DENVER -- Over the last five years, Larimer County in northern Colorado has seen what appears to be a steady, sustained drop in its suicide rate — a potentially significant breakthrough in a state that consistently ranks in the top 10 nationally for its high rate.

How the county got there was a decade-long affair in which local officials, ...Read more

PHILADELPHIA — The Immunodeficiency Center at Jefferson Einstein Philadelphia Hospital opened in 1994 with 40 patients unable to get care from other doctors who were wary of treating HIV patients or didn't know how to provide the specialized care they needed.

Thirty years later, the center has expanded beyond HIV care to provide psychiatric, ...Read more

Did you know that anorexia is the most lethal mental health condition? One person dies from an eating disorder every hour in the U.S. Many of these deaths are not from health consequences related to starvation, but from suicide.

Up to 1 in 5 women and 1 in 7 men in the U.S. will develop an eating disorder by age 40, and 1 in 2 people ...Read more

In the past few years, state and local governments across the U.S. have begun spending billions in opioid settlements paid by companies accused of fueling the overdose crisis. But where is that money going, who is getting it, and is it doing any good?

KFF Health News, partnering with the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and ...Read more

Ann Lewandowski knows all about pharmacy benefit managers, or PBMs, the companies that shape the U.S. drug market. Her job, as a policy advocate at drugmaker Johnson & Johnson, was to tell patient and physician groups about the PBMs’ role in high drug prices.

Armed with that knowledge, Lewandowski filed a potentially groundbreaking lawsuit in...Read more

ATLANTA — The U.S. government’s premier research body has made an important discovery that could help create new drugs to lower “bad” cholesterol, and hopefully prevent heart attacks and stroke.

But the interesting part of that story isn’t just the discovery itself, but the technology responsible for it: a relatively new type of ...Read more

BALTIMORE — The Baltimore City circuit courthouses and the District Court on East Fayette Street reopened Thursday after being treated for Legionella bacteria earlier this week.

Legionella is the bacteria which can cause Legionnaire’s disease, a severe form of pneumonia. The city recommended the courthouses close last week despite the ...Read more

When the idea of price transparency first took hold outside purely academic circles, the pitch was simple: Coloradans would save themselves and the system money by shopping for health care the way they do for TVs or cars.

But shopping for health care has proven more difficult than buying consumer goods. A poll released in August found about 69%...Read more

Tom Contos is an avid runner. When he started experiencing rectal bleeding in March, he thought exercise could be the cause and tried to ignore it. But he became increasingly worried when the bleeding continued for weeks.

The Chicago health care consultant contacted his physician at Northwestern Medicine, who referred him for a diagnostic ...Read more

New Year's resolutions are typically sweeping and grand. But you can often reap the biggest rewards by building off strengths already in place. Helping to make your family safer, stronger and more harmonious in the coming year may not require a complete overhaul, but rather a few strategic tweaks.

The start of a new year is a great time to take...Read more

Imagine a world where food on grocery store shelves is ranked by its healthiness, with simple, research-backed scores. In some countries, that world already exists.

Nutrient profiling systems, or NPSs, support clear front-of-package labels that assess food quality based on nutrient content. Nutri-Score in France is a rainbow-colored ...Read more

SEATTLE — Starting this spring, the University of Washington will try a new approach to helping students and employees in mental health crises, based on a philosophy that's become increasingly mainstream: Mental health professionals are better equipped than police to respond to some emergencies.

In emergencies that don't involve a safety risk...Read more

As Mark McAfee — the maverick leader of California’s largest raw milk dairy — works on getting his Fresno County dairy out of bird flu quarantine, his name has surfaced as a possible advisor for the Food and Drug Administration on shaping raw milk policy in the United States.

The founder of Raw Farm credits a celebrity customer, Robert F....Read more

LOS ANGELES — President-elect Donald Trump’s promise of mass deportations and tougher immigration restrictions is deepening mistrust of the health care system among California’s immigrants and clouding the future for providers serving the state’s most impoverished residents.

At the same time, immigrants living illegally in Southern ...Read more

MINNEAPOLIS -- On a recent cloudy winter Sunday, Peg McCormick, 72, was picking up a pair of sunglasses at the Warby Parker in the North Loop neighborhood of Minneapolis for an upcoming snow-escaping trip to Mexico.

Though she has purchased glasses from the retail chain for years, her resounding review of the process in general: “I hate ...Read more

Tescha Hawley learned that hospital bills from her son’s birth had been sent to debt collectors only when she checked her credit score while attending a home-buying class. The new mom’s plans to buy a house stalled.

Hawley said she didn’t owe those thousands of dollars in debts. The federal government did.

Hawley, a citizen of the Gros ...Read more

The question of nature vs nurture usually refers to a person’s personality and character and asks which one is most likely to determine who you will be as an adult. But the question of nature vs nurture is also relevant to your risk of developing certain diseases.

Your genetic makeup, passed onto you from your parents, determines everything ...Read more

Pomegranates are a vibrant, ruby-red fruit with an unusual composition. Although beautiful, the skin is tough and leathery, and the white pith thick and bitter. When eating a pomegranate, what you’re after is actually the seeds (also called arils), which are juicy, sweet, and tart. If you don’t know what you’re doing, it can be challenging...Read more