Rae Ellen Bichell

About 40 percent of Americans belong to a racial or ethnic minority, but the people who participate in clinical trials tend to be more homogeneous. Clinical trials are the studies that test whether drugs work, and inform doctors' decisions about how to treat their patients. When subjects in those ...

Despite striking ethnic disparities in the incidence and mortality of diseases like cancer and respiratory disease, minorities are not well represented in clinical trials. A paper out...

It typically causes fever and joint pain. A new study looks at a possible link to encephalitis, a brain infection.

Scientists worldwide face a yearly challenge in deciding what goes into the annual flu vaccine to make it effective. The job requires keeping tabs on a massive group of speedy, shape-shifting viruses.

Flu season is in swing and likely won't let up until April.

It seemed like high time to check in on how Americans feel about flu vaccination, so we asked more than 3,000 adults in the latest NPR-Truven Health Analytics Health Poll, conducted during the first half of October.

All ...

The giant roundworm looks a lot like an earthworm. It's pinkish, up to a foot long and can live for two years.

Right now, the worms are living comfortably in the small intestines of about a billion people worldwide. They're the most common worm infection in humans. The worms ...

After testing all the pieces of a tiny pill-size device, Albert Swiston sent it on a unique journey: through the guts of six live Yorkshire pigs.

Pig bodies are a lot like human bodies, and Swiston wanted to know whether the device would be able to monitor vital signs from ...

Dr. Odontuya Davaasuren has one goal: to improve the way people die in Mongolia.

"My father died of lung cancer, my mother died, my mother-in-law died because of liver cancer," she says. "Even though I was a doctor, I could do nothing."

The feeling of helplessness, and the unnecessary pain ...

He came into the hospital in bad shape. In addition to being HIV-positive, he had what looked like a malignant tumor. The tumor, it turned out, was not human.

Miracle. Game changer. Marvel. Cure. Lifesaver.

For Dr. Vinay Prasad, each one of these words was a little straw on the camel's back. At oncology conferences, they were used "indiscriminately" to describe new cancer drugs. Journalists bandied them about in stories.

Finally, the pile of hyperbole broke the camel's back.

...

Rocky Mountain spotted fever is a nasty disease.

"It's super, super scary," says F. Scott Dahlgren, an epidemiologist with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

"If you don't treat for Rocky Mountain spotted fever by the fifth day of illness, there's a really good chance you're going to ...

The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force now says all overweight and obese Americans between 40 and 70 years old should get their blood sugar levels tested.

The advisory group's previous recommendation, drafted in 2008, made no mention of weight, instead suggesting that doctors routinely test the blood sugar of patients ...

"If there's anything that this outbreak has taught me, it's that I'm often wrong," says Dr. Daniel Bausch.

He's talking about Ebola. He's one of the world's leading experts on the virus — an infectious disease specialist at Tulane University and a senior consultant to the World Health ...

Back in 1798, English philosopher Thomas Malthus predicted that the world would eventually run out of food for its growing population.

"The power of population is so superior to the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit ...

Ebola can linger in the semen of male survivors. That's been known for a while now. When male patients were released in West Africa, health workers would tell them not to have unprotected sex for about three months.

But two new research papers raise the possibility that the virus can ...

The thought of paying for her daughters' weddings has haunted Kamala Rani for years. When it came time for her older daughter to get married two years ago, she was up against the biggest cost of her life: $320.

This might seem like peanuts to an American audience used to ...

In the 1960s, Chairman Mao Zedong ordered scientists to find a malaria antidote to help ailing soldiers in North Vietnam. Today's Nobel Prize for medicine went to one of those researchers.

"If you don't have any money, then what's the point of managing it?"

That's a question that Stuart Rutherford encounters a lot. And, he says, it's a common "trap of thinking." People who have money think that people who are extremely poor — living on less than $1.25 a day ...

United Nations member states pledged Friday to eliminate extreme poverty by 2030. That's defined as surviving on $1.25 per person per day. What is life really like on that amount?

Right now, some 7,000 Thai workers are combing the Lapland wilderness of Finland and Sweden for bilberries, lingonberries and cloudberries. Each day, they hike into the woods that lie mostly above the Arctic Circle with buckets and simple scooping tools, emerging with up to 270 pounds in berries per person.

...