicide and injury deaths most elevated — while those on ADHD medication had lower all-cause mortality.
In 7,186 Korean adults followed up to 20 years, people flagged by fasting glucose, glucose tolerance and HbA1c all at once had a 15.3-fold higher risk of type 2 diabetes than normal controls.
A CDC field report documents the territory's largest dengue wave in over a decade, driven almost entirely by DENV-2, with one death — the first dengue-associated death there since 2005.
An Israeli records study of 181,000 adults found people now diagnosed are older and sicker, but start with better glucose and cholesterol, and far more leave the clinic on SGLT2 or GLP-1 drugs.
From 300 million laboratory tests, an Israeli team reconstructs trajectories and finds bone, liver, kidney, hormone and lipid markers shift abruptly at the final menstrual period — changes starting a decade earlier.
In 4,299 people with type 1 diabetes and 17,196 matched controls, the death rate was 131 vs 35 per 100,000 person-years. The excess risk was far larger in women, though absolute mortality was higher in men.
A national surveillance study found 415 children under 15 among Sierra Leone's 2024–2025 clade IIb mpox cases — three died, three-quarters needed hospital care, and household contact was the top documented exposure.
A Global Burden of Disease analysis found early-neonatal mortality in Kazakhstan dropped about 33% from 2010 to 2023 — yet boys kept dying at higher rates than girls, a gap that only recently began to close.
A nationwide study of 624,713 first births found quadrivalent HPV vaccination before pregnancy associated with modestly lower odds of preterm birth and growth restriction, strongest among women vaccinated youngest.
Nearly a third of 68 sampled cases carried the mutation that blocks first-line antibiotics — and the resistant strain hit infants under six months hardest, during an outbreak that reached 4,976 cases and 76 deaths.
A Korean cohort of 1.37 million women found more dementia after hypertensive pregnancies. The association did not survive adjustment for the vascular and metabolic conditions that followed.
Falling cervical cancer rates after HPV vaccination are well known. A 2026 analysis of mortality data goes further: among women vaccinated at 12–13 with ~90% coverage, no deaths were recorded against about 23 expected.
In Scottish hospital data, RSV was recorded about 2.3 times as often as human metapneumovirus, but patients admitted with either virus were similarly ill — and the analysis was funded by a maker of RSV products.
A Global Burden of Disease 2023 analysis of 31 countries finds the burden climbing, peaking in early adolescence and heavier in women, with population growth the single biggest driver.
Surveillance across seven countries detected Shigella by PCR in 20.0% of diarrhoea episodes in toddlers, and found ciprofloxacin resistance reaching 37.2% — a warning for a disease with no licensed vaccine.
National surveillance recorded 60,826 cases in Japan by July 2025 — about 15 times the previous year's 4054 — concentrated in school-age children, while four other countries had already peaked and declined.
A new MMWR comparison of five Ebola outbreaks since 2007 shows the Bundibugyo epidemic in Congo outran West Africa and the 2018 DRC outbreak at the same point, with 2,606 deaths by day 100.
A Global Burden of Disease 2023 analysis counts 241 million users worldwide, concentrated in south Asia, with a rising burden of stroke and oral cancer even as prevalence has barely moved.
An IARC worldwide incidence analysis puts the infection-attributable share at 12%, led by H pylori and HPV, with eastern Asia carrying the heaviest load and most of the toll preventable.
The PURE study measured airflow obstruction in adults across 25 countries and found most cases had never been labelled, with the largest undiagnosed share in lower-income settings.
A national cohort of 3,584,203 people found that 96.4% of those re-tested still had a viral load below 1000 copies per mL a year later — the threshold at which HIV is not transmitted sexually.
A government-funded test-negative study put effectiveness at 86% against emergency visits and 88% against intensive care, though the smallest subgroups carried wide confidence intervals.
WHO's 25 September update logs 1,133 more confirmed cases and 532 more deaths since 11 September, and two new health zones — one bordering South Sudan — widen the outbreak's reach.
A fine tremor everyone has — worsened by caffeine, stress, tiredness or some drugs — is the usual cause. Essential tremor is the commonest tremor disorder; a shake at rest is the one that points elsewhere.
Housing is a health exposure. The mortality data on homelessness are among the starkest in medicine — and a large share of the deaths are from causes health care can treat.
