BENTIU, South Sudan — Elizabeth Nyachiew was 16 when she watched her neighbor bleed to death during childbirth. She vowed to become a midwife to spare others from the same fate in South Sudan, a country with one of the world’s highest maternal mortality rates. “If I saw people dying, I wanted to know why,” … Read more
NEW YORK — For years, scientists have known people who use neti pots can become infected with a brain-eating amoeba if they use the wrong kind of water. On Wednesday, researchers linked a second kind of deadly amoeba to nasal rinsing. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published a report that for the first … Read more
A large Swedish study has uncovered a paradox about people diagnosed with an excessive fear of serious illness: They tend to die earlier than people who aren’t hypervigilant about health concerns. Hypochondriasis, now called illness anxiety disorder, is a rare condition with symptoms that go beyond average health worries. People with the disorder are unable … Read more
NEW YORK — U.S. life expectancy rose last year — by more than a year — but still isn’t close to what it was before the COVID-19 pandemic. The 2022 rise was mainly due to the waning pandemic, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention researchers said Wednesday. But even with the large increase, U.S. life … Read more
For the third year in a row life expectancy has declined in Canada, a trend experts consider to be historical, indicating a worrisome downturn in our overall health. Statistics Canada released its report Deaths, 2022 on Monday, showing that the life expectancy of Canadians fell to 81.3 years in 2022 from 81.6 years in 2021. … Read more
Advances in childhood cancer are a success story in modern medicine. But in the past decade, those strides have stalled for Black and Hispanic youth, opening a gap in death rates, according to a new report published Thursday. Childhood cancers are rare and treatments have improved drastically in recent decades, saving lives. Death rates were … Read more