The Abbott Nutrition plant in Michigan that was shut down in February, sparking a widespread baby formula shortage crisis, had a leaking roof, water pooled on the floor and cracks in key production equipment that allowed bacteria to get in and persist, Dr. Robert Califf, the head of the Food and Drug Administration, told a […]

Finally, he agreed to see Dr. Richard Kaufman, their primary-care doctor. Kaufman was shocked by the man’s appearance, how the skin on his face hung in folds as if air had been let out of his cheeks. He’d lost nearly 40 pounds. He struggled to walk the few steps to the exam table. His right […]

Katie Beckett became one of several children — like Ryan White, who contracted H.I.V. through a blood transfusion, and Amber Tatro, who was born with spina bifida — whose health struggles in the 1980s made them human-interest celebrities, the subjects of nightly news coverage, sympathetic newspaper profiles and, ultimately, state and federal legislation. Katie and […]

Kristine Gebbie, a health policy expert who served as the nation’s first AIDS czar in the early 1990s, died on May 17 in Adelaide, Australia. She was 78. The cause was cancer, her daughter Eileen Gebbie said. After serving as the chief health officer for the states of Oregon and Washington and as a member […]

LONDON — With so many lives affected by cancer — in the United States alone, about 40 percent will receive a cancer diagnosis during their lives — it might be understandable if the disease were a common and compelling subject for museum shows. Despite the statistics, major exhibitions on cancer have been few and far […]

One chilly afternoon this past January, Kennedy took the microphone in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, before a crowd of maybe a few hundred people, some of whom carried signs reading, “We will not comply,” “Resist medical tyranny” (accompanied by a swastika) and “Land of the free you can’t mandate me.” A march […]

A severe shortage of baby formula has prompted the Federal Trade Commission to begin an inquiry into the industry’s consolidation and whether online resellers have taken advantage of desperate families struggling to find formula. “The F.T.C. is launching a public inquiry to identify the factors that contributed to the shortage or hampered our ability to […]

The birthrate in the United States increased slightly last year, ending what had been a consistent decline since 2014, the federal government reported on Tuesday. There were 3,659,289 births in 2021, an increase of about 46,000, or 1 percent, from 2020, when there was a sharp drop, according to provisional data released by the National […]

After the Sept. 11 attacks, the United States considered immunizing the entire population to protect against a terrorist attack using smallpox. “In the end, it was decided no, because of the negative consequences of vaccinating lots of people,” Bill Hanage, an epidemiologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. “Vaccine side effects are […]

“I understand they want all the data, but we know that the vaccine has been extremely effective at preventing severe disease in all age groups and is very safe,” said Dr. Tress Goodwin, who practices emergency pediatric medicine and is a mother to three-year-old twins in Washington, D.C. “It’s crazy to think that my kids […]