For most of the past century, the United States’ track record on infectious disease has been quite good. Thanks to major investments in public health, diseases such as smallpox, polio,…
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The first time that Mehmet Oz was questioned by the Senate, in June 2014, the atmosphere was not inviting. He’d been hauled in to defend his habit of promoting unconventional…
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Maybe you were one of the 11.7 million people who watched when, on House M.D., the genius diagnostician Gregory House is roused in the middle of the night by a…
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He was one of the few ICU patients whose face I saw in early 2021, when COVID raged through Los Angeles. As a palliative-care physician, my job was to meet,…
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Mycobacterium tuberculosis is a near-perfect predator. In 1882, Robert Koch, the physician who discovered the microbe, told a room full of scientists that it caused one in seven of all…
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There seems to be a limit to how anti-vax is too anti-vax in the Trump administration. Yesterday, hours before Dave Weldon was slated to begin his Senate confirmation hearing for…
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Updated at 10:56 a.m. on March 14, 2025 Until the second Trump administration took over, the National Institutes of Health—the world’s single largest public funder of biomedical research—was not in…
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The wonder of the American supermarket is the way it exists outside of seasons. Stroll into any major grocery store on a dreary winter day, and you’ll find a bounty…
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In the early evening of March 7, 2020, I was on my cellphone in an airport terminal, telling a friend that I was afraid to write an article that risked…
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Photographs by Jake Dockins This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here. Peter greeted me in the mostly empty gravel parking…