All Sauce from Weekly Sauce:

For the first time in two decades, the infant mortality rate in the United States has risen, new government data shows. In a report released Thursday by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, researchers found that more than 20,500 babies died in 2022 before the age of 1. Overall, there were 5.6 infant deaths for…  read on >  read on >

The Olympics are often described as a rare, once-in-a-lifetime shot at international sports glory. That may be more true for Olympic track and field competitors than other athletes, a new study reports. There appears to be a peak performance age for track and field athletes, who specialize in running, jumping and throwing events, researchers report.…  read on >  read on >

Farmers and folks living in agricultural areas may be exposed to levels of pesticides that confer cancer risks that are higher than if they smoked, new research shows. These extra risks were most pronounced for certain cancers: non-Hopkins lymphoma, leukemia and bladder cancer, the researchers noted. Various pesticides mix together to raise the odds for…  read on >  read on >

Finding yourself packing on the pounds around your waist and arms? If so, you might be at heightened risk for neurological illnesses like Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s, new research suggests. There was one other physical characteristic that lowered the odds, however: muscle strength. Stronger folk appeared to have a lower odds for neurological illnesses compared to…  read on >  read on >

Obese kids infected with dengue are significantly more likely to suffer severe illness requiring hospitalization, a new study warns. A new analysis of nearly 5,000 dengue-infected Sri Lankan children found that weight plays a powerful role in how sick the mosquito-borne virus can make a kid. Kids with higher BMIs had higher hospitalization rates than…  read on >  read on >

Millions of Americans deal with the sleep deficits brought on by sleep apnea, and many turn to one of the few treatments out there, continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) machines. But what if new neurochemical targets in the brain could lead to new, less cumbersome therapies for sleep apnea? That’s what a team at the…  read on >  read on >

Synthetic antibiotics that attack bacteria in two directions at once could be the solution for combatting antimicrobial-resistant bugs, a new study claims. These dual-action antibiotics, called macrolones, disrupt bacterial cell function in two different ways. It’s nearly impossible for bacteria to resist macrolones, because the germ would need to defend against both attacks at once,…  read on >  read on >

Hospitals and clinical laboratories across the United States are facing a critical shortage of bottles used to culture blood samples, federal health officials report. Without the ability to culture blood, patients might receive the wrong antibiotics to treat conditions like endocarditis, sepsis and catheter-related blood infections, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned…  read on >  read on >

Misuse of illicit prescription drugs is falling dramatically among U.S. high school students, a new study says. The percentage of seniors who say they’ve misused prescription drugs in the past year has dropped to 2% in 2022, down from 11% back in 2009, researchers reported July 24 in the Journal of the American Medical Association.…  read on >  read on >