Author: Lance Garrison
It’s difficult to imagine a more contagious disease than whooping cough. For adolescents and adults, whooping cough, or pertussis, is a huge bother: cold symptoms, followed by a cough that takes weeks or months to resolve. Missed work and school are common. But for infants who haven’t yet been immunized, whooping cough can be serious — even life threatening.“Pertussis has caused about 30 deaths a year in the U.S. recently, almost all of them in children younger than three months old,” says Harry Keyserling, MD, professor of pediatric infectious disease at Emory University in Atlanta and a spokesman for the…
The tears and screaming, as upsetting as they are, are well worth the effort. A simple prick of the skin provides children with lifetime protection against diseases like chickenpox, meningitis, and hepatitis. With a schedule starting at birth and lasting into childhood, millions of kids in the United States are vaccinated each year, usually before school begins in the fall. Mary Glodé, MD, a professor of pediatrics and chief of the infectious diseases section at the University of Colorado School of Medicine and Children’s Hospital Colorado, explains which vaccines kids should be getting and when — starting with the first…
By the time your baby is a year old, they’ll need at least 16 vaccinations. The pain of each needle stick is fleeting for them, but the stress of seeing your baby cry can stick with you.Fear of shots shouldn’t steer you away from the recommended vaccination schedule. Vaccines are all that stand between your baby and dangerous childhood diseases like polio, diphtheria, measles, and rubella. “With each shot you get an increase in immunity,” says John W. Harrington, MD, professor of pediatrics at Eastern Virginia Medical School.And vaccines don’t have to hurt. “You can do a lot of different…
To the Editor:Re “Living Slow Deaths Behind Bars,” by Barbara Hanson Treen (guest essay, March 4):Ms. Treen’s excellent essay raises a number of important issues, to which I’d like to add one more: prison education. If more incarcerated individuals were able to receive more education while behind bars, recidivism rates would almost certainly drop, and, eventually, the average age of the prison population would, too.If more incarcerated men and women acquired at least some college credits while imprisoned, they would become, among other things, better candidates for earlier parole. Ms. Treen notes that parole boards typically “consider the transformation” applicants…
March 12, 2024 — It hurt to walk. So Dianne Rosenbluth saw a surgeon that friends recommended at the Duke University School of Medicine, had an X-ray, and found out she has osteoarthritis. Rosenbluth’s pain went away after a hip replacement, but she struggled to get her stamina back. She knew she had to “keep going and keep moving” to get better, including after a second hip replacement about 10 years ago. When the Duke Health & Fitness Center opened in nearby Durham, NC, the real estate agent, entrepreneur, and former teacher signed up. Rosenbluth, now 81, gets regular steroid injections in…
In June 1947, an unidentified flying object crashed northwest of Roswell, New Mexico. What precisely some probably superior being was doing piloting a probably very expensive spacecraft over a remote, though cynically notable portion of a state probably a good number of light years away from its home world is something this movie is about. [MUSIC PLAYING] Dear secret diary, hi. This is Bill again. Having a secret diary sure is fun. Anyway, I got lost today, which I realized is a lot like having amnesia. See, it’s like you’ll pass all these road signs and landmarks and all this…
Too many U.S. children and teens are not getting their full roster of vaccinations, says H. Cody Meissner, MD, director of pediatric infectious disease at Tufts Medical Center and a professor of pediatrics at Tufts University School of Medicine. Lack of information, socio-demographic disparities, and mistrust in science may all be reasons.The HPV (human papillomavirus) vaccine is one example of this. “HPV vaccination rates have gone up a few percentage points this past year but are still discouragingly low,” Meissner says. “There are about 31,000 cases of HPV-associated cancers in men and women each year in the U.S. The current…
As the physical toll of conflict mounts for Gazan civilians, so too does the emotional and psychological suffering. Yara M. Asi, an assistant professor at the University of Central Florida, believes that we need new language and ways to understand the depth of trauma currently faced by Palestinians in Gaza. In this audio essay, she argues that Western perspectives and diagnostics for mental health are insufficient for measuring and understanding the short- and long-term impact of sustained conflict on civilians.(A full transcript of this audio essay will be available within 24 hours of publication in the audio player above.)This episode…
“I heard there’s a microchip in the vaccine.” That’s what a surprising number of people tell Rupali Limaye, PhD, about why they don’t want to vaccinate their child.They might also say they’re worried that certain vaccines cause autism (a persistent myth that has no basis in fact) or that recommended vaccine schedules are dangerously fast, or that there are long-lasting side effects, or that the government is withholding vaccine information, or that infections aren’t dangerous, among other things, she says.The problem, says Limaye, who studies human behavior and the spread of disease at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health,…
Why did a U.F.O. allegedly crash in Roswell, N. M., of all places? In 1994, the filmmaker Bill Brown set out on a road trip to explore the 1947 incident.