Health | featured news

Pharmacy compounding has come under a spotlight in recent months, after a center produced pain medicine contaminated with fungus that caused a national meningitis outbreak.

A soda that claims to prevent the absorption of fat in your body is launching in Japan this week. What’s next, cavity-reducing candy?

Doctors trying to find some of the causes of autism put another piece into the puzzle on Monday: They found women who had flu while they were pregnant were twice as likely to have a child later diagnosed with autism.

Rather strange news was bouncing around Reddit recently, and it all started with a man relieving himself on a pregnancy test stick. In case you don’t know how a pregnancy stick works, here’s a quick tutorial: remove stick from box, pee on stick, watch to see if a pink line, blue line, plus or minus symbol, or whatever symbol the instructions tell you to look for appears. If the symbol appears, you are probably pregnant — that is, if you’re a woman.

It was just an e-mail about a single case of illness, but a gut instinct developed through years of disease detective work made Dr. Marion Kainer sense a bigger danger. Kainer, the director of health care-associated infections for the Tennessee Department of Health, started investigating the day she got that e-mail and hasn't stopped since. She camped out in her office for three weeks, leading a team of state workers as they traced the source of what would become a national outbreak of fungal meningitis.

Dashing the hopes of those who hope to pop a pill to prevent heart disease, doctors announced Monday that daily multivitamins don't stave off cardiovascular problems, such as heart attacks, stroke or death.

Two Texas sisters, ages 12 and 10, run in some of the most grueling races in the nation, but doctors say they are not in danger despite how young they are... The national championship trail run was held on a course both grueling and beautiful, more than 13 miles through the mountains near the Great Salt Lake. Most of it was an unrelenting up-and-down, the path often hugging ridges along a steep plunge, curling through a forest of scrub oak, white pine and red maple. The elevation hit a lung-busting 7,300 feet.

Boys left infertile by childhood cancer treatment may one day be able to produce healthy sperm by using stored stem cells, monkey research suggests.

A study on mice suggests that pheomelanin pigment, which gives rise to red hair, is itself a potential trigger for melanoma, the deadliest form of skin cancer. Doctors have long urged people with red hair, fair skin and freckles to avoid the sun and its damaging ultraviolet rays.

Zac Vawter considers himself a test pilot. After losing his right leg in a motorcycle accident, the 31-year-old software engineer signed up to become a research subject, helping to test a trailblazing prosthetic leg that's controlled by his thoughts.