By John Greenburg
Among nations, the United States is the runaway leader in the money it spends on global health programs, and the looming question for advocates is what will happen under President Donald Trump and a Republican Congress. Nick Seymour, a Harvard junior volunteering at a health clinic in Mexico, argued for sustained spending.
By Jessica Berman
A genetically engineered malaria vaccine has been shown to prevent the disease in mice, researchers say. The findings offer hope of halting the illness in humans, as well as stopping transmission of the mosquito-borne disease.
Researchers at the Center for Infectious Disease Research (CIDR) at the University of Washington, in conjunction with the Fred Hutchison Cancer Research Center, have developed a vaccine that uses the entire malaria-causing parasite — called P. falciparum — to stimulate a protective immune response.
By Mary Engel
Researchers may be one step closer to a truly effective malaria vaccine, a new study suggests. A genetically modified malaria parasite worked as designed in its first human clinical trial, causing neither malaria nor serious safety problems in the 10 people who volunteered to be infected. It also stimulated an immune response that holds out promise of a more protective vaccine than the single candidate now in pilot studies
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.