WASHINGTON (AP) — Federal government advisers last week were split on whether drugmakers need to update their COVID-19 vaccines for next season. The Food and Drug Administration’s outside researchers have met annually since the launch of the first COVID-19 vaccines to discuss tweaking their recipes to stay ahead of the virus. The challenge is trying [...]
Excess body weight can raise the risk of certain cancers, leading researchers to wonder whether blockbuster drugs like Wegovy, Ozempic and Zepbound could play a role in cancer prevention. A new study of 170,000 patient records suggests there’s a slightly lower risk of obesity-related cancers in adults with diabetes who took those popular medications compared [...]
WASHINGTON (AP) — Annual COVID-19 shots for healthy younger adults and children no longer will be routinely approved under a policy shift unveiled this week by the Trump administration. Top officials for the Food and Drug Administration laid out new requirements for yearly updates to COVID shots, saying they’d continue to use a streamlined approach [...]
Health officials are making a renewed call for vigilance against bird flu, but some researchers are puzzling over why reports of new human cases have stopped. “We just don’t know why there haven’t been cases,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, director of the Pandemic Center at Brown University. “I think we should assume there are infections that [...]
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Food and Drug Administration has issued a long-awaited approval of Novavax’s COVID-19 vaccine, but with restrictions. Novavax makes the nation’s only traditional protein-based coronavirus vaccine and, until now, it had emergency authorization from FDA for use in anyone 12 and older. Last week, the FDA granted the company full approval for [...]
Researchers at The Ohio State University are investigating West Nile virus and the transmission cycles of the insect-borne disease in an effort to determine the best way to limit its spread. Scientists hope to pin down the process by using mathematical models to analyze how factors such as temperature, light pollution and bird and mosquito [...]
People taking Eli Lilly’s obesity drug, Zepbound, lost nearly 50 percent more weight than those using rival Novo Nordisk’s Wegovy in the first head-to-head study of the medications. Clinical trial participants who took tirzepatide, the drug sold as Zepbound, lost an average of 50 pounds over 72 weeks, while those who took semaglutide, or Wegovy, [...]
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Trump administration has made an effort to impose new requirements on Novavax’s COVID-19 vaccine, the nation’s only traditional protein-based option for the coronavirus. Novavax earlier this week said that the Food and Drug Administration was asking the company to run a new clinical trial of its vaccine after the agency grants [...]
Emily Kramer-Golinkoff can’t get enough oxygen with each breath. Advanced cystic fibrosis makes even simple things such as walking or showering arduous and exhausting. She has the most common fatal genetic disease in the country, which afflicts 40,000 Americans, but her case is caused by a rare genetic mutation, so medications that work for 90 [...]
Many Americans were forced to postpone cancer screenings for several months in 2020 as COVID-19 overwhelmed doctors and hospitals. Yet that delay in screening isn’t making a huge impact on cancer statistics, at least none that can be seen yet by researchers who track the data. Cancer death rates continue to decline, and there weren’t [...]