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Chances are, if you aren’t older, chronically ill, or obese, you don’t need a forthcoming covid vaccine to stay out of the hospital. But it probably wouldn’t hurt.
Republicans in Congress have proposed substantial cuts to the budget of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, taking aim at one of former President Donald Trump’s major health programs: a push to end the HIV epidemic in the U.S.
An estimated 32% of adults in Logan County, West Virginia, have been diagnosed with depression, the highest rate in the United States, according to a recent CDC report.
Unsafe sleep environments are among the main reasons accidental suffocation or strangulation is a hard-to-solve public health problem.
Anti-vaccine tech entrepreneur Steve Kirsch, whose wild assertions have been repeatedly debunked, wrongly attributes deaths following vaccination to the vaccines themselves. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which runs the database, calls that inaccurate and irresponsible.
Mandy Cohen, the new director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, earned praise for her leadership and communication as the face of North Carolina’s response to covid-19. People in the state’s most vulnerable communities tell a more complicated story.
Chagas disease, caused by a parasite, affects people primarily in rural Latin America. But an estimated 300,000 residents of the U.S. have the disease, which can cause serious heart problems. Patient advocates call for much more aggressive efforts to fight it.
In early 2020, U.S. public health labs received covid-19 tests from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that were flawed, as a result of poor design and contamination. Now the CDC is overhauling its lab operations, but efforts to be better prepared for future threats won’t be easy, observers say.
FDA Commissioner Robert Califf has called misinformation one of the deadliest killers in the United States. As the FDA tries to fight that scourge, it sometimes stumbles.
Amid a years-long rise in maternal mortality rates in the United States, Idaho lawmakers decided to disband a committee created to investigate pregnancy-related deaths.
Citing the recent debt ceiling deal, the CDC is trimming its funding to child vaccination programs that focus on communities vulnerable to disease outbreaks. The cuts come despite data showing the percentage of children getting vaccinated has dropped in recent years.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director presided over one of the most tumultuous times in the agency’s history, struggling to regain public trust after it was revealed that Trump officials intervened in its pandemic response.
The pandemic gave federal officials expanded power to access crucial data about the spread of covid-19, but that authority will change when the public health emergency sunsets in May. That, along with the end of popular covid trackers, will make it harder for policymakers and the public to keep an eye on covid and other threats.
The federal government’s ambitious plan to end the HIV epidemic, launched in 2019, has generated new ways to reach at-risk populations in targeted communities across the South. But health officials, advocates, and people living with HIV worry significant headwinds will keep the program from reaching its goals.
Advocates for improving rural health pushed for the CDC to extend its rural health focus by creating an Office of Rural Health. They hope the agency will commit to rural health research and provide analyses that lead to good public health policies for rural communities.
In November, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released new guidelines for prescribing opioids for pain, allowing physicians more flexibility. But doctors, patients, and advocates wonder if the updated standards will be too little, too late to help chronic pain patients in a country still focused on fighting the ongoing opioid crisis.
Bills being considered by Montana lawmakers would allow people to refuse routine vaccinations based on their conscience, along with setting new rules for schools, courts, and businesses.
Responding to covid has taken so much attention and energy that some public health workers believe it pushed tuberculosis off people’s radar.
Since 2006, federal officials have been charged with setting up a network to let various parts of the U.S. health system share information during emergencies. It still hasn’t been built or even planned, even after the communication and data-sharing failures put on display during the pandemic.
The Vaccines for Children program, which buys more than half the pediatric vaccines in the U.S., may not cover the RSV shot for babies because it’s not technically a vaccine.
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