Health

By Deidre McPhillips, CNN Cancer mortality rates have been dropping for nearly two decades, aided by “major progress” in the early detection and treatment options for lung cancer, according to the American Cancer Society’s annual report on cancer statistics, published Wednesday. The overall cancer death rate dropped by about a third (32%) from its peak

By Sandee LaMotte, CNN Need to quickly put a name to a face on a company video call? About to play charades online with your new partner’s entire family? Or are you fretting about putting a name to that colleague’s face when you do go back to work in person? One day soon you may

By Melanie Radzicki McManus, CNN When the coronavirus pandemic temporarily closed gyms nationwide in 2020, many people opted to do their workouts at home through online instruction. Even after fitness facilities reopened, a good number of individuals elected to stay at home. That’s probably why online training nabbed the top spot in the Worldwide Survey

The question hung in the air like a bad odor, silencing the small group of fully vaccinated and boosted friends and family at my dinner table.

By Sandee LaMotte, CNN The question hung in the air like a bad odor, silencing the small group of fully vaccinated and boosted friends and family at my dinner table. “Why not just get Omicron and get it over with? It’s mild, right? And it can boost immunity?” The fully vaccinated, boosted, well-educated friend who

By Travis Caldwell, Jason Hanna, Deidre McPhillips and Christina Maxouris, CNN As the Omicron variant spreads like wildfire across the United States, it’s likely just about everybody will be exposed to the strain, but vaccinated people will still fare better, the nation’s leading infectious disease expert said Tuesday. “Omicron, with its extraordinary, unprecedented degree of

By Katherine Dillinger, CNN A 57-year-old Maryland man is doing well three days after receiving a genetically modified pig heart in a first-of-its-kind transplant surgery, University of Maryland Medicine said in a news release Monday. David Bennett had terminal heart disease, and the pig heart was “the only currently available option,” according to the release.

By Sandee LaMotte, CNN Exercise is good for you. Breaking a sweat has been shown to improve nearly every organ in the body, fight nearly every disease doctors diagnose and improve nearly every health condition that you might live with on a daily basis. It gets even better. A new study finds exercise boosts levels

By Lisa Drayer, CNN The new year brings with it some old circumstances: working from home, self- isolating again, and having close access to food almost all of the time. Some of us may enjoy more home-cooked meals and not having to walk too far for a snack, but working close to the refrigerator poses

By Katie Hunt, CNN Like many people, historian A. Roger Ekirch thought that sleep was a biological constant — that eight hours of rest a night never really varied over time and place. But while researching nocturnal life in preindustrial Europe and America, he discovered the first evidence that many humans used to sleep in

By Dakin Andone and Susannah Cullinane, CNN About 24% of US hospitals are reporting a “critical staffing shortage,” according to data from the US Department of Health and Human Services, as public health experts warn the Covid-19 surge fueled by the Omicron variant threatens the nation’s health care system. “Given how much infection there is,

By Eryn Mathewson, CNN The last 12 months have been weird for me. I’m a pretty healthy 39-year-old marathon runner. And yet I had a heart attack, was subsequently diagnosed with a rare disease, and broke my right clavicle — all within months of each other, all unexpected and unwelcome. This past year was supposed

By Travis Caldwell, CNN As a Covid-19 testing shortage compounds a burgeoning crisis of new hospitalizations, more states are racing to help hospitals and health care networks with staff and supplies. Staffing shortages are growing as frontline health care workers — who are at a higher risk of exposure — are infected and need to

By Jamie Gumbrecht, Naomi Thomas and Jen Christensen, CNN The US Food and Drug Administration is cautioning against using self-collected throat swabs for Covid-19 tests and says people should use the tests as instructed. “FACT: When it comes to at-home rapid antigen #COVID19 tests, those swabs are for your nose and not your throat,” it

By Jen Christensen, CNN Many people are hearing from their doctors that they have a “mild” Covid-19 infection amid a surge of the highly contagious Omicron variant of the coronavirus, but your illness may not feel as minor as “mild” sounds. It was true for Michelle Cordes, a dietitian at a Chicago-area hospital. She’s vaccinated

By Madeline Holcombe, CNN As a professionally trained dancer for nearly 20 years, I’ve found that a combination of pirouettes and leaps across the floor can leave me sweaty and breathing heavily on the other side — but I often don’t even notice it. The rush of joy, power and freedom of dancing far outweighs

By Travis Caldwell and Mallika Kallingal, CNN Covid-19 hospitalization rates among children are soaring in the United States, with an average of 4.3 children under 5 per 100,000 hospitalized with an infection as of the week ending January 1, up from 2.6 children the previous week, according to data from the US Centers for Disease

By Naomi Thomas, Virginia Langmaid and Jamie Gumbrecht, CNN Former health advisers to President Joe Biden say the US strategy for the Covid-19 pandemic needs to be updated to face a “new normal” of living with the virus, rather than aiming to eliminate it. In three pieces published in the Journal of the American Medical

By Dr. Sanjay Gupta, CNN Chief Medical Correspondent With more than a half-million Americans being officially diagnosed with Covid-19 every day, the need for clear guidance on isolation and quarantine is critically important. Sadly, the guidance from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is continuously changing, confusing and at times contradictory. Dr. Gerald

By Sandee LaMotte, CNN Wearing headsets, 18 subjects lay quietly while a functional magnetic resonance imaging machine (fMRI) droned on around their heads. They listened as a female voice recited a famous line from a cherished children’s book, “The Little Prince.” “It is only in the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential

By Katia Hetter, CNN Schools are shutting down and children’s hospitals are filling up with young patients sick from the latest, most highly transmissible coronavirus variant, Omicron. Parents and caregivers are once again faced with what to do to keep their kids safe and occupied during another year of pandemic life. Is it OK to