Health & Medicine

Sleep Is a Biology Exam (And Most Schools Are Failing It)

As students everywhere set their first alarms of the new school year, a well-established piece of biology goes ignored on an industrial scale: the teenage body clock is genuinely, chemically...

The Arithmetic of an Outbreak

This week, the US measles count for 2026 surpassed all of last year — which was itself the worst year in three decades. Two record years in a row is not bad luck. It's arithmetic, and the...

The Fifty-Dollar Copay

As of this summer, Medicare covers obesity medicine for the first time — fifty dollars a month, for patients who qualify. I spent the winter writing about the promise. This is the follow-up...

The Empty Chair: What the World Loses When Health Systems Stop Talking

In January, the United States completed its withdrawal from the World Health Organization. In November, the Americas lost their measles-free status. In my first piece for The Argosy, I want...

The Sticker Price of a Miracle

The weight-loss drugs everyone talks about just got their prices cut nearly in half by government deal, with a federal website selling them at cash prices and Medicare coverage on the way....

The Committee: How American Vaccine Policy Was Rewritten in a Year

Most people have never heard of the advisory committee that decides which vaccines American children are recommended to receive. In the span of one year, it was emptied, refilled, and set to...

One Case: How to Read a First

Last week, a patient in Washington State became the first person anywhere confirmed with H5N5 bird flu, and on Friday the patient died. One case, one death, no spread. Numbers that small are...

The Peacekeepers Within: A Nobel for the Immune System's Off Switch

This year's Nobel Prize in Medicine honors the discovery of regulatory T cells — the immune system's internal police force, which spends every day stopping your own defenses from destroying...

The Million-Dollar Cure: Can We Afford Miracles?

A new wave of gene and cell therapies is offering cures for previously untreatable genetic diseases. But with price tags stretching into the millions of dollars per dose, they are creating...

The Moral Failure of Vaccine Nationalism

The rapid development of COVID-19 vaccines was a scientific triumph. Their distribution was a moral catastrophe. A look back at the 'vaccine nationalism' of the pandemic reveals a broken...

The Plastic Inside Us: A Health Crisis in Slow Motion

Scientists are now finding microplastics in our blood, our lungs, and even in the placentas of newborn babies. This ubiquitous contamination represents a massive, uncontrolled public health...

The Fever Line Moves North: How Climate Change is Redrawing the Map of Infectious Disease

As the planet warms, the habitats of disease-carrying mosquitoes and ticks are expanding into new territories. The result is a dangerous and unprecedented spread of vector-borne diseases...

The Silver Tsunami: Can Our Healthcare Systems Survive an Aging World?

The world is aging at an unprecedented rate, a demographic shift that will place an immense and potentially unsustainable strain on our healthcare and social security systems. Nowhere is...

The Epidemic of Despair: Deconstructing the Global Youth Mental Health Crisis

Rates of anxiety, depression, and self-harm among adolescents are rising at an alarming rate worldwide. This is not a problem of individual weakness, but a systemic crisis with deep roots in...

The Messenger's New Mission: How mRNA is Revolutionizing Medicine

Forged in the crucible of the COVID-19 pandemic, mRNA technology is now being unleashed on a host of other diseases, from cancer to the flu. This is not just a new kind of vaccine; it is the...

Editing Our Own Code: The Dawn of the CRISPR Generation

The first-ever approved CRISPR-based therapies are a medical miracle, offering a potential cure for devastating genetic diseases. But they also mark a profound turning point for humanity,...

The Silent Pandemic: How Antibiotic Resistance is Undoing a Century of Modern Medicine

While the world fears the next viral outbreak, a slower, more insidious crisis is unfolding. Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is rendering our most essential medicines useless, threatening a...

Anatomy of a Failure: Why the World is Still Not Ready for the Next Pandemic

Years after the COVID-19 pandemic exposed the deep vulnerabilities in our global health architecture, a cycle of panic and neglect has left the world dangerously unprepared for 'Disease...