A new Australian study found that children who had COVID-19 during the first couple of years of the pandemic could be safely treated at home, taking the burden off hospitals. Children who had COVID-19 with moderate symptoms or preexisting high-risk conditions could be treated effectively via a Hospital-in-the-Home (HITH) program, according to the study. The…  read on >  read on >

Patients with a common vascular disease that causes blockages in their leg vessels had both worse symptoms and outcomes if they were Black or poor, new research finds. The study from Michigan Medicine looked at more than 7,000 patients with peripheral arterial disease (PAD) who had a lower extremity bypass operation to improve circulation. PAD…  read on >  read on >

Health care facilities remain one of the last places left in the United States with COVID-era mask requirements still in effect. It’s time for that to end, experts say. A prestigious collection of infection disease experts and epidemiologists say universal masking requirements in health care settings should be lifted, according to a commentary they published…  read on >  read on >

Nearly one-third of Americans live in counties with unhealthy air, according to a new report from the American Lung Association. One in three, or 120 million, people lives with unhealthy levels of ozone or particle pollution, the “State of the Air” report says. While air quality has improved overall, there are major differences between Eastern…  read on >  read on >

Seniors and people with weakened immune systems can get another booster dose of the bivalent COVID vaccine this spring, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced Tuesday. Seniors age 65 and older can get a booster at least four months following their first dose of the bivalent vaccine, which protects against both the original and…  read on >  read on >

Poverty is the fourth-greatest cause of death in the United States, according to new research. Researchers at the University of California, Riverside estimate that poverty was associated with 183,000 deaths in 2019 among people 15 years and older. And that’s a conservative estimate, they say, because the year was just prior to the COVID-19 pandemic.…  read on >  read on >

The sexually transmitted human papillomavirus (HPV) can cause a range of cancers, but public awareness of this grim fact is slipping in the United States, a new survey finds. While nearly 78% of respondents knew that HPV could cause cervical cancer in 2014, that dropped to about 70% in 2020, the investigators found. The common…  read on >  read on >