Author: TheConversation

By Ziyad Al-Aly, Chief of Research and Development, VA St. Louis Health Care System. Clinical Epidemiologist, Washington University in St. Louis Since 2020, the condition known as long COVID-19 has become a widespread disability affecting the health and quality of life of millions of people across the globe and costing economies billions of dollars in reduced productivity of employees and an overall drop in the workforce. The intense scientific effort that long COVID sparked has resulted in more than 24,000 scientific publications, making it the most researched health condition in any four years of recorded human history. Long COVID...

By Dylan Thomas Doyle, Ph.D. Candidate in Information Science, University of Colorado Boulder In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, researchers struggled to grasp the rate of the virus’s spread and the number of related deaths. While hospitals tracked cases and deaths within their walls, the broader picture of mortality across communities remained frustratingly incomplete. Policymakers and researchers quickly discovered a troubling pattern: Many deaths linked to the virus were never officially counted. A study analyzing data from over 3,000 U.S. counties between March 2020 and August 2022 found nearly 163,000 excess deaths from natural causes that were...

By John Swierk, Assistant Professor, Chemistry, Binghamton University, State University of New York Tattoos are an incredibly common form of permanent self-expression that date back thousands of years. Most tattoo artists follow strict health and sanitation regulations, so you might assume that tattoo inks are carefully regulated, too. But as work done by my team of chemistry researchers suggests, up to 90% of tattoo inks in the U.S. might be mislabeled. This is not just a case of a missing pigment or a minor discrepancy. These inks contained potentially concerning additives that were not listed on the packaging. WHAT...