A life-saving but increasingly expensive treatment for severe allergic attacks is poised to become cheaper.

Synthetic cannabinoids are behind yet another mass overdose in the U.S. More than 70 people in New Haven, Connecticut suffered overdoses thought to be caused by the lab-made drug known as K2 within the span of a day, NBC Connecticut reported Wednesday. As a result, 72 people were sent to a hospital to be checked out,…

More people are dying from drug overdoses in the U.S. than ever before, according to a new preliminary report released Wednesday by the federal government. There were an estimated 72,287 drug overdose deaths last year, the report found, with the majority caused by opioids. The toll is yet another record high.

Physicians who get paid extra by pharmaceutical and medical device companies often aren’t forthcoming about the money in their research papers, according to a study out Wednesday in JAMA Surgery. It found that many of the doctors who receive the most in industry payments only occasionally disclose their potential…

The State of New York is suing Purdue Pharma, one of the largest manufacturers and distributors of opioid painkillers, for what it says is the company’s role in driving the opioid crisis. On Tuesday morning, the attorney general’s office announced that it was filing a lawsuit against the pharmaceutical company for…

Not getting enough or the right kind of sleep is notoriously bad for physical health. But a new study out of the University of California, Berkeley suggests that poor sleep can be a nightmare for our social lives too. It just might turn us into lonely outcasts, capable of spreading our misery to others.

Couples in the U.S. looking to either conceive or avoid pregnancy will now have a new tool available to them. On Friday, the Food and Drug Administration announced it has permitted a digital birth control app to be marketed as such in the U.S. The app, called Natural Cycles, is the first medical device of its kind to…

A recent survey suggests that some people struggling with opioid addiction might be turning to a tragically desperate method to get more prescription painkillers: Hurting their own pets. And veterinarians themselves may be abusing opioids or helping to illegally sell them.

It’s long been thought that tighty-whiteys and other kinds of snug underwear can be bad for men’s semen quality, thanks to the warmer temperatures they can cause down below. And a new study out of Harvard University seems to confirm that suspicion. It found that men attending a fertility center who regularly wore…

Ketogenic diets (keto for short) have become the fad health trend of the moment, with adherents claiming that they can help you lose and keep off weight faster than anything else, as well as provide a bevy of health benefits. But a new mouse study out of Switzerland suggests that keto diets might have an unintended…

As worrying as new invasive species of parasitic ticks might be, a recent report released by the lab testing company Quest Diagnostics should remind us of the more pressing dangers these eight-legged bugs can cause. It suggests that not only have cases of the tick-borne Lyme disease substantially risen in the past few…

Given their current popularity, you might assume that probiotics—capsules containing a mix of “good” bacteria that are said to rebalance our gut’s bacterial content—would be perfectly harmless. But a team of gastroenterologists from Augusta University in Georgia is challenging that assumption. Their recent study is…

There’s a strange gender paradox at the heart of cardiovascular disease. Men are more likely to be diagnosed with a heart condition in their lifetime than women, but diagnosed women are less likely to survive. A study out today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences offers a new theory for this…

One of the most famous charity organizations in the world—the March of Dimes—has suddenly become much less charitable to the scientific causes it funded. The organization has canceled research grants totaling $3 million that it had already awarded to dozens of scientists, Nature reported Friday.

People are increasingly turning to an unconventional drug to supplement their opioid addiction, suggests a new report published this week. And some are getting sick as a result. Since 2014, hundreds of people have apparently rung up their local poison control center in connection to tianeptine, an antidepressant not …

The devastating story of thalidomide—a once-popular morning sickness drug later found to cause terrible birth defects—might have a few more chapters left to it. A new study published this week in the journal eLife claims to have discovered how the drug was able to so brutally harm developing fetuses in the 1950s and…

Chipotle’s years-long redemption tour might have hit a snag. Throughout this week, health officials in Ohio have reported hearing from hundreds of people in connection to an outbreak of sickness that appears to be linked to one of the chain’s locations in Delaware county.

Despite a growing awareness of the dangers and risks of opioid addiction among doctors and patients, the average amount of opioids prescribed to Americans over the past decade has barely budged, suggests a new study published Wednesday in The BMJ. But it’s difficult to know just how much this reality accounts for the…

Bacteria are steadily winning the war against even our strongest antibiotics, stoking fears of a future that resembles Victorian-era England in all the worst ways. A new study published Wednesday in Science Translational Medicine is sure to add to this existential terror: It suggests that at least some hospital-spread…