Public Health

Geneva (AFP) – Up to 45 percent of dementia risk could be prevented or delayed, the World Health Organization said Wednesday, citing modifiable risk factors such as tobacco and air pollution.

Original link: https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/494045/ultra-processed-foods-science-rcts

About 4,000 to 5,000 Americans drown each year. Most are adults who die in natural bodies of water, such as lakes, ponds or oceans.

Why I’m worried about your games, not just your feed. Country after country is racing to ban kids under 16 from social media. Australia went first and the early evidence says it isn’t working. But WHY it’s failing tells you more than the ban ever could. We’ve run this exact panic for a hundred years (from comics, rock, D\&D, video games) and we’re reliably bad at picking the right villain. In this one I get into the science behind the bans that the headlines skip, what’s actually driving teen distress, why “just take the bad thing away” keeps falling apart, and the part that worries me most: bans like this let the platforms off the hook, and games are next on the list. Not “social media is fine, actually.” Just we’re aiming at the wrong target, and the kids pay for the miss. Less banning, more teaching them to navigate the world they already live in.

Five million fewer people are currently enrolled in ACA marketplace plans compared to the record high reached last year. More than 1 million fewer peoplepicked a plan for 2026, and then 4 million more either disenrolled or failed to pay their premiums and therefore dropped coverage. 

Doctors agree: Climate change is a hazard to your health. Leading medical journals warn that rising greenhouse gas emissions will result in millions of needless deaths and undermine decades of hard-won progress in public health.

What that means for medical AI models is that any patient whose data is used to educate the bot could be exposed, leading to details about their medical history and diagnoses being leaked. In an analysis of seven medical AI datasets consisting of images, ECG records, and general electronic health records, the team determined that individual patients targeted by such attacks can be identified with “near-perfect attack success,” which they explain flies in the face of how such models are evaluated for safety. 

Duration - 1:32 

Updated seasonal COVID-19 vaccines continue to significantly lower the risk of post-viral cardiovascular complications. The 2024-2025 formulation reduced major adverse cardiac events by 38% in a cohort study of over one million US veterans.

Psychiatric diagnoses are purely descriptive; yet, none of the organizations directly referred to depression in this way. “The American Psychiatric Association, in the DSM-5, makes explicitly clear that the diagnostic criteria of mental disorders are descriptive in nature because the underlying pathologies are not known,” wrote authors Jani Kajanojaa and Jussi Valtonenb.

Breast milk samples from mothers in Seattle contain alarming levels of dangerous hormone-disrupting chemicals, including BPA, BPS, melamine, cyanuric acid, and triclosan, new peer-reviewed research has found.

link to open access study https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-026-02477-6

Seventy-three per cent of participants were ’not at high risk of fractures or falls,’ with calcium, vitamin D or combined supplements having ‘little to no effect on fractures.’

Duration - 1:23

UN report says global meat supply has risen fourfold in last 60 years and is expected to keep rising

June 4, 2026

Capitalism seems so inevitable to us that we sometimes fail to notice its explanatory power. In this case, it’s staring us right in the face. The incentive structures of capitalism run counter to those of child-rearing — and as market logics pervade deeper into every aspect of our society, the business of having babies makes increasingly little business sense.

For more than 12 years, Nicholas Enrich worked at USAID, the United States Agency for International Development, rising to become one of the agency’s top global health officials. Then, in a matter of weeks, he watched as the Trump administration and Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) dismantled the six-decade-old agency responsible for delivering American foreign aid around the world.