Your Health

At 31, a woman had the bacteria in her gut catalogued as part of scientific project that aims to characterize the creatures that live inside us and affect our health. Here's what she found out.

If TV and movie nurses took care of us when we're sick, we'd be in a heap of trouble. Those images of nutty, slutty and clueless nurses are bad news for the profession, and for patients.

Nature and nurture both matter, and having love and support from parents early on makes make academic and social success as an adult more likely, a study finds. But a child's temperament matters too.

A previously unknown form of botulinum toxin thought to be resistant to standard treatment raised public health concerns. Subsequent research has allayed those fears.

Public health has a way of slipping off the radar when people aren't scared about Ebola or anthrax. But that doesn't mean the threats go away. And most states aren't prepared for the next one.

Medicare will cut payments to hospitals with high rates of patient infections and injuries. Half of the nation's academic medical centers will be docked for making too many medical mistakes.

Inside the lab, a lone technician sorts through new samples, snipping off swab heads intentionally fouled with fecal material. One head goes to cold storage and the other is processed for sequencing.

Lipid metabolism may not sound sexy, but it's how you fit into that smaller pair of jeans. And when the fat says farewell, it has to go somewhere. Only some of it winds up in New Jersey.

Though blacks still lag whites nationwide in health, disparities have been largely eliminated in the western states, a study finds. Kaiser Permanente's Medicare HMOs did best on that.