ArcaMax

We are becoming a nation of better Boy Scouts, whose motto is "Be Prepared." In its latest annual assessment of the nation's day-to-day readiness for managing health emergencies, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation says the U.S. scores a 7.1 on a 10-point scale, up 3 percent from last year and nearly 11 percent since the index began five years ...Read more

In China, there is an indoor farm that raises cockroaches -- about 6 billion per year. It's the biggest farm of its type in the world, but not the only one. There are at least 100 other large-scale Chinese farms.

What's the demand for the insect, which has never seemed to have much trouble breeding abundantly on its own, in the wild or in the...Read more

The Journal of the American Medical Association just published a study by the U.S. Burden of Disease Collaborators, looking at causes of death and disease in the United States.

The top five causes of death from 1990 to 2016 were ischemic heart disease; lung, tracheal or bronchial cancer; chronic obstructive pulmonary disease; Alzheimer's ...Read more

If you've ever participated in a sleep study, you know that one of the aspects that ironically keeps you awake is having myriad electrodes and wires connected to various parts of your body to monitor such things as breathing, brain activity and temperature.

Biomedical engineers may have found an answer to the latter with penny-sized sensors ...Read more

According to a new ranking by U.S. News & World Report and the Aetna Foundation, the healthiest community in the country is Falls Church, Virginia, based on categories such as education, infrastructure and population health, which takes into account access to care, mental health and health outcomes.

The survey ranked 3,000 communities and ...Read more

Disparities in heart health among ethnicities in the U.S. have narrowed in recent years, according to a new analysis, but not in a good way. Most Americans do not have healthy hearts -- at least as healthy as their doctors or medical guidelines would suggest.

The analysis, published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, found that less than 40 ...Read more

A report in JAMA looked at health care spending in the U.S. and other high-income countries. The findings might make you a bit queasy. The U.S. spent approximately $1,443 per person on health care in 2016, almost twice the next highest country, Switzerland at $939 per person.

It wasn't because Americans use health care more often than ...Read more

If you have hypertension, a chronic condition that affects an estimated third of U.S. adults, your blood pressure isn't the only thing on the high side. So, too, are your health care costs. The Health Care Cost Institute says that in 2016, adults with hypertension spent 3.2 times more in total and 2.2 times more in out-of-pocket costs for ...Read more

The popular TV show Grey's Anatomy is often extolled by its fans as a realistic (if dramatized) look at life and death in the emergency room. So a group of doctors at St. Joseph's Hospital and Medical Center in Arizona decided to see just how accurately the show depicted real life and real medical emergencies and conditions.

They watched 269 ...Read more

The influential Infectious Diseases Society of America has stepped into it (an ongoing debate, that is), recommending that fecal transplants -- in which donor fecal matter is transferred to a patient - be used for persons in which standard antibiotic treatments for severe diarrhea caused by a bacterium called C. difficile have failed.

More ...Read more

Dutch lawmakers have approved a new measure that signs up every citizen as a potential organ donor unless they choose to opt out. It's an effort to ease the global, chronic shortage of donor organs and reduce transplant waitlists. Under the new law, every Dutch citizen over the age of 18 who hasn't registered as an organ donor will receive a ...Read more

Proponents of raw milk like to describe it as a "living food," which is to say that the pasteurization process used in most commercially sold milk hasn't destroyed raw milk's heat-sensitive enzymes, vitamins and beneficial bacteria.

But that lack of pasteurization also means bad bacteria survive too. A recent CDC report looked at a 2016 ...Read more

Of the 16,000 cases of lupus -- a chronic autoimmune disease that can damage any part of the body -- that are reported each year in the United States, 90 percent occur in women. Sex differences have long and obviously been suspect as a driving factor, but now scientists think they have a specific culprit: over-expression of a gene called Tlr7....Read more