Measles outbreaks are costing the U.S. millions of dollars. The true losses can't be counted.
NBC News
In 2026, there have been over 1,000 cases of measles. If vaccination rates keep dropping, the costs of medical care, public health efforts and lost work productivity could skyrocket.
In early 2025, as measles began to tear through West Texas, Katherine Wells knew she needed money.
Though the outbreak was concentrated in Gaines County, a community an hour away, Wells, who heads Lubbock’s public health department, needed more staff to respond to numerous exposures at local pediatricians’ offices, urgent care centers, restaurants and day cares.
“We were really relying on staff that aren’t hourly, because I can work them for 80 hours if I have to, which is horrible,” Wells said. In emergency planning meetings with the Texas Department of State Health Services, she pleaded for roughly $100,000 to hire temporary workers to help her exhausted staff.
“I was like, can I just have money so that if I need a few hours of work from a retired school nurse who we’ve worked with before, I can just pay them?” Wells said.
The answer, she said, was consistently “no.” The state did send a few travel nurses from other areas to help, but no extra funding.
NEW YORK — As a man wearing a neon-blue jellyfish hat fought off draping tentacles to scroll through his phone and find the latest message from his personal AI assistant, three people wearing Pegasus wings flitted through a sweaty Manhattan apartment-turned-ballroom trying to recruit users for their latest AI solution.“It’s getting hot, and the lobster is getting warm,” said Michael Galpert, one of the hosts of the event, encouraging the thousand-plus crowd to settle down so the evening’s presentations could begin.
Two marsupial species thought long extinct, until now known only from fossils, were found alive in New Guinea through a collaboration of scientists, indigenous communities and citizen scientists
The Food and Drug Administration’s vaccine chief, Dr. Vinay Prasad, will depart the agency next month, an FDA spokesperson said.
Anthropic said Thursday that the Defense Department has designated it a threat to national security, a striking move that bans it from doing business with the U.S. military and could send shock waves through America’s AI industry
The bill would create a national weather safety board to investigate deadly disasters and recommend changes for the future. It would be styled after the National Transportation Safety Board.
After President Trump told pregnant women not to take Tylenol, orders for it declined among pregnant women who visited emergency rooms, according to new research.
Nebraska became the latest state to sue Roblox on Wednesday, alleging that the popular gaming platform exploits children and misrepresents its safety practices
A combination of balmy winter weather in the western United States and one of the worst snow droughts in decades has experts concerned about wildfire season.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman unveiled a reworked agreement with the Pentagon on Monday night governing the Defense Department’s use of its AI services, which he says provides stronger guarantees that the military won’t use OpenAI’s systems for domestic surveillance
ChatGPT Health — OpenAI’s new health-focused chatbot — frequently underestimated the severity of medical emergencies, according to a study published last week in the journal Nature Medicine
Most major tech companies have age restrictions on their powerful chatbots, but that hasn’t stopped some toy companies from claiming to use OpenAI and Google to power their products
U.S. women's hockey gold medal-winning captain Hilary Knight revealed Monday in a television appearance that she played in Milan with a torn medial collateral ligament in one of her knees."I'm not walking around the best, and I'm missing a few games for the (PWHL's) Seattle Torrent," Knight said on "CBS Mornings.""To be able to play through injury was definitely a mental sort of gymnastic challenge for myself and also physical, but we've got some amazing support staff that did their best to get me out there and perform at my best — as best as I could."Knight, playing at what she said was her final Olympics at 36, tied the final against Canada with just over two minutes left in regulation.
GLP-1 drugs — including Ozempic and Wegovy — may be tied to a slightly higher risk of osteoporosis and gout, according to research presented Monday at the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons’ annual meeting.Dr.