A 43-year meta-analysis found loneliness in young adults rising by about half a standard deviation — while its own authors call the word 'epidemic' exaggerated. The pandemic added a small further bump.
As blood stem cells age, mutant clones take over. By the eighth decade this shows up in about one person in ten — and it tracks with higher mortality and heart disease.
Analysing 32,294 viral sequences from 16,428 people, Swiss researchers found 23 fast-growing clusters drove a third of recent transmission growth — evidence molecular surveillance could target the remaining chains.
An observational study across four DR Congo outbreak sites estimates that a third of positive mpox PCR results reflect environmental viral DNA, not infection — and that a stricter cutoff fixes most of it.
With influenza, virus shedding starts within a day of infection, peaks on day two and lasts about five days on average — often before you feel your worst. Nearly a quarter of infections cause one symptom or none at all.
If a choking person can still cough or speak, let them cough. If they cannot, the guideline sequence is five back blows then five abdominal thrusts, repeated — and new data suggests bystander action changes who survives.
The evidence that recessions and job loss kill is stronger than it looks. Three landmark studies quantify the mortality signal — and where it stops being causal.
US mortality is roughly two-fold higher in Black men, but when care and treatment are equal — in the military health system and in trials — the stage-for-stage survival gap largely disappears.
Federal statistics put 18.3 million households short of food last year. A 57,404-person cohort links lower food security to higher premature mortality and years of lost life expectancy.
A harmonised meta-analysis of over a million adults found high sitting time raised mortality — but about 60 to 75 minutes a day of activity erased that risk. Being inactive, not the chair itself, did most of the damage.
The evidence-based first move for a burn is unglamorous: hold it under cool running water. A large registry study links proper cooling to fewer skin grafts and ICU admissions; ice and butter belong nowhere near it.
It is a surgical emergency in which a twisted cord cuts off the testicle's blood supply. Salvage rates fall from over 90% inside six hours to single digits after two days, so speed to surgery is the whole game.
A study of 3,932 athletes found cyclists had no worse erectile or urinary function than swimmers and runners. But heavy saddle time is tied to genital numbness, and men logging 5+ hours a week showed lower sperm counts.
Colder days track with more heart attacks in nationwide data, and the sharpest signal is the day after heavy snowfall — a rise seen in men but not women, pointing to the shovel as much as the temperature.
A double-blind trial gave 17,598 people pantoprazole or placebo for three years and tracked pneumonia, fractures, kidney disease and dementia. Only gut infections rose, and only modestly.
Two of the largest datasets — 6.5 million UK bank customers and a Swedish national registry — tie heavier gambling to financial and health decline, and gambling disorder to a fifteenfold suicide death rate.
A national analysis of 2020–2025 surveillance found a case fatality rate of 15.5% that never improved, a season tied to heat and rainfall, and a falling share of suspected cases ever confirmed.
Large cohorts link higher optimism and a stronger sense of purpose to longer life and lower mortality, in a dose-dependent way. But the studies are observational, and no trial has proved the causal arrow.
US national survey data put lifetime binge eating disorder at 2 percent of men and anorexia at 0.3 percent. Men are underdiagnosed, and the male-specific presentation often hides as gym dedication.
Meta-analyses of more than a million people find a U-shaped link between sleep duration and death, lowest around seven hours. But this is observational, and reverse causation is the hard part to rule out.
Studies going back decades find no link between habitual knuckle cracking and hand arthritis. One doctor cracked a single hand for a lifetime to prove it — and got arthritis in neither.
A modelling study of 93 household surveys corrects for the chronic underreporting that hides stillbirths, and finds steady but socially unequal declines in perinatal mortality since 1990.
WHO flagged a drifted A(H3N2) subclade K in December; the first 2025-2026 effectiveness data, from 1.4 million US veterans, put overall protection near 22% and protection against hospitalisation near 32%.
There is no established safe amount, and UK and US authorities advise not drinking at all. Heavy drinking clearly causes fetal alcohol harm; the data on light drinking are genuinely sparse, not reassuring.
Eligibility set by exact date of birth created a natural experiment. Vaccinated people had a 20% lower relative risk of dementia over seven years. It is one striking study, and it tested the older live vaccine.
Men are under 1% of breast-cancer cases, but they present older and at higher stage, and survival has improved more slowly than in women. Care is largely borrowed from female breast cancer.
