Архив рубрики: Здоровье Америка

When you’re ready to get your flu vaccine this year, you have a convenient new option: you can skip the doctors’ office or pharmacy and inoculate yourself. FluMist, a vaccine sprayed up the nose to protect people from serious influenza symptoms, is now available for anyone in the U.S. to order online and administer to themselves or others at home.

FluMist, made by AstraZeneca, has been available since 2003. But even though it’s relatively easy to administer, it still required a health care professional to give to people. in Sept. 2024, however, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved it for at-home use without a health care professional—making it the first flu vaccine that people can give themselves.

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Here’s what to know.

How does FluMist work?

FluMist is the only nasal vaccine approved in the U.S. It’s administered as two spritzes—one in each nostril—and stimulates antibodies against the influenza virus in the nasal passages and bloodstrea..

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) recently announced it will wind down funding for mRNA vaccine development—which could prove to be one of the costliest, deadliest decisions HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will make during his tenure. HHS has already scaled back access to and recommendations for COVID-19 vaccines—a decision experts are deeply concerned about—and Kennedy’s frequently misinformed views on vaccines continue to fan the flames of anti-vaccination attitudes. Now, Kennedy’s failure to fully explore the potential of mRNA vaccines could stagnate research that has the potential to save millions of lives around the world.

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The dark cloud of COVID-19, one of the deadliest infectious disease outbreaks in history, can hardly be thought of as having a silver lining. But the nearest thing to a glimmer of a positive would be that the fast development of COVID-19 vaccines helped prevent many more deaths and led to rapid progress..

Never mind the popular image of Americans as sedentary, housebound, and living on the couch. It turns out a whopping 80% of us are physically active, according to a new report from the Sports and Fitness Industry Association. That’s 247 million people getting up and breaking a sweat as opposed to just 20%, or 62 million, who remain exercise averse. It’s a continuation of a recent trend in the U.S.—and it’s fueled in part by the astonishing growth in one sport in particular.

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Pickleball saw a 46% increase in players from 2023 to 2024—and a jump of 311% in just the past three years.

The authors of the report surveyed participation in 124 sports and activities from 2019 to 2024, analyzing online interviews with 18,000 people. Far and away, the researchers found, the most popular physical activity Americans choose is walking for fitness—it’s free, easy, and requires no investment at all beyond a comfortable pair of shoes. For more than 115 million active..

On Aug. 8, the calls started rolling in to Colorado Parks and Wildlife: Scary-looking rabbits were hopping around Fort Collins. These weren’t your standard cute, fluffy bunnies; they had horn-like growths protruding from their faces and bodies. People on social media described them as “zombie” and “demon” rabbits and noted their resemblance to Frankenstein. One Fort Collins resident told a local news station that she had seen a rabbit that looked like it had “black quills or black toothpicks sticking out all around his or her mouth.”

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The rabbits didn’t hop out of the set of a horror flick: They have cottontail rabbit papillomavirus, a skin disease that leads to alarming-looking growths. “It exhibits as these wart-like growths on their face—sometimes they’re smaller, like little nodules, and sometimes they’re bigger, like tentacles or horns,” says Kara Van Hoose, a spokesperson with Colorado Parks and Wildlife.

We asked experts what the virus is, how..

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The percentage of adults in the U.S. who report drinking alcohol is at a record low, according to a Gallup poll released on Wednesday.

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Only 54% of adults said they consume alcohol—the smallest share since Gallup started tracking Americans’ drinking behavior in 1939. And a majority of Americans (about 53%) said they believe that even just “one or two drinks a day” is bad for their health. That’s a leap from the roughly 25% of Americans who held this view from 2001 through 2011.

Even the Americans who said they do drink alcohol reported consuming less of it than those in past polls. Just 24% said they’d had a drink in the past 24 hours—another record low. And 40% said they hadn’t had an alcoholic beverage in more than..

Everyone needs vitamin B12: It helps the body produce red blood cells and maintain healthy brain function, along with so many other things. But are you getting enough of it?

Here’s what to know about vitamin B12 and whether you should consider upping your levels.

A boon for brain health

“Vitamin B12 is important for brain health because it helps protect nerve cells in the brain, which support memory and thinking skills,” says Michelle Routhenstein, a preventive cardiology dietitian and certified diabetes educator in New York. It’s water-soluble, so the body does not store it in large amounts, and daily intake is essential.

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The current federal recommendations are for adults to get 2.4 mcg of vitamin B12 per day. Great food sources of B12 include seafood like oysters, salmon and tuna, beef, and fortified products like nutritional yeast, plant-based milks, some breads and breakfast cereals, says Routhenstein.

But some recent research suggests that so..

Do you ever feel your energy crash halfway through the day? The foods you eat, and the way you eat them, play a massive role in whether your energy levels feel steady or like a roller coaster.

“Calories are quite literally energy for our bodies—and the foods you choose can directly influence your energy levels,” says Mackenzie Burgess, a registered dietitian nutritionist and recipe developer at Cheerful Choices. “Nutritious, balanced meals and snacks help provide steady fuel, while overly sugary, ultra-processed foods can cause spikes and crashes, leaving you tired and groggy.”

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You can train your energy levels to become more consistent. The key is regularly fueling your body with the right balance of protein, healthy fats, fiber, and complex carbs.

Here’s what three experts recommend people eat to stay energized.

Start with a strong breakfast

Breakfast “breaks the fast” after hours of sleep and replenishes glucose, which is the main source of ene..

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Health practitioners, companies, and others have for years hailed the potential benefits of AI in medicine, from improving medical imaging to outperforming doctors at diagnostic assessments. The transformative technology has even been predicted by AI enthusiasts to one day help find a “cure to cancer.”

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But a new study has found that doctors who regularly used AI actually became less skilled within months.

The study, which was published on Wednesday in the Lancet Gastroenterology and Hepatology journal, found that over the course of six months, clinicians became over-reliant on AI recommendations and became themselves “less motivated, less focused, and less responsible when making cognitive decisions without AI a..

If the first message you get from someone you matched with on a dating app leaves you speechless, hopefully it’s because you’re wowed by their good looks, witticisms, curious mind, and articulate nature.

If that sounds painfully naive, welcome to the apps in modern dating culture. The daters Julie Nguyen works with are more likely to be floored by the laziness, spelling errors, and sheer audacity of the people on the other end. “It’s a numbers game, so it’s really easy to just be like, ‘OK, I’m going to say something really quick and really generic because I’m going to be talking to a lot of people,’” says Nguyen, a dating expert with the app Hily (Hey, I Like You). The worst messages, she adds, are usually short, boring, riddled with typos and grammar mistakes, or way too forward. They don’t invite any real depth, instead coming across as copied-and-pasted lines sent to everyone else on your match’s roster.

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A thoughtful, sincere, and personalized me..

Most people pee multiple times a day without giving it much thought. But if there’s a change in how often you urinate or how much you pee on each occasion, it could make you wonder if something is amiss.

It’s normal to urinate six to eight times over the course of 24 hours, says Dr. Philippe Zimmern, a urologist and professor at UT Southwestern Medical Center. But you may pee more or less than that on a particular day, depending on what and how much you drink, your age, the weather, your stress, physical activity level, and overall health.

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There’s actually a fairly wide range of “normal”: In a study published in 2023 in the journal Nursing Research, for example, researchers evaluated the urination patterns of about 2,500 healthy women andfound that they peed two to ten times per day and zero to four times per night. Older women peed more often than younger ones (especially at night). Research suggests that men tend to pee slightly less often.

“A ful..