“No one expects a grown woman in her 40s to have an eating disorder. That’s for teenagers, right? Well, guess what – it happened to me.” Alexa, a 44-year-old real…
Category: Anthropology
5 years of COVID-19 underscore value of coordinated efforts to manage disease – while CDC, NIH and WHO face threats to their ability to respond to a crisis
Five years ago, on March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization declared the outbreak of COVID-19 a global pandemic. The novel coronavirus, dubbed SARS-CoV-2, began as a “cluster of severe…
From TB to HIV/AIDS to cancer, disease tracking has always had a political dimension, but it’s the foundation of public health
Federal datasets began disappearing from public view on Jan. 31, 2025, in response to executive orders from President Donald Trump. Among those were the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s…
Daylight saving time and early school start times cost billions in lost productivity and health care expenses
Investigations into the 1986 Space Shuttle Challenger disaster revealed that key decision-makers worked on little sleep, raising concerns that fatigue impaired their judgment. Similarly, in 1989, the Exxon Valdez oil…
NIH funding cuts will hit red states, rural areas and underserved communities the hardest
The National Institutes of Health is the largest federal funder of medical research in the U.S. NIH funds drive research and innovation, leading to better understanding and treatment of diseases…
Knocking down abandoned buildings has a lot of benefits for Detroit − but it’s costly for cities
Few cities have experienced a sharper economic change of fortune than Detroit. It was one of the fastest-growing cities in the nation between 1900 and 1950. In the nearly 75…
As tuberculosis cases rise in the US and worldwide, health officials puzzle over the resurgence of a disease once in decline
An outbreak of tuberculosis, or TB – a lung disease that is often accompanied by a hacking cough – began in January 2024 in Kansas City, Kansas, and two nearby…