In the largest pooled cohort studies, the lowest-risk amount of sleep sits closer to seven hours, and both too little and too much track higher mortality. But the curve is a warning sign, not a prescription.
The only FDA-approved drug for the penile-curvature disorder straightens the average man's bend only modestly more than placebo. Surgery is more definitive, and most oral remedies are unsupported.
The Sardinian 'Blue Zone' was a real, carefully validated finding. A separate line of work argues the world's longevity hotspots track missing birth records and old-age poverty — not diet.
A descriptive study using WHO modelled estimates for 2022 put current cigarette use between 1.7% in Ghana and 18.2% in Seychelles, with the male-female gap reaching 36.4 points in Lesotho.
The vaccines and antibody drugs that cut Ebola's death rate work against the Zaire species. None is approved for the Bundibugyo virus now driving the largest Ebola outbreak in Congo's history.
Registry and responder cohorts document persistent PTSD and depression, a symptom peak more than a decade after the attacks, and a burden that compounds with chronic physical illness.
Men die by suicide two to four times as often as women in most countries. The reasons implicate lower help-seeking and masculine norms — and the interventions tested so far have not been shown to reduce it.
Registries show a real but narrow signal: a few cancers, led by prostate and thyroid, run high in 9/11 responders, while overall cancer incidence sits at or below the rate expected.
A Danish study of 71,000 cases found the risk factors tied to a diagnosis weakened over a decade, pointing to changing diagnostic practice rather than falling thresholds of impairment.
US men die at higher rates than women at almost every age. In younger men the gap is driven by injuries, overdose and suicide; in older men by heart disease — with delayed help-seeking a recurring thread.
WHO's 10 September update records 963 more confirmed cases and 481 more deaths in the DRC since late August, with the case fatality ratio holding near 48%.
In half a million Chinese adults, higher exhaled carbon monoxide tracked with lower Parkinson's risk even among people who never smoked. It is an association, not a therapy.
Enlarged male breast gland tissue is common and usually benign. In a study of 19,640 young males, about three-quarters of cases were idiopathic and only 3.4% were linked to underlying disease.
It is the most common cancer in young men and incidence keeps climbing, but deaths are a small fraction of cases — and major guidelines advise against routine screening or self-exam in men without symptoms.
A Norwegian study of 204,663 children found no raised risk of autism or most neurodevelopmental disorders after maternal COVID in pregnancy — with one exception in the early pandemic.
A meta-analysis of 28 studies and 684,065 people links intimate partner violence to raised odds of neonatal, infant and under-5 death — the association strongest for sexual violence.
An interim report in NEJM Evidence links the parasitic outbreak to iceberg lettuce and one restaurant chain, with cases spread across most of the state.
Applied to 411,000 UK Biobank adults, the Edmonton staging system and the Lancet Commission's clinical-obesity model classified severe disease alike but diverged on who counts as early-stage.
In 2.5 million Swedish births followed to adulthood, mothers' early-pregnancy obesity was linked to a stepwise rise in offspring cardiovascular disease, though sibling analyses temper the size.
In 2,292 hip fractures across six cities in Nagano, snowfall raised the odds of admission — until the models adjusted for how cold it was, at which point the association disappeared.
National surveys show risk behaviours climbing among adults with diabetes since 2007, while a separate study finds noncommunicable-disease mortality nearly twice as high in the worst-affected province as in the best.
A study of 806 suspected cases found nearly a quarter were confirmed Crimean-Congo haemorrhagic fever, all the main risk factors tied to livestock handling — as warming expands the range of the ticks that carry it.
Comparing US adults vaccinated just before and just after the changeover from the live to the recombinant shingles vaccine, researchers found a 9% lower cardiovascular burden over seven years.
Hospital admissions for food anaphylaxis in the UK rose 5.7% a year for two decades while the case fatality rate fell. The treatment recommendations have almost no randomised evidence behind them.
The Global Burden of Disease estimates for anxiety disorders separate two things that public debate keeps merging: how many people have it, and how likely a given person is to. Diagnosis is a third question again.
A surveillance analysis of Sistan and Baluchestan finds confirmed and probable cases falling from a 2019 peak, with an 11% fatality rate and a clear winter clustering.
An analysis of a decade of surveillance data shows the system leans heavily on hospitals and misses cases in the community — the weakness that lets measles circulate undetected between outbreaks.
Cross-sectional studies from the country's south and east report about a third of respondents vaping, with attitudes — not knowledge — the factor most strongly linked to use.
