New Yorkers, beware: If you come across a bird or animal that is sick, dead or behaving strangely, keep yourself and your pets at a safe distance. The bird flu virus, H5N1, is present in at least some small fraction of New York City birds, according to a new study. The finding is not entirely…
They’re in makeup, dental floss and menstrual products. They’re in nonstick pans and takeout food wrappers. Same with rain jackets and firefighting equipment, as well as pesticides and artificial turf on sports fields. They’re PFAS: a class of man-made chemicals called per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances. They are also called “forever chemicals” because the bonds in…
When Diane Scheig’s father, Bill, came home from work at the Mallinckrodt factory in St. Louis, he would strip down in their garage and hand his clothes to her mother to immediately wash, not daring to contaminate the house with the residue of his labors. Mr. Scheig, an ironworker who helped build the city’s famous…
Over the past decade, R.I.P. Medical Debt has grown from a tiny nonprofit group that received less than $3,000 in donations to a multimillion-dollar force in health care philanthropy. It has done so with a unique and simple strategy to tackling the enormous amounts that Americans owe hospitals: buying up old bills that would otherwise…
Large health insurers are working with a little-known data company to boost their profits, often at the expense of patients and doctors, a New York Times investigation found. A private-equity-backed firm called MultiPlan has helped drive down payments to medical providers and drive up patients’ bills, while earning billions of dollars in fees for itself…
A new article in the New England Journal of Medicine, one of the oldest and most esteemed publications for medical research, criticizes the journal for paying only “superficial and idiosyncratic attention” to the atrocities perpetrated in the name of medical science by the Nazis. The journal was “an outlier in its sporadic coverage of the…
Historically speaking, it’s not a bad time to be the liver of a teenager. Or the lungs. Regular use of alcohol, tobacco and drugs among high school students has been on a long downward trend. In 2023, 46 percent of seniors said that they’d had a drink in the year before being interviewed; that is…
Bird flu outbreaks among dairy cows in multiple states, and at least one infection in farmworker in Texas, have incited fears that the virus may be the next infectious threat to people. The influenza virus, called H5N1, is highly pathogenic, meaning it has the ability to cause severe disease and death. But while its spread…
If you’re 50 or older and reading this article, chances are you are wearing a pair of inexpensive reading glasses to correct your presbyopia, or farsightedness, the age-related decline in vision that makes it progressively more difficult to see fine print and tiny objects. Eventually, everyone gets the condition. But for nearly a billion people…
The federal government is required to “expeditiously” house migrant children who cross into the United States unlawfully, rather than allow them to remain in unsafe open-air sites along the border, a Federal District Court judge ruled Wednesday night. The decision, handed down by Judge Dolly M. Gee of the United States District Court of Central…
