A new variant of COVID-19, dubbed cicada, is less susceptible to vaccination and appears to discriminate based on age, scientists say. The variant appears less threatening to older individuals, preferring young people instead.

Cicada, formally named BA.3.2, is a mutation of the omicron COVID-19 branch that first appeared in 2021. It has been ...Read more

MINNEAPOLIS — Children’s Minnesota hospital system resumed gender health care services it had suspended in late February in response to efforts by President Donald Trump’s administration to cut off federal funding.

A favorable federal court ruling led to the reversal, Children’s said in a written statement on Monday, April 6. The health...Read more

Southern California’s Salton Sea was once a resort playground, with sunny beaches, celebrities and people waterskiing on the vast inland lake in the 1950s and ’60s.

Today, those resorts are long gone, replaced by a drying and increasingly toxic landscape. As the lake shrinks, wind blowing across the exposed lakebed kicks up toxic dust left ...Read more

Life Time is leaning into premium offerings and higher prices, a bet that’s paying off.

Founder and CEO Bahram Akradi said the fitness company continues to move away from a traditional gym model built on large numbers of infrequent users.

Instead, it is building what he calls “a social, athletic country club environment.”

Custom scent ...Read more

MINNEAPOLIS — Taylor Hastings will likely go down in “Love is Blind” history as the only contestant on the reality-dating show to ask each of her suitors if he’s had a colonoscopy.

It was an unusual romantic icebreaker, but maybe it shouldn’t be.

We’ve got to normalize talking about colorectal cancer screenings, says Hastings, an ...Read more

All children need to feel safe, understood and valued. This is especially true for children who have experienced trauma. Early, hurtful experiences can cause children to see the world differently and to react in seemingly unpredictable ways.

Children who have been adopted, have been placed into foster care, or have experienced significant ...Read more

Bluestem Health, a clinic that serves low-income and uninsured patients in Lincoln, Nebraska, has lost money for the last two years.

And CEO Brad Meyer fears times will soon get worse for the clinic and its 21,000 patients. That’s because Nebraska is set to become the first state to require certain Medicaid enrollees to work or lose their ...Read more

Severe ankle pain drove Jelon Smart to start taking a weight loss injection a year and a half ago.

Smart was 285 pounds and worked as a caterer in Savannah, Georgia. After she’d been standing on her feet for long hours, her ankles would be “as swollen as a football,” she said. She was walking with a limp. An orthopedic doctor diagnosed ...Read more

Free, largely confidential and available 24 hours a day via call, text or online chat, the 988 Lifeline — formerly the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline — is among the most accessible and effective suicide prevention tools in the U.S.

People have contacted the service roughly 25 million times since July 2022, when the previous 10-digit ...Read more

BIG SANDY, Mont. — The emergency department at Big Sandy Medical Center is one room with a single curtain between two beds.

It’s one of the many parts of the 25-bed rural hospital that need updating, former CEO Ron Wiens said.

He said the hospital, an essential service in its namesake town of nearly 800 residents in the state’s sprawling...Read more

Tax time can come with big surprises for some people who have Affordable Care Act coverage, including owing money back to the government for premium subsidies received during the previous year.

More changes lie ahead that make it important for those getting subsidies in 2026 to track their income and take steps to protect against that kind of ...Read more

The patient initially came to see Mark Supiano in 2017 because her family was concerned about her short-term memory loss.

While taking her history and vital signs, Supiano, a geriatrician at the University of Utah, saw one disturbing signal: Her blood pressure was 148/86, above normal despite her taking two medications intended to lower it. “...Read more

WASHINGTON — As Democrats vie to take control of Congress in the midterms this fall, their main message on health care policy is fairly straightforward: undo Republicans’ Medicaid cuts and restore the health care subsidies that lapsed at the end of last year.

But some analysts and lawmakers say momentum is growing for a bigger health care ...Read more

A measles outbreak in Washtenaw County may be spreading due to community transmission, health officials said Thursday, announcing that a case has now confirmed in neighboring Monroe County.

Due to the continued spread, state officials are temporarily recommending that families in southeast Michigan have their infant children vaccinated at an ...Read more

Proposals to ban or regulate kratom, a plant-based substance sold in gas stations, convenience stores and vape shops, are making headlines in local newspapers across the United States. But as lawmakers debate whether to regulate or ban kratom, public health problems associated with the drug continue to rise.

In late March 2026, the ...Read more

Six months after a West Virginia man died following a protracted battle with his health insurer over doctor-recommended cancer care, the state’s Republican governor signed a bill intended to curb the harm of insurance denials.

West Virginia’s Public Employees Insurance Agency enrolls nearly 215,000 people — state workers, as well as their...Read more

Do you ever find yourself at the end of a nonstop day feeling like you haven’t made progress on the things that are actually important to you? If so, you’re not alone.

If you are a person with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD, you might find it even harder to direct your effort toward what’s most important – ...Read more

In 2013, a scientist at Abbott Laboratories saw study results with potentially big implications for the company’s profits and the lives of some of the world’s most fragile people: preterm infants.

The upshot, she wrote in an email: Babies fed rival Mead Johnson Nutrition’s acidified liquid human milk fortifier — a nutritional supplement...Read more

Last summer, Lorena Alvarado Hill received a series of unexpected medical bills.

A teacher’s aide in Melbourne, Florida, Hill is a single mom who works shifts at J.Crew on the weekends to send her daughter to college. Hill and her mother, who lives with her, had been enrolled in an insurance plan through HealthFirst.

Hill paid nothing toward...Read more

Last August, as part of the federal government’s crackdown on people in the country illegally, the Trump administration sent states the names of hundreds of thousands of Medicaid enrollees with orders to determine whether they were ineligible based on immigration status.

But seven months later, findings from five states shared with KFF Health...Read more