Health

San Francisco News

Customizing mRNA is easy, and that’s what makes it the next frontier for personalized medicine − a molecular biologist explains

Angie Hilliker, University of Richmond While using mRNA as medicine is new, mRNA has been inside you for your entire life. The cells in your body create mRNAs that serve as instructions to make specific proteins you need to function. Researchers can create new mRNAs to correct those instructions when they aren’t working. I am a molecular biologist who studies how cells control their mRNAs to make the proteins they need, a basic question of how life works at the cellular level. While most scientists studying mRNAs are not creating new drugs, this fundamental understanding of how mRNA works laid

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How do pacemakers and defibrillators work? A cardiologist explains how they interact with the electrical system of the heart

Virginia Singla, University of Pittsburgh Your heart’s job is to keep your pulse steady to pump blood throughout your body. Sometimes your heart rate is slower when you’re relaxing, and sometimes it’s faster when you’re exercising or stressed. If your heart’s ability to keep the beat starts to go awry, cardiac electrophysiologists like me look for outside help from an implantable device. There are two common implantable devices for the heart: artificial pacemakers and defibrillators. Artificial pacemakers keep blood and oxygen flowing during times of stress. Defibrillators are devices that detect dangerously fast heart rates and deliver shocks like those

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Who is still getting HIV in America? Medication is only half the fight – homing in on disparities can help get care to those who need it most

Angel Algarin, Arizona State University As the globe marks another World AIDS Day on Dec. 1, it’s crucial to both acknowledge the significant strides made in the global battle against HIV and recognize the persistent challenges that remain. While the United States had seen a slow decline in the overall number of new HIV infections from 2017 to 2021, a closer look at the data reveals persistent disparities largely borne by LGBTQ people and communities of color. As a social epidemiologist who proudly identifies as a gay Latino, I have a vested interest both personally and professionally in understanding and

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Texas is suing Planned Parenthood for $1.8B over $10M in allegedly fraudulent services it rendered – a health care economist explains what’s going on

Graham Gardner, Texas Christian University Planned Parenthood no longer provides abortions in Texas, Louisiana and the other 10 states that have essentially banned abortion since the Supreme Court handed down its Dobbs v. Jackson decision in June 2022. But the nonprofit is still providing other services for patients in those places, including cancer screening, contraception and the treatment of HIV and sexually transmitted infections. And Texas hasn’t given up on its long-running quest to force the group, which provides reproductive health care in its nearly 600 U.S. clinics, to stop operating within its borders. Alongside an anonymous whistleblower identified as

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How worried should we be about the pneumonia outbreak in China?

C Raina MacIntyre, UNSW Sydney; Ashley Quigley, UNSW Sydney; Haley Stone, UNSW Sydney, and Rebecca Dawson, UNSW Sydney Reports of a surge in pneumonia-like illness primarily affecting children in northern China have captured our attention. The last time we heard about a mysterious respiratory outbreak leading to overcrowding in hospitals was the beginning of the COVID pandemic, so it’s not entirely surprising this has caused some alarm. On November 22 the World Health Organization requested information from China about this surge. Chinese health authorities have since said the outbreak is due to a number of respiratory pathogens. So what are

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FDA’s latest warnings about eye drop contamination put consumers on edge − a team of infectious disease experts explain the risks

Alexander Sundermann, University of Pittsburgh and Daria Van Tyne, University of Pittsburgh The Food and Drug Administration issued a warning in late October 2023 urging consumers to avoid purchasing and to immediately stop using 26 over-the-counter eye drop products because of risk of eye infection that could result in partial vision loss or even blindness. More products were soon added to the list, and a few others have been voluntarily recalled. No cases of eye infection from the products have been reported as of mid-November 2023. It’s just the latest in a series of warnings and recalls related to bacterial

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Brains have a remarkable ability to rewire themselves following injury − a concussion specialist explains the science behind rehabilitation and recovery

Hilary A. Diefenbach, University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus High-profile sports like football and soccer have brought greater attention in recent years to concussions – the mildest form of traumatic brain injury. Yet people often do not realize how common concussions are in everyday life, and seldom does the public hear about what happens in the aftermath of concussions – how long the road to recovery can be and what supports healing. Concussions are important to understand, not only for recovery, but also for the insights that the science of recovery can bring to brain health. I am a speech

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Pollution from coal power plants contributes to far more deaths than scientists realized, study shows

Lucas Henneman, George Mason University Air pollution particles from coal-fired power plants are more harmful to human health than many experts realized, and it’s more than twice as likely to contribute to premature deaths as air pollution particles from other sources, new research demonstrates. In the study, published in the journal Science, colleagues and I mapped how U.S. coal power plant emissions traveled through the atmosphere, then linked each power plant’s emissions with death records of Americans over 65 years old on Medicare. Our results suggest that air pollutants released from coal power plants were associated with nearly half a

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How do viruses get into cells? Their infection tactics determine whether they can jump species or set off a pandemic

Peter Kasson, University of Virginia COVID-19, flu, mpox, noroviral diarrhea: How do the viruses that cause these diseases actually infect you? Viruses cannot replicate on their own, so they must infect cells in your body to make more copies of themselves. The life cycle of a virus can thus be roughly described as: get inside a cell, make more virus, get out, repeat. Getting inside a cell, or viral entry, is the part of the cycle that most vaccines target, as well as a key barrier for viruses jumping from one species to another. My lab and many others study

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