If your circadian rhythm is constantly being thrown off by your terrible, no good, absolutely miserable nights of sleep, congratulations, you might also have a whole new kind of depression. It’s called circadian depression, a term coined by researchers at the University of Sydney in Australia, who published their findings in the British Journal of Psychiatry and detailed them in a press release.
The researchers analyzed data from over 11,000 participants with severe or recurrent depression. After a while, the researchers figured these people probably weren’t suffering from your run-of-the-mill doom-and-gloom. Their internal body clocks seem fundamentally out of whack.
They all seem to be suffering from the same debilitating combo of traits, like seasonal mood shifts, severe morning fatigue, delayed sleep timing, and something called “social jet lag, which is when your weekend sleep schedule looks completely different than your workweek schedule. For instance, they might sleep for five hours on a weekday and 11 hours on a weekend.
Scientists Just Identified a New Type of Depression Linked to Your Body’s Internal Clock
As you can imagine, that kind of life comes with tremendous downsides. In this case, the study notes that people with circadian depression are more prone to hitting rock bottom early in life. They might also suffer from mania at higher rates, along with psychosis, and tend to have suicidal thoughts.
If that wasn’t enough, they also have elevated genetic risks for other ailments that blaze their own paths of destruction, like inflammation that leads to all sorts of health issues, ADHD, and heart issues.
Sadly, common treatments like SSRIs and SNRIs don’t often work on these people since the condition stems from a misfiring of their internal clocks. Traditional antidepressants can’t fix that.
Instead of a pill that fixes everything, researchers suggest fixing your chronobiology. Light therapy might help. Taking melatonin before bed could help you knock out. Maintain a stricter bedtime and bedtime routine. You know, all the stuff you’ve probably already tried. Hey, can’t hurt to try it all again.
South Korea is ground zero for a lot of the hottest, and flat-out craziest, beauty trends of the past decade. There is a new one out there that its creators are hoping catches on in the US, which is a bit ironic considering that it’s made from the skin of dead people from the US.
According to a feature by Business Insider, American tissue banks have been shipping donated cadaver skin to South Korean biotech firms who are chopping up and processing this American skin to turn into injectable “skin boosters” like Re2O, an injectable and pricey treatment that turns your face dewy and smooth thanks to a puréed dead American.
It sounds dystopian and rather gross, and it’s a little of both. See, when Americans check the donor box at the DMV thinking that they’re going to help someone with kidney failure, they still might, but also, their skin might get shipped across the Pacific to a country like South Korea that lacks enough domestic donors. So, companies like L&C Bio snatch up all the American tissue they can from supply hubs in places like San Antonio and Florida.
A Bizarre New Korean Beauty Treatment Uses Skin Harvested From Dead Americans
Re2O made a ton of money in the first half of 2026 alone, raking in $17 million in sales. Broadly, skin-derived injectables are on track to hit $75 million in South Korean sales.
But what good is your product if you can’t sell it to Americans so you can unlock the achievement of selling their own dead skin back to them? like how Tyler Durden took pride in selling people’s liposuctioned fat back to them in a bar of soap? L&C Bio has signed a $60 million distribution deal to bring its human tissue-based beauty injectable into American med spas.
The company says Re2O is part of a broader family of products that don’t need FDA approval, but an FDA spokesperson told Business Insider that sometimes products that don’t actually meet that criteria still get sold. Who knows what will happen there.
It is all quite dystopian, especially if you are an organ donor and hope that, should you meet an untimely demise, your skin be used to help someone in desperate need of, say, a skin graft. The something so ignoble about the thought of your skin being turned into a smoothie that makes a rich person’s skin more supple.
The weird subsection of Americans who think eating soy-based products somehow makes you weaker is really not going like this: a researcher used a variety of factors to determine which food was the best protein source. Tofu was the clear winner, and it wasn’t even close.
In a study published in Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems, Dr. Chris Macdonald created the BPI Score, a rating system that puts a variety of popular high-protein foods under the microscope to determine which one comes out on top after a variety of factors are taken into consideration.
The short version of the results is that plant-based proteins were all at the top and animal-based proteins were mostly at the bottom, with a couple of exceptions.
This, of course, raises the question of the criteria on which these 20 popular high-protein foods were judged. There are two primary BPI score categories: a People Score (focused on stuff like cholesterol content, saturated fat, sodium content, etc.) and Planet Score (considers the protein’s impact on climate change, land use, pollution, etc.).
