A new study highlights the lasting financial impact of a cancer diagnosis for many working-age adults and their families in the United States. It shows a cancer diagnosis and the time required for its treatment can result in employment disruptions, loss of household income and loss of employment-based health insurance coverage, leading to financial hardship ..read more

Primary health care, conditional cash transfers and social pensions have prevented 1.4 million deaths of all ages in Brazil over the past two decades, according to a new study. If expanded, these programs could avert an additional 1.3 million deaths and 6.6 million hospitalizations by 2030 ..read more

The US saw a 22% decline in rates of prescription-opioid overdose related emergency department (ED) visits in children 17 and younger between 2008 and 2019, but an uptick in the early part of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a new study. The authors also note that rates of pediatric opioid overdoses remain high in many populations ..read more

Childhood verbal abuse by adults costs society an estimated $300 billion a year globally, show recent findings ..read more

The introduction of a policy protecting parental leave benefits in Sweden in 1980 had unintended consequences on child health. The policy appears to have led to an increase in premature birth rates ..read more

Connecting the study of infectious disease spread, biodiversity loss and climate change could offer win-win-win solutions for planetary health, but a new analysis has uncovered almost no research integrating the three global crises ..read more

Global life expectancy increased by 6.2 years since 1990, according to a new study. Over the past three decades, reductions in death from leading killers fueled this progress, including diarrhea and lower respiratory infections, as well as stroke and ischemic heart disease. When the COVID-19 pandemic arrived in 2020, however, it derailed progress in many locations ..read more

To better understand COVID-19's spread during the pandemic, public health officials expanded wastewater surveillance. These efforts track SARS-CoV-2 levels and health risks among most people, but they miss people who live without shelter, a population particularly vulnerable to severe infection. To fill this information gap, researchers tested flood-control waterways near unsheltered encampments, finding similar transmission patterns as in the broader community and identifying previously unseen viral mutations ..read more

New study findings suggest that shortening overnight operations by seven hours at bars and taverns in a Baltimore, Md. neighborhood resulted in a 51 percent immediate drop in homicides within the first month, followed by a 23 percent decline in all violent crimes annually in the surrounding area, compared to similar neighborhoods with no change in hours of sale. Homicide rates decreased by 40 percent in each subsequent year ..read more

The prevalence of malnutrition across the globe was shared by the NCD Risk Factor Collaboration, a network of health scientists from around the world who provide and evaluate data on major risk factors for all countries, in collaboration with the World Health Organization. The network participants reviewed body mass index data from more than 3,600 studies from 1990 to 2022, determining the rates of malnutrition, either from obesity or underweight, for all countries, and the degree to which the data has changed through the years ..read more