Enlarge / The transplant team with the replacement heart. (credit: The transplant team with the replacement heart. ) On Monday, the University of Maryland School of Medicine announced that its staff had done the first transplant of a pig’s heart into a human. The patient who received it had end-stage heart disease and was too […]
Enlarge (credit: Getty | Joe Amon) Misinformation about the pandemic and the health measures that are effective against SARS-CoV-2 has been a significant problem in the US. It’s led to organized resistance against everything from mask use to vaccines and has undoubtedly ended up killing people. Plenty of factors have contributed to this surge of […]
Enlarge (credit: RAJESH JANTILAL / GETTY IMAGES ) Based on various measures, the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine has appeared to be less effective than those based on mRNA technology. It has also been associated with some rare blood clotting complications that recently caused the CDC to revise its endorsement associated with the vaccine. Still, […]
Enlarge (credit: Peter Dazeley / Getty Images ) Smoking can really clog up the lungs, even for people who’ve never been near a cigarette. Turns out that smoking habits from the early 1900s are still inflicting damage—not on tobacco users or their families, but on people with cystic fibrosis. Cystic fibrosis (CF) is a hereditary […]
Enlarge / A call for radical empathy: In her 2021 book, Undoing Drugs: The Untold Story of Harm Reduction and the Future of Addiction , Maia Szalavitz argues for adopting the controversial practice of harm reduction when treating addiction. (credit: iStock / Getty Image) There’s rarely time to write about every cool science-y story that […]
Enlarge / Portrait of Catherine the Great. Her 1787 letter to Count Piotr Aleksandrovich Rumiantsev—now up for auction—called for a national vaccination campaign against smallpox. (credit: Public domain ) During her long reign, Catherine the Great ‘s leadership transformed Russia into a powerhouse of Europe. She was also a leader in public health policy, championing […]
Enlarge (credit: Reshi Irshad / Getty Images ) On Friday, Pfizer and BioNTech announced that their latest vaccine trial was showing some odd results in children within a specific age range. Children in the 2- to 5-year age group didn’t produce as strong of an antibody response to the particular vaccine as older and younger […]
Enlarge / Scenes like this might become less common if a new SARS-CoV-2 protease inhibitor becomes widely available. (credit: Getty Images ) On Monday, pharmaceutical giant Pfizer released more data on its anti-COVID-19 drug, named Paxlovid. The company} had released its initial data on the drug in early November, and it looked extremely promising : […]
Enlarge / That’s a lot of mutations. (credit: Stanford ) On Friday, the World Health Organization officially named a new version of the particular SARS-CoV-2 virus a variant associated with concern, and attached the Greek letter omicron to the designation. The Omicron variant is notable for the sheer number regarding mutations in the spike protein […]
A young mother in a small Argentina town has possibly become the second documented person in history to have their own immune system cure HIV. Scientists researching the disease published a new study in the Annals of Internal Medicine on Monday, explaining their remarkable findings in the cells of a 30-year-old formerly-HIV-positive woman from the […]