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Our Take: The current regulatory landscape for digital health tools is complex and doesn’t lend itself to easily determining where digital health tools belong or how they should be regulated. As a result it is not clear how to design these tools within regulatory guidelines and what process they should or may need to follow…

With approved vaccines and better health-care systems, 2 recent outbreaks in Africa have been managed quickly and with few deaths The era of large and deadly Ebola outbreaks may soon be over, thanks in part to vaccines and improvements in health-care delivery. After lengthy Ebola virus disease outbreaks claimed thousands of lives in both West…

Unidos Contra COVID totes shots, empathy and facts to Philadelphia’s Spanish-speaking residents  In a makeshift tent behind a soccer goal and close enough to a taco stand that the smell of grilling barbacoa and carnitas drifts over, Melissa Pluguez cheerfully asks a man, in Spanish, if he’s right- or left-handed. The man, wearing jeans and…

The algorithms carry out an array of crucial tasks: helping emergency rooms nationwide triage patients,  predicting who will develop diabetes, and flagging patients who need more help to manage their medical conditions. But instead of making health care delivery more objective and precise, a new report finds, these algorithms — some of which have been in…

Facebook unveiled a remarkable piece of internal infrastructure in the spring of 2020. Called Web-Enabled Simulation (WES), the platform is a detailed replica of Facebook, with artificial user accounts ranging from simple bots that browse the site to machine-learning-based agents that mimic social interactions. The sophistication of the platform is astonishing. Going far beyond traditional realms of…

Scott Gottlieb also expressed concern about U.K. study showing brain-tissue shrinkage after covid-19 The transmission of the more contagious delta variant in the United States could spur a fall surge in coronavirus infections if only 75 percent of the country’s eligible population is vaccinated, former Food and Drug Administration chief Scott Gottlieb said Sunday. Although Gottlieb cited…

In the earliest days of the pandemic, it was the small, long-underfunded coterie of dedicated coronavirus researchers answering almost all of the world’s questions about the emerging threat. But as SARS-CoV-2 took off, researchers from other specialties flooded in, drawn by the scale of the emergency, a desire to put their skills to use, and the competitive…

New research: Sweeteners could cause gut bacteria to invade the intestine New research has discovered that common artificial sweeteners can cause previously healthy gut bacteria to become diseased and invade the gut wall, potentially leading to serious health issues. The study, published in the International Journal of Molecular Sciences, is the first to show the pathogenic effects…

Research can tell us only so much. The rest is a waiting game. Midway through America’s first mass-immunization campaign against the coronavirus, experts are already girding themselves for the next. The speedy rollout of wildly effective shots in countries such as the United States, where more than half the population has received at least one…