Scott Hensley

CVS Caremark has pulled cigarettes from its shelves a month ahead of schedule.

In February, CVS, one of the nation's largest drugstore chains, said it would stop selling tobacco products by October, despite the profits they brought the company. Now cigarettes in the company's stores are history.

Why are they ...

An Ebola vaccine being developed by the National Institutes of Health and drugmaker GlaxoSmithKline is going to get a try in healthy people starting next week.

The number of Ebola cases and deaths continues to climb in Western Africa, underscoring the need for a vaccine to protect people from ...

The human toll of the Ebola epidemic in West Africa is becoming clearer by the day. The virus has killed at least 1,350 people, making this the largest outbreak of the disease ever.

There's no Ebola cure, and only a few experimental treatments are in the works.

One called

Sometimes called the fastest game on two feet, lacrosse is also one of the fastest-growing sports in the U.S.

Between 2008 and 2012, kids' participation in lacrosse climbed 158 percent to a little more than three-quarters of a million, according to a survey conducted by the Sports & Fitness ...

Everyone seems to talk about feeling stressed out. But what's the reality of stress in America these days?

NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard School of Public Health conducted a nationwide poll in March and early April to find out.

Our questions zeroed in on the effect ...

There's no getting around the fact that the abuse of prescription painkillers is a huge problem in the U.S. Prescription drug overdoses now kill more people each year than car crashes.

But the overdose risks vary quite a bit depending on where in the country you live. One ...

Perhaps we should have expected that the contradictory stories about a middle-aged man's heart attack would lead to a vigorous conversation about whether the doctors and nurses or the patient and his wife were right in their descriptions.

The piece by Dr. Leana Wen, an emergency physician, about ...

Prescriptions for narcotic painkillers have surged in recent years. Fatal overdoses and abuse of the drugs have risen, too. Doctors and patients are grappling with how to balance the need for pain relief with the potential for trouble.

In April, Judy Foreman, author of A Nation in Pain,

Bike-sharing is taking cities by storm.

Rental stations across town give people a quick way to get around — and get some exercise.

But there's a catch.

When you pick up a bike, you usually have to bring your own helmet or go without one. If you ride with your ...

OK, so now we know for sure that camels can, in fact, transmit the virus that causes the Middle East respiratory syndrome to humans.

DNA tests found that the virus that infected a 44-year-old Saudi Arabian man sickened with MERS matched a virus found in a camel on his ...

When the Food and Drug Administration gave the OK to a new treatment for a parasitic disease called leishmaniasis in late March, the Canadian company that owns the medicine got something that's quite likely to prove even more valuable than U.S. sales of the drug will ever be.

After all, ...

Bayer has announced it is buying Merck's consumer drugs business, and Pfizer is trying to take over AstraZeneca. Why is this reorganization happening now, and what does it mean for drug development?

Among the states that looked to expand health coverage to nearly all their citizens, Massachusetts was an early front-runner.

The state passed its own health care law back in 2006 mandating near-universal insurance coverage. That law became a model for federal action. And after the Affordable Care Act went through ...

Pfizer finally fessed up and told the world that it wants to buy British drugmaker AstraZeneca. It wasn't a very well-kept secret.

The New York-based drugmaker confirmed publicly that it approached AstraZeneca in January about getting together. AstraZeneca, based in London, rebuffed the New Yorkers.

Pfizer executives said Monday ...

The launch of Sovaldi, the $1,000-a-day pill for hepatitis C, is shaping up as the most successful ever.

The Food and Drug Administration approved the pill in December. And then Gilead Sciences was off to the races. The company said it sold $2.27 billion worth of Sovaldi in the quarter ...

One of the world's largest drugmakers says it will invest more than $200 million in Africa over the next five years in a push for better treatment of noncommunicable diseases there.

GlaxoSmithKline said the funding would be focused on sub-Saharan Africa, where the company already employs about 1,500 people and ...

You had better not cuddle up with the My Sweet Love/My Sweet Baby Cuddle Care Baby Doll from Wal-Mart.

First of all, she gets sick on cue. The battery-powered doll coughs and babbles. Her cheeks flush, too.

You can make her better with a medical kit that includes a ...

Everybody knows smoking is hazardous. Being around someone who smokes isn't such a good idea either. "There's no safe amount of secondhand smoke," the surgeon general has said.

Now thirdhand smoke is getting scrutiny. What's thirdhand smoke? It's the residue from smoke that settles onto clothes, hair, furniture or ...

The latest treatment to prevent migraines is a headband that looks more like something you'd expect to see in Star Trek than the doctor's office.

But don't let the slick design fool you. The basic pain-stopping technology inside the Cefaly headband has been around for decades.

The battery-powered headband ...

What can doctors do to help kids stay away from drugs?

There's not much evidence to say one way or the other, it turns out.

The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, which issues guidelines on what doctors should and shouldn't do, said there aren't enough reliable studies around to come ...