A review pooling prevalence across the region ties the projection to modifiable risks that are unusually common there — smoking, inactivity, diabetes — layered on rapid ageing.
A cluster-randomised trial in Cúcuta coated water containers in 13,803 homes. Dengue incidence fell to 337 per 100,000 versus 528 in control clusters, at about US$2 per household a year.
Three surveillance networks put 2025/26 effectiveness between 22% and 45% against a drifted H3N2 virus. The figure is a comparison between vaccinated and unvaccinated people who all got tested.
A case-control study by MSF's Epicentre and WHO put NmCV-5's adjusted effectiveness at 92% against meningococcal meningitis after 2024 campaigns in Niger — on a small sample of 17 confirmed cases.
Two national studies settle the question the trials could not: in England, cancer rates fell 87% among those vaccinated at 12-13; in Sweden, the risk was cut by nearly two-thirds.
A harmonised meta-analysis of more than a million people found the association between sitting time and death disappeared in the most active quarter. In the least active, it did not disappear at all.
Tracking 3.6 million women over 24 years, researchers found women with endometriosis were nearly 3.5 times more likely to develop the condition before 40. Seventy percent of cases still have no identified cause.
A peer-reviewed account traces the mass screening and tsetse-fly control that cut gambiense sleeping sickness below one case per 10,000 in endemic areas — the threshold WHO validated in January 2025.
Maricopa County runs some of the most detailed heat mortality surveillance in the US. A distributed lag model applied to the same five years put the toll far higher — and the gap is the method, not a scandal.
A Swiss cohort was classified by WHO, NIH and EASO criteria at the same time. The share of people with obesity roughly doubled, and the overweight category shrank to fill the gap.
In 273,466 people with substance-related hospital admissions, psychosis was far more common after hallucinogen admissions, until adjustment for preexisting conditions erased the link.
A 23-year genetic-network analysis of 5,094 cases identified 107 molecular super-spreaders, mostly men aged 50-69, with 94.4% living within 2 km of major transport routes.
The nosebleed guideline first move is specific: firm, sustained pressure on the soft lower third of the nose for at least five minutes. Most settle this way; the treatments people escalate to have thin evidence.
An all-oral, bedaquiline-based programme treated 277 patients through six years of conflict in eastern Congo and reached 77.6% treatment success — above WHO's 75% mark — but mortality stayed at 13.4%.
An age-period-cohort analysis across five registries finds annual increases of 5.3% in Korea and 3.8% in Japan, against 1.6% among Japanese Americans and flat or falling rates in US White women.
The first federal survey to ask about psilocybin specifically finds 2.8% past-year use, concentrated among young, white, college-educated men. People with recent depression had 37% higher odds.
Women whose habits aligned with a favorable estrogen-metabolism pathway had up to 61% lower endometrial cancer risk. The score explains only a tenth of the variation it predicts.
The first independent population-representative mortality survey in the Gaza Strip estimates 75,200 violent deaths through early January 2025 — and finds fewer non-violent excess deaths than some models predicted.
A Swedish birth cohort of 2.76 million people found the cumulative male-to-female ratio for autism incidence had fallen to 1.2 by age 20 — and projects parity by 2024.
A Lancet study across 547,000 adults and 925 infectious diseases finds obesity raises the risk of severe infection across almost every pathogen type. The global estimate rests on modelling, not on the cohorts themselves.
A population study covering all 15 million residents of Ontario found the rate of new ADHD medication prescriptions accelerated sharply after 2019 — and shifted decisively toward adults.
A national registry analysis found the highest burden among 20-to-29-year-olds and a notable rise among girls aged 10 to 19, with rates concentrated in the Sierra region.
A meta-regression across 28 countries put pooled prevalence near 4-5% and standardised mortality ratios between 1.8 and 4.7, in a condition the Global Burden of Disease study does not count.
Among 1,000 adults in Mwanza, overnight oximetry found sleep apnea in 17% of people with HIV and 19% without. Excessive daytime sleepiness, oddly, was more common in those without HIV.
A 55-expert consensus sets out how to attribute health outcomes to climate change. Its sharpest recommendation is against the fraction-of-attributable-risk method that many studies still use.
Applying prevalence figures to UN population data yields 852 million adults with insomnia. Only 31 of 237 countries had a usable national estimate of their own.