Public Health

MISSOULA, Mont. — Missoula’s new downtown library was teeming with people who might typically spend a Saturday afternoon hiking, biking or otherwise making the most of Montana’s abundant outdoor recreation. One look at the soupy haze blanketing the city and it was clear why. “We’re definitely trying to stay out of the smoke,” Charlie Booher […]

As a deadly heat wave scorched the Pacific Northwest last month, overwhelming hospital emergency rooms in a region unaccustomed to triple-digit temperatures, doctors resorted to a grim but practical tool to save lives: human body bags filled with ice and water. Officials at hospitals in Seattle and Renton, Washington, said that as more people arrived […]

The drugmaker Pfizer recently announced that vaccinated people are likely to need a booster shot to be effectively protected against new variants of covid-19 and that the company would apply for Food and Drug Administration emergency use authorization for the shot. Top government health officials immediately and emphatically announced that the booster isn’t needed right […]

ST. LOUIS — The day after Missouri Gov. Mike Parson finished his bicentennial bus tour to drum up tourism to the state in mid-July, Chicago issued a travel advisory warning about visiting Missouri. Earlier this summer, as covid-19 case counts began to tick up when the highly transmissible delta variant took hold in the state, […]

Miché Aaron has always been a high achiever. The 29-year-old is in her third year of a planetary sciences doctoral program at Johns Hopkins University, where she researches minerals found on Mars. She’s a former NASA space grant scholar and hopes to become an astronaut one day. But last year, Aaron was barely keeping it […]

[UPDATED on July 20] On a sweltering June morning, Novavax CEO and covid vaccine maker Stanley Erck stood on a stage unmasked and did something that would have been unthinkable six months ago: He shook hands with Maryland’s governor. Erck was with Gov. Larry Hogan to announce Novavax’s global vaccine headquarters ― a campus expected […]

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — The best part about returning to the pandemic-besieged state Capitol is that the elected officials are so unused to seeing us reporters after more than a year that some are occasionally extra chatty. The bad part is that the masks make it harder to eavesdrop on the rest of them. Much like […]

Los tambores se escuchaban sin parar mientras los fanáticos de la selección mexicana de fútbol se reunían en Empower Field, en Mile High, para un partido de fútbol internacional. Pero dentro de una casa rodante médica móvil estacionada cerca del estadio, había silencio y el tono era profesional. Durante el medio tiempo del partido de […]

Horns blared and drums pounded a constant beat as fans of the Mexican national soccer team gathered recently at Empower Field at Mile High in Denver for a high-profile international tournament. But the sounds were muted inside a mobile medical RV parked near the stadium, and the tone was professional. During halftime of Mexico’s game […]

Opening two new medical schools in Montana would stretch and possibly overwhelm the state’s physicians who provide the clinical training that students need to become doctors, according to leaders of a University of Washington medical school program that relies on those teaching physicians. The University of Washington School of Medicine’s WWAMI program in Montana requires […]