by Jessica Samuels
For 100 years, food fortification, the practice of deliberately increasing the content of vitamins and minerals in a food, has been essential to combating public health crises. However, these practices have continued into the modern era. Because overconsumption of nutrients has been linked to toxicity and diseases, public health officials should…

by Rupa Palanki
The United States increasingly faces a crisis in maternal and infant health care. Over 2.3 million American women of reproductive age live in maternity care deserts — counties with little to no access to birthing centers and obstetric care. These deserts often result from rural hospital closures, health care provider shortages,…

Photo credit: Melisa Slep
by Rishita Nandagiri and Lucía Berro Pizzarossa
Discussions about abortion tend to be dominated by considerations pertaining to medicine (e.g., “safety”) and law (e.g., “legality”). Medication abortion — misoprostol alone or in combination with mifepristone — has dramatically shifted these discussions. Brazilian women used misoprostol to self-manage their abortions in the…

by Donrich Thaldar
As the era of genomic medicine dawns, large-scale genomics projects are becoming increasingly central to health care advancements. Projects like FinnGen in Finland, the UK Biobank, and the All of Us initiative in the United States are charting new frontiers in precision medicine, enabling researchers to unlock the genetic codes underlying…

by Rebekah Ninan
This summer, a startling study from researchers at University of California, Berkeley revealed tampons from several brands contain toxic heavy metals like lead, arsenic, and cadmium. This finding follows the 2023 discovery that many menstrual products contain per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), even those marketed as PFAS-free. All of these contaminants are…

by Elena Caruso
While the exact definition of self-managed abortion remains blurred, it currently tends to refer to the end of a pregnancy through the autonomous administration of pills outside of a public health facility. The World Health Organization (WHO) recommends self-management for pregnancies under 12 weeks, using a combination of mifepristone and misoprostol…

by Abeer Malik
Imagine: Overjoyed at your pregnancy, you eagerly track every milestone, logging daily habits and symptoms into a pregnancy app. Then tragedy strikes—a miscarriage. Amidst your grief, authorities knock at your door. They’ve been monitoring your digital data and now question your behavior during pregnancy, possibly building a case against you using your…