News by Subject Medicine & Health

An NYU pediatrician and researcher writes in JAMA Pediatrics that new recommendations on testing children for lead are inconclusive, but do not mean that we should abandon screening children for elevated lead levels.

Research led by The University of Tokyo examined why the United Nations Millennium Development Goal for access to safe drinking water was achieved when all previous attempts had failed. They looked at previous targets, definitions of water safety, and relations with population movement and socioeconomic change. They found keys to success were the relatively easier and somewhat ambiguous targets, huge population migration in China and urban and rural development in India, and economic development.

Air pollution from diesel engines may worsen allergy-induced lung impairment more when tiny particles are filtered from the exhaust than when they are not, according to new research published online in the American Thoracic Society's American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine.

Overpumping in California's Central Valley has depleted groundwater storage capacity and caused the land to sink. A new model based on remote sensing data could help zero in on where water managers can replenish aquifers by flooding fields.

A new study indicates that the microbes we track into buildings--the microscopic bacteria and other microorganisms that thrive on our skin and outdoors--can help break down harmful chemicals in household dust.

Investigators from a large population-based study conducted in northern England have suggested that exposure to a persistent, low-level environmental trigger may have played a role in the development of autoimmune diseases of the liver within that population.

Dangerous airborne viruses are rendered harmless on-the-fly when exposed to energetic, charged fragments of air molecules, University of Michigan researchers have shown.