Tofu Just Beat Meat in a New Study Ranking the Best Protein Sources
Tofu destroyed the competition, coming out on top in 36 out of a possible 40 points on the scale. At the opposite side of the spectrum was cheddar cheese, which scored a measly 13 points. Let’s all give cheddar cheese a polite round of applause for still being an odd but delicious complement to a crunchy Taco Bell taco.
To understand why tofu blew out the competition, you have to consider the whole, visually off-putting slab of white, gelatinous goo. The BPI score scales everything per 100 grams of protein, meaning beef emits about 100 times more greenhouse gases than tofu and uses way more land. Pair that with the fact that tofu is a fine source of protein, packing all nine essential amino acids and zero cholesterol, and it makes sense why, all things considered, tofu is the protein champion of the world.
Overall, plant-based proteins dominated animal-based proteins, with only chicken breast and tuna cracking the top 10, and even then they ranked in the back half, at numbers seven and eight, respectively.
There are some points of contention, like the study’s use of UK grocery prices, which makes sense since the researcher is from the UK and received funding from two UK universities, including the University of Cambridge. But since he didn’t even factor in ethical issues like farm animal welfare, it’s safe to say animal protein got lucky.
BRUSSELS — Extreme heat killed more than 50,000 Europeans this summer. Climate change was responsible for two-thirds of the death toll.
Those are the stark findings from two new peer-reviewed studies in the academic journal Nature Health, marking the first comprehensive assessment of fatalities during this year’s record-breaking heat waves.
The figures come from around 850 cities across Europe, meaning the full death toll, including rural areas, is higher still. The scientists also found that this summer was the deadliest so far this century, far outstripping previous records.
“I think we can be quite confident in stating that the summer of 2026 is likely to have been the worst on record for heat-related mortality across much of Europe,” said study lead author Clair Barnes, an extreme weather researcher at Imperial College London.
“These numbers are a stark reminder that our hotter, more extreme summers are having an increasingly severe impact on public health. Behind these statistics are real people whose lives were lost and real families who grieve for them,” she added.
Scientists from Imperial College and the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine examined 854 cities in the European Union, the United Kingdom, Norway and Switzerland, home to about 40% of the 30 countries’ population.
Both papers estimated heat-related excess deaths by analyzing temperature records and historical heat-mortality models, a method the researchers say has consistently produced results mirroring official statistics later released by governments.
To isolate the role of climate change, the scientists then compared the actual weather seen in these cities to a temperature model representing a world without global warming.
They found that more than 50,000 heat-related excess deaths occurred in those cities this summer, with around 32,000 attributable to climate change driving up temperatures.
The studies also showed how exceptionally deadly this year’s summer proved. Between 2000 and 2025, the first paper found a total of 430,000 heat-related deaths, with around half caused by climate change. The 2026 figures eclipsed the previous records of 29,000 deaths in 2022 and 28,000 in 2003.
Almost a third of this summer’s heat-related deaths occurred during Europe’s late June heat wave that smashed several temperature records.
And while the elderly were the worst-affected population group, the death toll of this summer included around 6,000 people under the age of 65.
“The burden was greater among older adults. People aged 85 and over accounted for roughly half of the estimated deaths,” said Garyfallos Konstantinoudis, study co-author and assistant professor at Imperial College.
“However, heat-related mortality was not limited to the older populations,” he added. “Even among younger adults, people aged between 20 and 44, we estimated more than 800 excess deaths.”
Although the case is considered exceptional, investigators are working to determine how the infection occurred and whether the pathogen played a role in the patient’s death.
ADHD can be bad enough on its own, and now we get news from a study published in JAMA Network Open by researchers at University College London and the University of Liverpool that a meta-analysis of nearly 16 million people across three continents found that people with ADHD have a 70 percent higher rate of death from all causes across the board…which significantly plummets when they get on medication.
Living with a brain that constantly refuses to fully hold onto ideas and actions is already an exhausting full-time nightmare and can leave people feeling like they don’t have full control over their own lives. And now, on top of that, tracking data across two decades reveals that having ADHD comes with a huge drop in life expectancy.
Suicide risk rockets by 90 percent, while injury-related fatalities jump by 55 percent. Even boring old dying of natural causes creeps up by 27 percent due to the link to physical issues like cardiovascular disease and the kind of erratic health habits you’d expect someone with attention deficit issues to have.
