Health stories on Noozify — original reporting and curated links, ranked by the community.
The device is called Aletta, and it is the first standalone robot cleared to draw blood from a patient's arm without hands-on intervention. It is authorized for adults in outpatient settings and must run under the oversight of someone trained in phlebotomy — but a single phlebotomist can supervise three machines at once. That ratio is the point: blood draws are among the most common procedures in American medicine, and a shortage of trained phlebotomists has been adding delays. This is the FDA's own announcement.
A law that made animal tests optional, a headline that said they were over, and the quiet regulatory machinery that actually decides what counts as proof.
A study of more than 15,000 moderate and severe injuries in a national trauma database for England and Wales found traumatic brain injury about 3.5 times as common among e-scooter riders as among motorcyclists, and 1.7 times as common as among cyclists. More than a third of injuries to adult e-scooter riders involved a brain injury. Helmet use tracks the gap: 6% of e-scooter riders wore one, against 45% of cyclists and 76% of motorcyclists. Children made up roughly 16% of injured e-scooter riders. The researchers had no data on distances travelled, so the finding is that the pattern of injuries differs — not that a given e-scooter trip is riskier. Published in Scientific Reports.
A study in Addiction tracked calls to US poison centers: 19 kratom cases in 2010, 1,242 in 2023. Severe outcomes — life-threatening events, lasting disability, death — went from zero to 158. Hospitalizations involving kratom alone climbed more than 1,150% over the decade, and nearly 1,300% when it was combined with other substances. It is sold in gas stations as a mild herbal supplement, and remains largely unregulated at the federal level.
The FDA added Arkansas, Iowa, Missouri, Nebraska, New Hampshire, and North Carolina to the outbreak traced to iceberg lettuce grown in central Mexico and recalled by Taylor Farms on July 17, bringing the confirmed outbreak to 6,358 illnesses across 15 states. It is centered in Michigan, which has recorded the only two deaths — cyclosporiasis is rarely fatal.
Ohio's health department now reports 4,013 cyclosporiasis cases across 80 counties, up from 2,576 just a week earlier, as the nationwide multistate outbreak — tied to shredded lettuce served at Taco Bell locations — pushes past 20,927 confirmed illnesses.
The first approved CRISPR therapy is now available to toddlers with sickle cell disease. It works — and it costs more than most American homes. That tension is the real story.
A new paper points to the smartphone as a provocative culprit behind the sharp decline in US fertility since 2007, though some researchers are skeptical that a single factor could drive such a long-term trend.
A study of people living in Sardinia, Italy – one of the world's so-called Blue Zones – found that personality may be just as important as diet and exercise for reaching 100.