Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA
PANAMA CITY BEACH, Fla. (AP) — Florida officials are plowing ahead with a proposal to roll back certain vaccine mandates for the state’s schoolchildren, after Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis called for the state to become the first in the nation to eliminate all school vaccination requirements. Pediatricians, infectious disease physicians and teachers have decried the push to undermine vaccines, which for generations have been a cornerstone of public health policy for keeping children and adults safe from potentially deadly — but preventable — diseases. Experts have warned that doing away with the mandates could allow for a dangerous resurgence of…
Along the 2024 presidential campaign trail, Donald Trump pledged to make in vitro fertilization, or IVF, free – part of his party’s wider push for a new American “baby boom.”But in October 2025, when the administration revealed its IVF proposal, many health care experts pointed out that it falls short of mandating insurance companies to cover the procedure.Since Trump returned to the White House, it has become clear just how fraught IVF is for his base. Some conservative Christians oppose IVF because it often involves destroying extra embryos not implanted in the woman’s uterus.According to Politico, anti-abortion groups lobbied against…
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved Flow Neuroscience’s at-home brain stimulation device to treat depression, offering an alternative to typical antidepressants that can cause side effects with long-term use, the company said on Thursday.Depression rates in the U.S. have surged 60% over the past decade, affecting more than 20 million adults, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.Flow’s FL-100 delivers a gentle electrical current to the part of the brain that regulates mood and is designed for home use under remote supervision. It is the first such device to be approved in the U.S.The device is…
(This is an excerpt of the Health Rounds newsletter, where we present latest medical studies on Tuesdays and Thursdays.)Dec 12 (Reuters) – Pfizer’s Tukysa added to maintenance therapy significantly delayed disease progression in patients with HER2-positive metastatic breast cancer who had responded well to initial treatment, according to results of a late-stage trial.Tukysa, known chemically as tucatinib, belongs to a drug class known as tyrosine kinase inhibitors that block the HER2 protein on cancer cells, helping to slow or stop tumor growth.The drug is already approved for use in colorectal cancer and for later-stage breast cancer.The 654 patients in the…
LONDON (AP) — King Charles III will speak about his cancer diagnosis and recovery during a TV broadcast on Friday as the monarch continues to use his personal story to encourage others to get the early screening that can boost their chances of survival.The recorded message will be broadcast at 8 p.m. on Britain’s Channel 4, giving Charles the opportunity to reflect on his experiences in the 22 months since he announced he would undergo treatment for an undisclosed type of cancer.Charles’ decision to disclose his diagnosis was a departure for Britain’s royals, who have traditionally considered their health to…
By Deena BeasleyDec 12 (Reuters) – Alzheimer’s trials testing Novo Nordisk’s blockbuster GLP-1 drug semaglutide, despite their failure, underscore a shift to approaching the brain-wasting disease as a system of complex pathways, much the way the field of cancer therapeutics has been transformed in recent years, experts say.Just two drugs are approved to slow Alzheimer’s – Eli Lilly’s Kisunla and Leqembi from Eisai and Biogen. Both were shown to delay disease progression by around 30% by removing toxic amyloid plaques from the brain, but progress is being made to identify other targets and strategies for arresting the disease.Globally, over 55…
Dec 12 (Reuters) – The US Food and Drug Administration intends to put a ‘black box’ warning on COVID-19 vaccines, CNN reported on Friday, citing two people familiar with the agency’s plans.The ‘black box’ is the most serious type of warning, which highlights major risks such as serious side effects and restrictions.The plan to install the warnings for COVID shots is being orchestrated by Vinay Prasad, the FDA’s chief medical and scientific officer and director of the agency’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, the report added.Vaccine makers Moderna, Pfizer and Novavax, as well as the U.S. Department of Health…
As Nvidia works to install some of its newest chips in Microsoft data centers, an employee at the GPU giant observed in early fall that Microsoft’s cooling approach at one facility seemed “wasteful.”Nvidia has been deploying its GB200 Blackwell architecture at Microsoft and other tech giants as demand for compute to train and run AI models surges.Blackwell, announced in March 2024, is roughly twice as powerful as its predecessor, Hopper, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said at launch. GB200 is part of an earlier wave of Blackwell deployments, with the GB300 generation now available.In early fall, an internal email sent by…
LinkedIn is full of corporate braggarts. But don’t expect the best engineers to flaunt their success on the platform — or even have an account, according one former Meta employee.Michael Novati spent almost eight years at Meta, back when it was still called Facebook and hadn’t yet doubled down on AI. He reached the rank of principal software engineer and earned the nickname “coding machine.”On the “A Life Engineered” podcast, host Steve Huynh asked Novati about his claim that the top five engineers aren’t on LinkedIn. Novati stood by it.”When I was at Facebook, the top engineers were like, ‘If…
ROME (AP) — A national strike called on Friday by Italy’s largest trade union in protest against the government’s budget plans widely disrupted transportation, health and school services across the country.The protest, which targets the 2026 budget bill proposed by the conservative government of Premier Giorgia Meloni, comes just two weeks after another general strike organized by smaller trade unions, with the same motivations.The strike mainly hit railway transportation, with cancellations and delays registered for both long-distance and regional trains. Public schools across the country canceled classes, forcing students to stay home because of a lack of local public transportation…