Health News

  • The Pentagon has completed its review of Defense Secretary’s Lloyd Austin’s failure last month to quickly notify the president and other senior leaders about his hospitalization for complications from prostate cancer surgery.

    February 08, 2024
  • A new study looked into how well health misinformation is researched by these institutions and the methods they used to fight it. One of the study's authors is Stefanie Friedhoff, professor of the practice at Brown University's School of Public Health.

    November 21, 2023
  • After more than 30 years at the National Institutes of Health, the next guest has been recognized by the Senior Executives Association with the 2023 Spirit of Excellence award for diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility.

    November 07, 2023
  • U.S. officials say the number of suicides among military members and their families dipped slightly in 2022, compared with the previous year. This decline comes as the Defense Department tries to build prevention and treatment programs to address what's been a steadily growing problem over the past decade.

    October 26, 2023
  • Next week the U.S. military plans to begin draining fuel from World War II-era underground fuel tanks in Hawaii. Work to drain the 104 million gallons remaining in the tanks is scheduled to begin on Monday. 

    October 13, 2023
  • The work of our next guest has spanned 40 years and helped save lives. For that work at the NIH, he's a finalist for the Paul Volcker Career Achievement Award from the Partnership for Public Service.

    October 06, 2023
  • It's no longer the relentless killer it was 40 years ago, but HIV is still around and still infecting people. And it remains a focus of the Health and Human Services Department's Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA).

    September 27, 2023
  • While it may not yet be on the tip of everyone’s tongue, a potentially game-changing new federal medical research agency called the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) is gearing up to power breakthroughs in biomedical and health research.

    September 14, 2023
  • Hundreds of thousands of veterans have received additional benefits in the past year after President Joe Biden signed legislation expanding coverage for conditions connected to burn pits that were used to destroy trash and potentially toxic materials. The first anniversary of the law is Thursday, and Biden will mark the occasion at a Veterans Affairs hospital in Salt Lake City. Administration officials are trying to encourage as many people as possible to sign up by Wednesday, which would allow their benefits to be retroactive to when the law was signed. The agency is also trying to hire more people to handle the influx of claims, which is expected to cause larger backlogs over the coming months.

    August 06, 2023
  • New lawsuits claim that the U.S. Defense Department and the Department of Veteran Affairs are making it difficult and sometimes impossible for veterans to get infertility treatments. Multiple lawsuits were filed Wednesday in federal courts in New York and Boston seeking to hold the United States accountable for creating obstacles to health care access for a population that advocates say has a higher rate of infertility than the population at large. The lawsuits seek to obtain in vitro fertilization coverage for military service members and veterans who don't fit the Veterans Affairs definition of infertility as pertaining solely to married, heterosexual couples.

    August 02, 2023
  • More than $200 billion may have been stolen from two large COVID-19 relief initiatives. That's according to new estimates from a federal watchdog investigating federally funded programs designed to help small businesses survive the worst public health crisis in more than a hundred years. The numbers issued Tuesday by the U.S. Small Business Administration inspector general are much greater than previous projections issued by the office. They underscore how vulnerable the Paycheck Protection and COVID-19 Economic Injury Disaster Loan programs were to fraudsters, particularly during the early stages of the pandemic. The Small Business Administration disputed the new figures, saying the report “contains serious flaws that significantly overestimate fraud.”

    June 27, 2023
  • The next round of COVID-19 vaccines will target one of the latest versions of the coronavirus. The Food and Drug Administration's decision was announced Friday, one day after a panel of outside advisers supported the recipe change. The FDA told vaccine makers to provide protection against the omicron strain, known as XBB.1.5. Today’s shots include the original coronavirus and an earlier version of omicron. The three U.S. companies that make the shots said they had geared up to make many millions of new doses available for the fall. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will eventually decide who should get the new shots.

    June 16, 2023
  • The Biden administration will end the last remaining federal COVID-19 vaccine requirements next week when the national public health emergency for the coronavirus ends. Vaccine requirements for federal workers and federal contractors, as well as foreign air travelers to the U.S., will end May 11. The government is also beginning the process of lifting shot requirements for Head Start educators, healthcare workers, and noncitizens at U.S. land borders. The requirements are the last vestiges of some of the more coercive measures taken by the federal government to promote vaccination as the deadly virus raged. Their end marks the latest display of how President Joe Biden’s administration is moving to treat COVID-19 as a routine, endemic illness.

    May 01, 2023
  • President Joe Biden has signed an executive order containing more than 50 directives to increase access to child care and improve the work life of caregivers. But the White House said Tuesday the directives in the order would be funded out of existing commitments. That likely means the directives' impact would be limited and they'd carry more of a symbolic weight. The Democratic president was more ambitious in 2021 by calling to provide $425 billion to expand child care, improve its affordability and boost wages for caregivers. White House Domestic Policy Council director Susan Rice says the order shows Biden isn’t waiting on Congress to act.

    April 18, 2023
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