ADHD Is Linked to a 70% Higher Risk of Death, According to a Major New Study
With ADHD, impulse control glitches out, and ordinary situations that most people can tackle as effortlessly as they grieve can sometimes, for the ADHD mind, become dangerous. Think stuff like drifting off behind the wheel or forgetting to take pills that manage a chronic illness. In the United States, our healthcare system is such a tangled mess of unnecessary bureaucracy that it’s quite easy to imagine someone with ADHD giving up and forgetting about filing a claim or even getting on a healthcare plan to begin with.
It sounds quite depressing, that is, until the researchers found that all of that could be mostly eliminated if someone with ADHD remembers to regularly take ADHD medication. Among those diagnosed, participants taking ADHD meds saw their overall mortality risk drop by about 25 percent. The researchers note that this specific metric comes from a smaller subset of three studies, but the overall idea is that getting an accurate ADHD diagnosis and pairing it with the right medication can help you get your taxes done on time.
It will also help you remember to pay your rent, take out the trash, and maybe even finish that romantasy novel you’ve been working on, and may eventually help you live longer
Microsoft’s new AI diagnostic system beat generalist doctors on hard cases, according to a study in Science. But most of the improvement seems to come from the AI models underneath, not from Microsoft’s system itself.
New Yorkers march in support of universal healthcare this summer. | LightRocket via Getty Images
Americans are furious about the state of our healthcare system.
A recent KFF poll found 60 percent of US adults worry about the cost of medical care — more than gasoline, food and groceries, or their rent or mortgage. One in three Americans say they worry every day or almost every day about their ability to afford healthcare, per a new survey from the Pew Research Center. There seems to be a growing appetite for reform, too: More than 65 percent of Americans say they support the government spending more tax dollars to lower healthcare costs.
Democrats are trying to weaponize those frustrations against the Republicans who currently hold Congress and the White House. By a 2-to-1 margin, voters say they trust Democrats over Republicans on healthcare. That could mean single-payer Medicare-for-all or a new public insurance option or maybe something else. What all this energy leads to will depend on what happens in November. The candidates themselves are framing the stakes in those existential terms.
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“Medicare for all is where we need to go,” Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic candidate in the Michigan Senate race whose support for the policy has been widely covered, said during an August interview with CNN. “And my hope is, both coming out of the 2026 midterms and then out of 2028, that we’re going to be on our way to a Senate majority to be able to get this done.”
Real change will have to wait for the 2028 presidential election and a new occupant in the White House. But this year’s midterms are still a make-or-break moment: The candidates who get elected this year, and how they shape the upcoming presidential primary debate and actions in Congress, will determine whether healthcare reform happens at all.
If you’re fed up with the state of American healthcare, and you want to see a change, you should show up for the midterms on Tuesday, November 3.
Big midterm wins can beget big healthcare wins
The classic pattern in American elections is that more voters go to the polls during presidential campaigns than during the midterm elections when only House and Senate seats are on the ballot. Turnout has started to tick up for the midterms in recent years, but it still trails behind presidential years. Midterms suffer from the perception that there’s not as much at stake if the White House is not on the line.
But that’s never been strictly true.
Midterm elections are extraordinarily important in shaping the future of policymaking, even if the payoff is delayed. They help determine both the character of the Congress that could eventually pass a major bill after the next presidential election, and the kind of ideas and policies that are going to be prioritized.
“Voters should see 2026 and 2028 as the elections that will guide the next big change in our healthcare system,” said Natalie Davis, CEO and co-founder of the advocacy group United States of Care, in a statement to Vox. “These elections will be how voters’ demands are heard — and will tell us whether the next real window for change will come with serious reforms or missed opportunity.”
A walk through the recent history of healthcare reform should help make the stakes of the 2026 elections clear.
In 2006, the national mood looked similar to what we’re seeing today. A very unpopular Republican president was in office, and the country had soured on his agenda. George W. Bush’s foreign wars and his misguided attempt to overhaul Social Security gave Democrats an opportunity to win big in the 2006 midterms — and they did. Dems won more than 30 seats and secured a comfortable majority in the House. In the Senate, they won six seats and narrowly took control of that chamber too.
It was a resounding rejection of the Bush administration, and it set up the next decade of Democratic policymaking. At the highest level, the midterms gave energy to the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, united as they were around their opposition to the Iraq War, and that energy carried over to the presidential primary. Barack Obama defeated Hillary Clinton and won the presidency, springboarding off of the excitement that started with the 2006 elections.
