When President Bill Clinton worked with a bipartisan Congress to enact a federal program to guarantee vaccines for poor children, they agreed that the authority over buying shots from drug makers should rest with the health secretary. The bill’s drafters did not consider that an extremely vocal critic of childhood vaccines would emerge as a…
Over the past year, Muanema Fakira noticed something odd about the eyes of her 1-year-old daughter Sumaya. Her left eye was cloudy. It did not gleam with curiosity or glint in the sun. When the problem persisted, Ms. Fakira made the rounds to health clinics in their town in central Mozambique. Doctors said they could…
All they could grab were stuffed animals, toothbrushes, Barbie dolls and blankets. Their bunk beds, cleats and clothes burned with their houses. The New York Times interviewed 10 children and their parents about what it was like to flee the fires in Los Angeles. They talked about what they are worried about, and what is…
The last time Faida Pierre, 10, went to school, her mother found her stranded on the roof of the school’s building, barefoot and crying, while a gang stormed the surrounding downtown Port-au-Prince neighborhood. The principal and teachers had called parents to pick up their children as the sound of gunfire grew louder and armed men…
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has often trained his criticisms of vaccines on a common ingredient: aluminum, which he has suggested is responsible for a litany of childhood ailments, including food allergies, autism and depression. “You wonder why a whole generation of children is allergic to stuff,” Mr. Kennedy said during a 2021 interview. “It’s because…
There were more than 32,000 cases of whooping cough in 2024, the highest tally in a decade. In California alone, the disease struck 2,000 people between January and October last year. More than 60 infants younger than 4 months were hospitalized in the state. One died. Whooping cough, or pertussis, is just the most stark…
Most American parents hardly give thought to polio beyond the instant their child is immunized against the disease. But there was a time in this country when polio paralyzed 20,000 people in a year, killing many of them. Vaccines turned the tide against the virus. Over the past decade, there has been only one case…
The Harvard Sentences are hundreds of sentences that have been used for many decades to test technologies in which understanding speech is essential, like telephone systems and hearing aids. I came across the list recently and was charmed by it. Some sample sentences: It’s easy to tell the depth of a well. The hogs were…
Water fluoridation is widely seen as one of the great public health achievements of the 20th century, credited with widely reducing tooth decay. But there has been growing controversy among scientists about whether fluoride may be linked to lower I.Q. scores in children. A comprehensive federal analysis of scores of previous studies, published this week…
Britt Allcroft, a British producer, director and writer who adapted the antics of a cheerful, impetuous locomotive into a TV series, “Thomas & Friends,” which became a sprawling franchise and a longtime favorite of children and adults, died on Dec. 25 in Los Angeles. She was 81. Her death was confirmed by her daughter Holly…