An outbreak of meningococcal disease in Florida has caused at least 26 cases of the serious illness, an official from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Wednesday. Seven of the cases have been fatal, said Sam Crowe, a C.D.C. epidemiologist. The outbreak is primarily affecting men who have sex with men; at […]

Health authorities in Britain have declared a national incident after finding evidence suggesting local spread of poliovirus in London. No cases of polio have been identified so far, and the risk to the public is low. But health authorities urged anyone who is not fully immunized against poliovirus, particularly young children, to immediately seek vaccines. […]

The Food and Drug Administration is planning to require tobacco companies to slash the amount of nicotine in traditional cigarettes to make them less addictive and reduce the toll of smoking that claims 480,000 lives each year. The proposal, which could take years to go into effect, would put the United States at the forefront […]

“Overall, the people who’ve been coming through with Covid are much, much less sick than they were even this winter,” said Dr. Megan Ranney, an emergency physician at Brown University. “It feels like almost a different disease for folks, with the exception of people who are really old, who are unvaccinated or who are immunosuppressed.” […]

In the 1960s, while still working for the American Rehabilitation Foundation, Dr. Ellwood formed a health policy research group called Interstudy, which explored ways to apply business management techniques to improve health care and cut costs. It set up an H.M.O. that years later became United Health Group, now one of the nation’s largest health […]

As the Covid death rate worldwide has fallen to its lowest level since the early weeks of the pandemic in 2020, it may be tempting to conclude that the coronavirus is becoming irreversibly milder. That notion fits with a widespread belief that all viruses start off nasty and inevitably evolve to become gentler over time. […]

Along a bare torso and down a thigh, the sun glints through ocean waters and bathes coral and fish in aqueous light. On a lower leg, vivid frogs tense, as if preparing to jump from dewy leaves. A mischievous child with twinkling blue eyes stares out from an inner bicep. In his home studio in […]

It’s a moment many parents have anxiously awaited for months: Children younger than age 5 are now eligible for vaccination against the coronavirus, among the last Americans to qualify. Without access to vaccines, parents of young children have confronted nearly impossible choices since the pandemic began. Many children were kept from schools, family gatherings and […]

Scientific advisers to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention voted unanimously on Saturday to recommend Covid vaccines for children under age 5, the last group of Americans to qualify for the shots, except for infants younger than 6 months. The agency’s director, Dr. Rochelle P. Walensky, is expected to quickly endorse the decision. Parents […]

Something was wrong with the foxes. That was what callers to the Dane County Humane Society in Wisconsin kept saying in April, as they reported fox kits, or young foxes, behaving in strange ways: shaking, seizing or struggling to stand. The kits, which were often lethargic and wandering by themselves, also seemed unusually easy to […]