Richard Harris

If someone is infected by the Loa loa worm, taking a drug to treat river blindness could be risky. Now there's a fast way to identify the worm — by turning a smartphone into a microscope.

It's a deadly combination of infection and inflammation striking more than a million Americans every year. Doctors can treat the symptoms of sepsis, but they still can't treat the underlying problem.

In order to improve the quality of health care and reduce its costs, researchers need to know what works and what doesn't. One powerful way to do that is through a system of "registries," in which doctors and hospitals compile and share their results. But even in this era of ...

A woman who caught pneumonic plague in Colorado last summer likely contracted it from her friend or his dog. Antibiotics limited the outbreak to four people and cured them.

Saturday's magnitude-7.8 quake released stress that was building for 150 years, scientists say, and it reshuffled tension to nearby faults.

Genetic profiling of cancer cells can help guide treatment, but such profiles can be ambiguous. Results would be more accurate if all labs tested normal cells from each patient, too.

Renegade cells floating through seawater apparently cause the cancer, scientists say. Though people can't catch it, the malignancy might offer clues to how cancer cells spread in the human body.

Doctors long ago noticed that, beyond the usual influences of diet and smoking, short people seem to get heart disease more often than tall people. But why?

Does the imbalance start at conception or are there factors during pregnancy that favor the birth of slightly more males than females? Researchers find clues that point to factors in the womb.

Medical researchers have made only modest progress treating the most common cancers since the war on cancer was declared in 1971. 

Medical researchers have made only modest progress treating the most common cancers since the war on cancer was declared in 1971. The disease has proved far more complicated than doctors had hoped.

When someone asks whether we're winning the war on cancer, the discussion often veers into the world of numbers. And, depending on which numbers you're looking at, the answer can either be yes or no.

Let's start with the no.

The number of cancer deaths in this country is on ...

Medical researchers have made only modest progress treating the most common cancers since the war on cancer was declared in 1971.

Federal law requires publicly-funded medical researchers to promptly report the results of many experimental treatments. But few are doing so, a review shows, and patients may be hurt.

The Food and Drug Administration has approved a drug that thwarts some enzymes breast cancer cells use to evade treatment with estrogen-blocking drugs.

Tobacco's link to lung cancer, stroke and heart attack is well known. But smokers are also more likely to die from kidney failure, infections, and breast cancer, a revised tally suggests.

Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Margaret Hamburg says she'll leave the job at the end of March after six years in the spotlight and controversies over Plan B emergency contraception.

Scientists launched a large trial Monday to test two vaccines. But testing Ebola drugs in West Africa is proving more difficult than expected because the disease is disappearing rapidly.

You may soon be able to donate your personal data to science. There are plans afoot to find 1 million Americans to volunteer for a new Precision Medicine Initiative that would anonymously link medical records, genetic readouts, details about an individual's gut bacteria, lifestyle information and maybe even data ...

Scientists studying HIV and Ebola have noticed another virus hitching along for the ride in some blood samples. Now they're trying to figure out whether the lurker helps the body fend off disease.