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.
The agency authorised emergency use of four veterinary products to prevent or treat New World screwworm infestations, acting on a 2025 declaration that the parasite poses a potential public-health emergency.
A new 30-day order under the Public Health Service Act continues suspending the entry of certain travellers recently in DR Congo, Uganda or South Sudan. It runs through 10 November; comments close 30 October.
The government is gathering evidence to build step-count and muscle-strengthening guidance into the Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans, a supplement to the 2018 edition. Written comments close 12 November 2026.
A final rule amends 80 FDA standards of identity so makers can replace some or all added salt with substitutes, part of a push to cut sodium tied to high blood pressure. It takes effect 14 December 2026.
A proposed rule would push several compliance dates under the 2024 trichloroethylene risk rule to 31 December 2027, giving processors and refrigerant makers more time to drop the solvent. Comments close 13 November.
A notice sets out how the agency intends to designate every US area for the 9.0 microgram 2024 fine-particle standard. Comments close 5 November; a court has ordered final designations by 6 February 2027.
A CMS and CDC proposed rule would codify pandemic-era remote review of digital lab data, allow digital images in gynaecologic cytology proficiency testing, and ease 2024 staffing rules. Comments close 7 December.
In preregistered trials of more than 90,000 patients, telling people an algorithm flagged them as high-risk lifted vaccination by a few points — and saying the algorithm was involved changed nothing.
RESOLVE randomised 880 treatment-naive, non-cirrhotic patients to a shorter sofosbuvir–velpatasvir course; cure rates were non-inferior to the 12-week standard, with implications for the cost of elimination programmes.
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 history of Norway's 1975 ban — one of the WHO's three 'best buys' against alcohol harm — traces how it survived courts, alcohol-free beer and social media, and why pressure to modernise it worries defenders.
A final action moves the Serious-area deadline for the Los Angeles-South Coast fine-particle area from December 2025 to December 2030, after California showed on-time attainment was impracticable. Effective 2 November.
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.
An interim final rule lets HHS freeze federal-marketplace registration for agents and brokers without a current plan-year agreement. CMS imposed the pause immediately; it runs until 1 February 2027.
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.
England's scarlet fever rate tripled after 2014 and a more toxigenic strep A lineage emerged, culminating in the deadly 2022 wave of invasive infections in children.
From January 2026 children in England are offered varicella vaccine as MMRV at 12 and 18 months. Pooled trial data put one dose near 81% effective against any chickenpox and 98% against severe disease.
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.
The agency is repealing the carbon-capture-based standards at the heart of the 2024 rule, saying compliance-cost savings outweigh the emission cuts. It takes effect on 16 November 2026.
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.
The US banned Red No. 3 in 2025 on a rat-specific cancer finding, not human data. The separate question — whether dyes affect children's behaviour — has better, and more unsettling, evidence.
A randomised trial put a number on how much misinformation lowers vaccination intent. A systematic review mapped how common it is. And inoculation studies show the skill of spotting it can be trained at scale.
Bangladesh was validated in 2023 as the first country to eliminate visceral leishmaniasis as a public health problem; India is nearing the same threshold, even as post-kala-azar skin cases climb.
A controlled study tied Scotland's minimum unit price to a 13.4% fall in deaths wholly caused by alcohol, largest in the most deprived areas. The effect on hospital admissions was smaller and not significant.
Too little iodine, especially in pregnancy, is the world's leading preventable cause of impaired brain development. Salt iodisation fixed most of it — but mild deficiency has crept back in some rich countries.
The childhood infection clears on its own in most children and has no specific antiviral. The evidence that matters is about the rare severe case — and where it happens.
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.
An injection at birth prevents a rare but often catastrophic bleeding disorder. Pooled surveillance data put late-onset bleeding at a median of 35 per 100,000 unprotected infants — and near zero after the shot.
Back sleeping, a firm flat surface, and room-sharing without bed-sharing are the core of the American Academy of Pediatrics' safe-sleep guidance. Roughly 3,500 US infants still die in sleep each year.
A few drops of blood taken in the first days of life are checked for dozens of rare but treatable disorders. The US panel has grown from 29 conditions to 35, and states adopt each one at very different speeds.
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.
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.
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 validated Bhutan's elimination of dog-transmitted human rabies, a disease almost always fatal once symptoms appear. The country has recorded zero such deaths since June 2023.
In a draft TSCA evaluation open for comment until 3 November, EPA preliminarily found the industrial solvent poses unreasonable risk to health. IARC classifies it as a Group 1 human carcinogen.
WHO validated Timor-Leste's elimination of trachoma, the last suspected focus in its South-East Asia Region. A 2025 survey of 4,949 young children found no transmission requiring intervention.
In 6,772 users of a US health system's AI triage tool, people engaged about twice as often when the AI matched what they already planned — raising a hard question about what the tools are steering.
JAMA published paired systematic reviews for the coming respiratory season. Both found vaccines reduced hospitalisation across age groups, with no new safety signals, though protection wanes over time.
No- and low-alcohol drinks are the fastest-growing category in the drinks trade, and one in six Americans now reaches for them. Whether they cut real drinking, or simply add to it, is barely studied.
Gavi is funding a standing mpox vaccine stockpile, coordinated by the same group that manages emergency supplies for cholera, yellow fever and Ebola, to avoid repeating the 2022 access gap.
Cochrane's 2024 review found low-certainty evidence of a small effect since fluoride toothpaste became widespread. The IQ meta-analysis that reopened the argument reported a null below 1.5 mg/L in one key analysis.
The share of US adults who drink has fallen to a record 54%, and for the first time a near-majority think a daily drink or two is bad for them. What is driving the sober-curious turn is less obvious than the trend.
Alternating alcoholic and soft drinks is the tactic of the moment, but it has never been tested. A brief conversation with a clinician has, and it cuts drinking by about two drinks a week.
Fatal disease burden fell 10% in two decades. Non-fatal burden — the toll of living with illness rather than dying from it — rose 7% over the same period. Mental health diagnoses in young adults nearly doubled.
The dye is being pulled under a 1958 law that bans any additive found to cause cancer in animals, at any dose. FDA's own review calls the rat finding of limited relevance to people.
Canada says two drinks a week. The US still says up to one or two a day. The gap is not a dispute about data — it is a dispute about where to draw a line on a continuous curve.
An analysis of nearly 139,000 Americans finds sedative misuse for sleep clusters among both the socially advantaged and the chronically unwell — pointing to two distinct drivers behind the same behavior.
Brown University researchers pooled 16 studies covering more than 150,000 people. The consistent finding is not detox — it is that most participants are still drinking less months later.
The 2024 amendments to the International Health Regulations took effect in September 2025, adding a 'pandemic emergency' tier. The United States formally rejected them.
In New Orleans, five-day heat waves raised domestic violence calls by 7%. Across 42 low- and middle-income countries, drought raised intimate partner violence risk — but its interaction with heat was negative.
The proposed Nutrition Info box would rate saturated fat, sodium and added sugars on the front of most packaged foods. The strongest real-world evidence is for blunter warning labels.
For the first time, Part D limits annual out-of-pocket drug spending to $2,000, with an option to pay it in monthly installments. Over a million heart patients alone were spending more.