From disease eradication efforts to advances in vaccination and maternal health, this archive tracks real progress in public health. Stories here focus on what’s working — policies, interventions, and research that are improving and extending lives around the world.
The nation’s overall cancer death rate declined 1.7 percent in 2015, the latest indication of steady, long-term progress against the disease, according to a new report by the American Cancer Society.
Between 1990 and 2012, particulate matter and organic aerosols significantly declined in the United States, saving thousands of lives.
A team at Lancaster University in the U.K. has discovered that a drug designed to treat type 2 diabetes may hold the key to fighting the memory loss that accompanies Alzheimer’s disease.
Ebola outbreaks may soon be predictable — and that changes how the world can respond. Scientists analyzing satellite data and outbreak records across the Congo basin found a consistent two-year gap between forest loss and Ebola emerging in that same location, pointing to displaced fruit bats moving toward human settlements as habitat disappears. That window could give health workers and governments time to direct resources before a single case appears. Transmission mechanisms aren’t fully understood and building a real-time tool remains a serious challenge — but ecology-based prevention could reshape how the world fights infectious disease at its roots.
President Trump on Thursday will announce he is directing his Department of Health and Human Services to declare the opioid crisis a public health emergency
The discovery, which involves “silencing” the Hippo pathway in the heart, could lead to better treatments for those at risk of heart failure potentially ones that could eliminate the condition entirely.
Breast cancer death rates declined almost 40 percent between 1989 and 2015, averting 322,600 deaths, the American Cancer Society reported Tuesday.
Trachoma is an eye disease caused by infection with Chlamydia trachomatis bacteria. It is the leading infectious cause of blindness worldwide.
In lab settings, using mice and human tissue samples, researchers were able to correctly identify lung, ovary, thyroid, and breast cancers and do so with around 93% accuracy.
The lower carbon emissions were worth billions of dollars as a result of the avoidance of the range of problems caused by fossil fuels.
