Medical Discovery NewsBridging the World of Medical Discovery and You

While antibiotics save lives, long term or repeated use of it is linked to obesity, type two diabetes, heart disease and even cancer – likely because they disrupt our gut microbiome. A single course of antibiotics causes drastic changes within days and a big drop in the diversity of the microbes. And a new study reveals that certain antibiotics cause changes that can last four to eight years.

Behind mosquitos, ticks pose the greatest health risk to us among all creepy crawlies and animals. They can transmit microbes that cause serious diseases such as Lyme disease and babesiosis, an infection of red blood cells. Ticks pass on pathogens when they latch onto our skin using their mouths to feed on our blood. Proteins in their saliva immobilize our immune response, and scientists have been studying this mechanism for ways to manipulate it to our benefit.

While Dave and I both want to age well, we don't know how much is out of our hands or how much damage has already been done. We'll discuss two studies on brain health to show that you can improve it - but only up to a point.

One way to gauge the value of the COVID-19 vaccines is to calculate how many people would have been sickened and died without them. Just in the US, we would have had one and a half times more infections, nearly 4 times more people hospitalized, 4 times more deaths, and more than $1 trillion in added medical costs.