Health

Members of the World Health Organization reached a landmark agreement on Wednesday on how to learn from COVID-19, which killed millions of people in 2020-22, and prepare the world for future pandemics.Sticking points on the road to the deal included how to share drugs and vaccines fairly between wealthy countries and poorer ones.The legally binding pact is widely seen as a victory for the global health agency at a time when multilateral organizations like the WHO have been battered by sharp cuts in U.S. foreign funding."After more than three years of intensive negotiations, WHO member states took a major step forward in efforts to make the world safer from pandemics," the health body said in a statement.U.S. negotiators left the discussions after President Donald Trump began a 12-month pro...

A new report from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) suggests autism diagnosis rates continue to rise in the U.S., sparking inflammatory rhetoric from government officials, while experts largely attribute the trend to improved screening and better understanding of the condition. The CDC reported Tuesday that an estimated one in 31 eight-year-olds in the U.S. have autism, using data from 14 states and Puerto Rico in 2022. The previous estimate — from 2020 — was one in 36.The CDC checked health and school records for eight-year-olds for its estimate, because most cases are diagnosed by that age. Boys continue to be diagnosed more than girls, and the highest rates are among children who are Asian/Pacific Islander, Indigenous and Black.The CDC acknowledges that its repor...

Babies and children up to age four could be breathing in plasticizers and other chemicals from their mattresses while they sleep, a Canadian study suggests.Federal regulations set limits on some phthalates or plasticizers, which are substances added to products to make them more flexible.Miriam Diamond, an environmental chemist at the University of Toronto, and her team designed an experiment to estimate how much of the compounds are released into a child's sleeping area from 16 different mattresses.In Tuesday's issue of the journal Environmental Science & Technology, the researchers reported that two of the mattresses tested did not comply with Canadian regulations for two phthalates and two plasticizers in consumer products. The regulations are based on potential harm to human health...