Maryn McKenna

There’s no denying it: Farming had a rough year. Extreme weather spun up storms and floods, unseasonal freezes and baking heat waves, and prolonged parching droughts. In parts of the world in 2023, tomato plants didn’t flower, the peach crop never…

The US is enduring a sharp spike in cases of babies born with syphilis, an illness that not only threatens infants’ health, but also shows that the system providing healthcare for pregnant women is fracturing. Congenital syphilis has risen to its…

A deadly wave of heart attacks and strokes is headed for the US, borne by extreme heat waves spawned by climate change—and those deaths are most likely to occur in people who are older or Black. By mid-century, according to research published Monday,…

In the last hard days of World War I, just two weeks before world powers agreed to an armistice, a doctor wrote a letter to a friend. The doctor was stationed at the US Army’s Camp Devens west of Boston, a base packed with 45,000 soldiers preparing…

The world at last has a public health tool it has been seeking for more than a century: a reliable vaccine against malaria that can protect at least two-thirds of the children who receive it from developing the deadly disease. In fact, in an…

Fall has arrived, flu shots are rolling out in pharmacies, and pediatricians are watching for an uptick in respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV. In other words, it’s virus season. Covid deaths and hospitalizations also began rising at the end of July,…

In the last days of the 1400s, a terrible epidemic swept through Europe. Men and women spiked sudden fevers. Their joints ached, and they broke out in rashes that ripened into bursting boils. Ulcers ate away at their faces, collapsing their noses and…

La Organización Mundial de la Salud (OMS) se enfrenta a la peor causa de muerte en el mundo, al presentar su primer plan para combatir la hipertensión, un nivel de presión arterial alta que afecta a uno de cada tres adultos a nivel mundial. Esta…

The World Health Organization (WHO) is taking on the world’s worst killer, laying out its first plan to conquer hypertension—a level of high blood pressure that affects one in every three adults globally. That figure has doubled since 1990. It’s now…

If you were planning on a shore vacation this year, you might have kept track of great white sharks. The apex predator made famous by Jaws (and, OK, by The Meg and Sharknado) has been spotted on East Coast beaches from South Carolina up past Cape…

In February, a dermatologist in New York City contacted the state’s health department about two female patients, ages 28 and 47, who were not related but suffered from the same troubling problem. They had ringworm, a scaly, crusty, disfiguring rash…

Internal dissent within the mostly volunteer disease-news network known as ProMED—which alerted the world to the earliest cases of Covid, Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), and SARS—has broken out into the open and threatens to take down the…

On the map of the US Drought Monitor, a joint project of federal agencies and the University of Nebraska, colored warnings cover the landscape. It’s abnormally dry in Michigan. Minnesota is in moderate drought. A severe drought covers the Pacific…

It turns out that eating ivermectin is good for something after all. If you’re a deer, that is. And if the goal is to kill the ticks that are biting you—ticks that carry diseases that threaten humans. The antiparasitic drug, which is mostly used on…

Al menos cuatro personas de Florida y una de Texas han sido diagnosticadas con paludismo, enfermedad que debieron contraer cerca de su lugar de residencia, puesto que ninguna de ellas viajó fuera de EE UU o de sus propios estados, según las…

At least four people in Florida and one in Texas have been diagnosed with malaria that they must have caught near where they live—because, according to health officials, none of them traveled outside the US or their own states. The very unusual…

Consider this nightmare scenario. For four days now, temperatures have soared past 110 degrees. Those able to stay home are cranking their air-conditioning while officials scramble to move the unhoused into cooling centers. Even at night, the…

Shira Fishbach, a newly graduated physician, was sitting in an orientation session for her first year of medical residency when her phone started blowing up. It was June 24, 2022, and the US Supreme Court had just handed down its decision in Dobbs v.…

In the intensive care ward of Radboud University Medical Center, a sprawling hospital in the southeastern Netherlands, Paul Verweij was worried. The physician-scientist was accustomed to dealing with very sick patients; as chair of medical…

Medicine may be about to achieve a long-sought goal: a “morning-after pill” to prevent sexually transmitted infections. It could sharply reduce soaring rates of illness and huge health care costs. The effectiveness of this pill—and it literally is a…