The King County Health Department, which serves mostly the city of Seattle and its suburbs, has recently earned a reputation for being driven by politics rather than by evidence-based medicine or common sense.

As the highest quality of care continues not to be the emphasis in the health care debate — let alone be on par with discussions around access – Canadian health systems remain in the spotlight. This time multiple hospitals in southern Ontario shut their doors to the sickest of babies. 

Many people talk about increasing STEM programming for young people, especially in underrepresented populations. But few of us actually walk the walk. Well, the same cannot be said for The Society for Science & the Public. Recently it lent its support to five organizations through their STEM Action Grants Program.

The hypothesis that lipids – those nasty cholesterols – are responsible for cardiovascular disease has been the king of the theoretical mountain. But a new study suggests that lipids do not tell the entire tale.  

1. A Herpes vaccine is a lot more tricky than it may seem, given the number of people who have it, and have had it for thousands of years. A film crew for a documentary tentatively titled "Patient Zero" visited the office to interview medicinal chemistry expert Dr. Josh Bloom, due to his series of articles on three competing vaccines jockeying to solve this problem.

The Food and Drug Administration has just approved a reformulation of amantadine for the treatment of Parkinson's Disease. It's a significant step forward.

Researchers describe wild cattle on Amsterdam Island in the southern Indian Ocean, ones that lost about 25% of their body size in just over 100 years.

Cinnamon is a staple in your pantry, but should it have a place in your medicine cabinet? Experts say, hardly. In fact, too much of a good thing can be harmful. 

There's good and bad cholesterol. And if we want to avoid certain types of heart and circulatory problems, we want to lower the bad, LDL and raise the good. But how high is enough? And is it possible to get the good, HDL too high? If the results of a recent study are confirmed, yes, having HDL that's too high won't help your heart.

Who hasn’t chuckled at a TV prescription drug ad, during its litany of wide-ranging potential side effects? Anal leakage and the oft-repeated erections lasting more than four hours? With direct-to-consumer marketing, product overstatements of health benefits with simultaneous minimization of possible harms have become the norm. Now, the FDA wants to change that.