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Ten years ago, Washington, D.C., was on the verge of a public health disaster: It had the highest reported rates of HIV in the country. And in a city of 588,000, 1,333 people tested positive for HIV in 2007 alone. By the time they were tested, most had full-blown AIDS.Back then, city officials acknowledged that they didn’t have a complete picture of the problem. But they estimated that as many as one in 20 residents were infected with the disease, rivaling rates in sub-Saharan Africa. (Wiltz, 7/21)

CAR-T is having a moment. The Food and Drug Administration looks poised to approve the first hot-wired white blood cell treatment from Novartis, promising to change the lives of patients with a particularly deadly form of cancer and usher in an entirely new definition of the word “drug.” But scientists around the world are hardly standing pat in the glow of this success. Instead, they’re toiling to discover, refine, and re-invent cellular therapies for cancer in hopes of treating more tumor types, improving safety, and pushing the still-nascent field forward. Some of the most promising applications of the technology remain on the horizon — though plenty of challenges stand in the way. (Garde, 7/21)

Asmall Australian biotech has drawn big-name backers — including swimming superstar Michael Phelps — to its audacious goal: to develop a quick, cheap, and objective way to diagnose an array of mental illnesses. The tool would be a stunning breakthrough in the field of mental health —  if it works. And there’s the rub. Researchers have been trying for decades to find reliable biomarkers for mental illness — that is, tangible biological clues that conclusively indicate whether a person has a particular psychiatric disease. Effort after effort has failed, leaving doctors to diagnose such conditions mostly on the basis of screening checklists and conversations with their patients. (Keshavan, 7/21)

A report out Thursday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention about homicides and women provides some disturbing numbers about just how common this is. Homicide is the fifth leading cause of death for women ages 18 to 44. In 2015 alone, 3,519 women and girls were killed. More than half of these killings were perpetrated by current or former boyfriends, husbands or other intimate partners. (Cha, 7/20)

A large study published in the British Journal of Clinical Pharmacology found that certain antibiotics taken during pregnancy may increase the risk for birth defects. Canadian researchers followed 139,938 mothers of babies born in Quebec from 1998 to 2008, tracking their antibiotic use in the first trimester, and their babies’ birth defects through the first year of life. (Bakalar, 7/20)

Temporary tattoos aren’t just for style anymore. Scientists have developed a new wearable sensor that looks and feels like a henna tattoo but can monitor electrical muscle activity and body temperature, too. (Pattani, 7/20)

In a fitness-crazed land of spin classes and CrossFit gyms, Octavia Zahrt found it can be tough to feel as though you're doing enough. "When I was in school in London, I felt really good about my activity. Then I moved to Stanford, and everyone around me seems to be so active and going to the gym every day," she says. "In the San Francisco Bay Area, it's like 75 percent of people walk around here wearing exercise clothes all day, every day, all the time, and just looking really fit." (Chen, 7/20)

Albert Yee said the coffee is everywhere you look in the densely packed vendor stalls along avenues in Malaysian cities: an instant mix with a natural ingredient similar to what's found in Viagra that helps men with erectile dysfunction. And he wanted a piece of the action. "There are whole streets of it, like tequila in Mexico," Yee told The Washington Post by phone Thursday, describing how his one-man import business outside of Dallas is now at the center of a nationwide voluntary recall coordinated by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. (Horton, 7/20)

Tobacco companies want U.S. regulators to bless smokeless tobacco as a safer alternative to smoking, as cigarette consumption falls. In its campaign, Big Tobacco has unusual supporters: some public-health advocates. (Maloney, 7/21)

Clyde Boyce has been hospitalized 14 times in the past four years. Boyce, 61, survived two strokes and five operations to unblock arteries around his heart, including three procedures in which doctors propped open his blood vessels with stents. He takes 18 pills a day and gets injections every two weeks with a powerful drug to lower cholesterol. (Szabo, 7/20)

Working long hours may increase the risk for atrial fibrillation, or irregular heartbeats that can lead to serious cardiovascular complications, a new study in the European Heart Journal found. Lengthy work hours have been shown in several previous studies to increase the risk for cardiovascular disease. (Bakalar, 7/20)

UNOS data he presented this month show that in 2016, a third of those on the waiting list (31,830 people) were African American, and just over a third of transplant recipients (4,284) were African American.  The rates at which other racial groups were wait-listed and transplanted were also even. There still aren’t enough kidneys for those in need. But the system no longer unintentionally works against blacks as it did in the 1990s, when UNOS data show they made up more than a third of the wait inglist, but got only about a quarter of kidney transplants. (McCullough, 7/20)

Philadelphia, like most major cities, has a team that regularly reviews the most tragic events many of us can imagine: the deaths of children. The goal is to look for any patterns that might help prevent these deaths, and the circumstances that allowed them to occur. A recent report from the city’s Department of Public Health shows that we still have a long way to go, specifically when it comes to the number of infants who die at what should be a safe time, when they are put to sleep. (Taylor, 7/20)

Half of the mothers who lived in the neighborhoods wracked by the civil unrest that followed the death of Freddie Gray in 2015 became so stressed by the circumstances that they suffered from insomnia, loss of appetite and other depressive symptoms, according to new research by the University of Maryland School of Medicine. While the mothers weren’t tested to see if they fit the clinical definition of depression, the researchers said the results found that the sight of burning buildings, looting, and the constant blue lights from police cars was enough to have a major emotional impact in neighborhoods located in the six ZIP codes where the brunt of the unrest took place. (McDaniels, 7/20)

It’s shark season — primarily on cable TV. As the decades-long tradition of “Shark Week” approaches, you can expect once again to hear of “serial killer” sharks, attacks near major coastal cities, and menacing, massive shark swarms. But, as you probably also know, shark attacks are incredibly unlikely. You’re 75 times more likely to be killed by lightening than by a shark. On average, one person dies of a shark attack every other year in the United States. (Wosen, 7/21)

Physicians, researchers, activists and legislators across the U.S. are working to understand why preeclampsia is rising faster than other chronic conditions and prevent it. ...And according to Dr. Anupam B. Jena, internal medicine physician and professor at Harvard Medical School, and his colleagues, preeclampisia increased “from 2.4% of pregnancies in 1980 to 3.8% of pregnancies in 2010.” (Cheatham, 7/20)