Health & Medicine

  1. Health & Medicine

    Antibiotic resistance is coming to dinner

    Foods tainted with bacteria that antibiotics don't kill are a recipe for more serious—even lethal—infections.

    By Janet Raloff
  2. Health & Medicine

    Gender bias: Stroke after heart surgery

    Women are more likely than men to suffer strokes after heart surgery.

    By Damaris Christensen
  3. Health & Medicine

    New drug takes on intestinal cancer

    Imatinib mesylate, already approved by the FDA for treating people with a form of leukemia, blocks the activity of certain enzymes that cause gastrointestinal stromal cells to replicate uncontrollably.

    By Damaris Christensen
  4. Health & Medicine

    Virus in transplanted hearts bodes ill

    Pediatric heart-transplant recipients who acquire a viral infection in the heart fare poorly over the long term.

    By Nathan Seppa
  5. Health & Medicine

    Gene stifled in some lung, breast cancers

    The silencing of a gene called RASSF1A appears to increase the risk of cancer, studies of lung and breast tumors show.

    By Nathan Seppa
  6. Health & Medicine

    Memory may draw addicts back to cocaine

    The hippocampus may be the seat of powerful cravings for cocaine in rats and play a key role in drug-addiction relapse.

    By Jessa Netting
  7. Health & Medicine

    Fat may spur heart cells on to suicide

    Fat in the heart may kill cells and eventually lead to heart failure.

    By Jessa Netting
  8. Health & Medicine

    Virulent bacterium’s DNA is sequenced

    The completed genome sequence of Staphylococcus aureus reveals transfers from other organisms of many of the antibiotic-resistance and virulence genes.

    By Jessa Netting
  9. Health & Medicine

    Death of a theory

    Three separate analyses of oral polio vaccine used in the 1950s in Africa deflate the theory that such a vaccine could have ignited the AIDS epidemic by containing virus-infected chimpanzee cells.

    By Nathan Seppa
  10. Health & Medicine

    Gene therapy cures blindness in dogs

    Gene therapy to replace a defective RPE65 gene succeeds in bringing sight to three blind dogs, suggesting such therapy might reverse Leber congenital amauosis, a rare condition in which children are blind from birth.

    By Nathan Seppa
  11. Health & Medicine

    New anthrax treatment works in rats

    By distorting a protein in the toxin that makes the anthrax bacterium deadly, scientists have discovered a promising way to treat the disease and possibly even to prevent it with a vaccine.

    By Nathan Seppa
  12. Health & Medicine

    Tamoxifen dilates arteries in men

    The breast cancer drug tamoxifen can widen a narrowed coronary artery in men with heart problems.

    By Nathan Seppa