Weekly Health Quiz: Problem Foods, Flu and Covid Boosters
Test your knowledge of this week’s health news.
Test your knowledge of this week’s health news.
The pandemic dealt a serious setback to global efforts to immunize children against diseases like measles and polio, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported on Thursday, reducing worldwide coverage for some vaccines to levels not seen since more than a decade ago. The proportion of eligible children who received a polio vaccine fell…
MIS was first described in May 2020 in a letter published in the British journal The Lancet. A group of pediatricians described eight children, most of whom had some documented exposure to Covid-19, who came to a London hospital with unrelenting fevers, abdominal pain and diarrhea. Their blood pressures were extremely low, and testing showed…
Deciding which booster shot to get can feel a lot like a choose-your-own-adventure book — you’ve got three options, but don’t have a clue which one leads to the best outcome. The Food and Drug Administration recently authorized a mix-and-match booster shot strategy that now allows eligible adults to pick a booster from one of…
Federal regulators on Wednesday placed so-called black box warnings on breast implant packaging and told manufacturers to sell the devices only to health providers who review the potential risks with patients before surgery. Both the warnings and a new checklist that advises patients of the risks and side effects state that breast implants have been…
Some American adults with weakened immune systems who received a third dose of either the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna coronavirus vaccine authorized just for them will become eligible for a fourth shot as a booster next year, according to updated guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “In such situations, people who are moderately…
A large clinical trial has found that a common and inexpensive antidepressant lowered the odds that high-risk Covid-19 patients would be hospitalized. The results, published on Wednesday, could open the door to new guidelines for the drug’s use both in the United States and globally. The drug, fluvoxamine, has been safely prescribed for nearly 30…
Pregnant and breastfeeding women respond to the first dose of the coronavirus vaccines more slowly than other women, and mount a less potent defense against the virus, according to a new study. After the second dose, however, their response looks almost normal. The results, published this month in the journal Science Translational Medicine, suggest that…
In the intervening years, the types of prescription drugs available — and their prices — have changed. Revlimid is just one of several very expensive cancer drugs. About 1.5 million Medicare beneficiaries qualified for the catastrophic benefit in 2019, often running up thousands of dollars in bills. Many piece together financing by applying for foundation…
Merck has granted a royalty-free license for its promising Covid-19 pill to a United Nations-backed nonprofit in a deal that would allow the drug to be manufactured and sold cheaply in the poorest nations, where vaccines for the coronavirus are in devastatingly short supply. The agreement with the Medicines Patent Pool, an organization that works…