By Johanna Eurich and Steve Heimel
The rate of suicide and homicide in the Kusilvak Census Area, located along the lower Yukon River in Alaska, more than doubled since 1980, a rate increase higher than anywhere else in the nation.
By Bruce Japsen
The cost of diabetes, heart disease and back pain are taking a greater toll on the U.S. economy, with these conditions and injuries dominating personal healthcare spending, authors of a new study say.
By Susan Brink
The number of new cancer cases grew worldwide to 17.5 million in 2015 from 13.1 million in 2005. The fastest growth is in some of the world's poorest countries, according to a report on the global burden of cancer in the December 3 journal JAMA Oncology.
Creating protective immunity against the early liver stage of malaria infection is feasible, but has been difficult to achieve in regions with high rates of malaria infection. Many current malaria vaccines target the pre-erythrocytic stage of infection in the liver, however in endemic regions, increased blood stage exposure is associated with decrease vaccine efficacy, challenging current malaria vaccine efforts.
By Keegan Hamilton
Drug-related deaths have surged in recent years amid America’s opioid epidemic, but a new study of U.S. mortality rates suggests the problem is even worse than previously thought due to widespread misreporting of cause of death by doctors.
By Tony Kirby
"The last person that I train, I want that training to be in something other than HIV", says Jared Baeten. Speaking to The Lancet Infectious Diseases from the HIV Research for Prevention Conference (HIVR4P) in Chicago, IL, where he brought a 12-strong team of his researchers, Baeten explains: “When that time comes, I want HIV to have been eliminated as public health threat, so we can focus on other diseases”.
By Dennis Thompson
What causes a person’s death depends in large part on where they spend their lives, concludes a new county-level analysis of U.S. mortality data.
Armed with this sort of information, county and city health departments can focus their efforts on the specific problems affecting their communities, said lead researcher Ali Mokdad, Professor of Global Health at the University of Washington.
By: Olga Khazan
For the first time since the 1990s, Americans are dying at a faster rate, and they’re dying younger. A pair of new studies suggest Americans are sicker than people in other rich countries, and in some states, progress on stemming the tide of basic diseases like diabetes has stalled or even reversed. The studies suggest so-called “despair deaths”—alcoholism, drugs, and suicide—are a big part of the problem, but so is obesity, poverty, and social isolation.
The U.S. death rate is on the rise for the first time in more than 15 years, with life expectancy for a baby born in 2015 dropping slightly, the government reported Thursday.
In a trend that's worrying experts, the nation's death rate — or the number of deaths for every 100,000 U.S. residents — rose 1.2 percent from 2014 to last year, the first noteworthy uptick since 1999.
By Betty Baboujon
Despite decades of warnings, obesity poses a growing problem worldwide. Once it was thought to afflict just affluent countries, where excess can easily become a way of life. In reality, obesity is a global issue affecting poorer countries on a grand scale. While there has been progress in reducing hunger globally, the next stage doesn’t look too promising.