The Latest Breaking News from Faye Flam

Faye Flam: Political polarization fuels medical misinformation

FDA commissioner Robert Califf said in an interview that aired this week that misinformation is killing Americans — contributing to the fact that our life expectancy is 3 to 5 years worse than that of people in comparably wealthy countries. He called for better regulation to crack down on misinformation.…

Tribune News Service · Apr 14, 2023

Faye Flam: CDC’s top priority has to be rebuilding public trust

COVID-19 was already spreading widely around the world in February and early March of 2020 — well before many Americans had gotten the message that the disease was something to take seriously. Now, the New York Times has reported that staffers at the disease intelligence service at the Centers for…

Tribune News Service · Mar 30, 2023

Faye Flam: We shouldn’t need body bags to learn from Ohio’s train disaster

If things had gone a bit differently, the chemicals on the train that derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, could have exploded, killing people on the spot, maybe hundreds. That’s the unacceptable risk thrust on communities across the country by the transportation of hazardous materials. Fixing the problem won’t be easy.

Tribune News Service · Feb 18, 2023

Faye Flam: Let's leave the oil — and the ‘zombie viruses’ — under the permafrost

Vast stretches of permafrost are melting as the Earth’s polar regions warm, thawing ancient viruses and bacteria that had remained frozen for tens of thousands of years. Behind the lurid headlines about “zombie viruses,” there’s some fascinating science — and a warning.

Tribune News Service · Dec 9, 2022

Faye Flam: Even a small nuclear war would mean mass famine

This century’s worst-case climate scenario isn’t global warming of 4 or even 5 degrees Celsius. It’s a nuclear winter that would trigger global cooling up to 12 or 13 degrees C.

Tribune News Service · Nov 20, 2022

Faye Flam: If you’ve had COVID, watch out for stroke symptoms

Harlan Krumholz, a cardiologist at the Yale School of Medicine, says he worries about two kinds of long COVID. There’s the obvious version where people suffer prolonged virus symptoms like fatigue, and a stealthier version in which people recover yet carry an added risk of blood clots and strokes.

Tribune News Service · Nov 5, 2022

Faye Flam: Better cancer screenings are coming. Can we afford them?

Patients and their doctors count on cancer screening tests to save lives, and yet a number of large, controlled studies are showing disappointing results for mammography and other mass screening tests. This month, the New England Journal of Medicine published a controversial study that cast doubt on the widely accepted…

Tribune News Service · Oct 26, 2022

Faye Flam: An NYU professor got fired. Then everyone missed the point

The disruption associated with the COVID-19 pandemic is loosening society’s grip on some stubborn assumptions about different facets of life, especially work and education. The latest: that the hardest college classes are the most rigorous, as exemplified in last week’s hullabaloo over the case of an New York University professor…

Tribune News Service · Oct 13, 2022

Faye Flam: Hunger and obesity are the same problem in the US

Scientific understanding is challenging the conventional wisdom about hunger — now framing it as a scourge that afflicts not only people who get too few calories, but also those who consume mostly sugar and refined starch. Under this new understanding, people eating the wrong kind of diet can suffer from…

Tribune News Service · Oct 6, 2022

Faye Flam: Here’s who really needs the new COVID booster

The new U.S. COVID booster campaign needs a dose of clarity about its goals and limitations. The latest “bivalent” vaccine — retooled to protect against the currently circulating BA.5 variant — will benefit some more than others. The oldest and most vulnerable citizens are likely to benefit most. Public health…

Tribune News Service · Sep 29, 2022