Dems’ success in the midterms also helped put lowering healthcare costs at the forefront of the Democratic agenda. That encouraged both Obama and Clinton to develop detailed healthcare policy proposals during their primary campaigns and ultimately set the stage for the Democrats to pursue the Affordable Care Act once they had full control of the government in 2009.
And then there is the literal size of the congressional majorities that parties need to pass their agenda. Voters may not spend much time thinking about whip counts, but one or two elections in a midterm year can ultimately decide the fate of the next president’s agenda.
Part of the reason Democrats were able to pass the ACA was that they built on their huge wins in 2006 with more wins in 2008 and held massive congressional majorities once Obama was sworn in. And once the debate over healthcare reform really got started, they needed every single vote. It was especially important in the Senate: Democrats had exactly 60 votes in 2009. That meant if all of them united together, they could pass filibuster-proof legislation — so long as nobody defected. That was only possible because in 2006 Mark Pryor won a Senate seat in Arkansas, Sherrod Brown triumphed in a Senate race in Ohio, and Jon Tester beat an incumbent Republican in Montana.
Without those wins in 2006, the Democratic legislative agenda in 2009 would probably have looked different. They might’ve had to pursue a more limited healthcare reform plan; maybe the ACA wouldn’t have passed at all.
What kind of Democrats will be on the rise in 2028?
The 2006 midterms both created the opportunity for the ACA — and set the limits on what the legislation could actually achieve. Democrats had that 60-seat Senate majority, but within it were many more moderate members. Policies like the public option (which would have authorized the government to create its own health insurance plan to sell alongside private insurance) couldn’t get sufficient support. That is the dilemma of policymaking: You need those swing-seat members to win, which often means tacking to the center, but you also can’t pass anything they won’t get on board with.
Nevertheless, that is a good kind of political problem to have, one which Democrats would be thrilled to face in January 2029. All of which brings us to 2026. What are we going to do now?
It all starts with the vote count. Most projections expect the Democrats to win between 10 and 20 House seats. But the difference between 10 and 20 could be substantial. The cushier the majority, the further you can push the policy agenda. More than 30 House Democrats actually voted against the ACA, but they could still narrowly pass the bill because of the huge majority that they had started building in 2006.
If you live in one of the districts — like Arizona’s Sixth or Colorado’s Eighth or Florida’s 22nd, to name just a couple of the 21 toss-up races identified by the Cook Political Report this year — that forecasters say is competitive this year, you could have an outsized say in what the future of policymaking looks like. But even in safe districts, you should vote: Elections are the most reliable way we have to gauge public opinion, and strong victories for the candidates who prioritize healthcare send a message.
The same goes for the Senate. If Democrats sweep all of the competitive races, they could have up to 55 seats in the Senate in 2027 — with a chance to build on it in 2028. If you are a voter in Kansas, Michigan, Ohio, Texas, Alaska, Maine, New Hampshire, or Iowa, your ballot carries extra weight for the next steps in US healthcare reform. If the Democrats can reach 60 votes again in 2029, they would have much more flexibility about what to pass. Even if they fall short of that magic number, the more of a cushion they have above 50, the more likely that their Senate leaders can find support for altering Senate rules for the filibuster and get an ambitious bill approved.
How you can get involved this election
If there is ever going to be a path to a true healthcare overhaul, it starts with this year’s elections. If you want to see a change, you can vote — and you can do more than that.
The results of this year’s midterms will also set the terms of the debate among Democrats. We are likely to see “show” bills advanced by Dems next year that may have no chance of being signed by President Donald Trump, but that will give us a sense of what kind of policies the party wants to pursue and how much support there is for them. Believe it or not, the first Medicare prescription drug negotiations bill passed the House in 2007 after Democrats’ big wins in 2006 — even though the policy didn’t become law for another 15 years. The broader public may not pay much attention to this kind of doomed-to-fail legislation, but it is often a window into the future.
“One challenge for Democrats is finding the next big health care idea beyond the Affordable Care Act that will resonate with voters and respond to their affordability concerns,” said Larry Levitt, executive vice president for health policy at KFF. “One big difference between now and 2006 is that back then there was already a lot of coalescing around ideas that ultimately led to the ACA. All the major Democratic candidates for president in 2008 supported something like that. I’m not sure that’s true now, at least not yet.”
Democrats are already aligning on a wide range of healthcare ideas, from reviving the public option to free primary care to the full-blown Medicare-for-all supported by progressive candidates, some of whom are in competitive elections. If El-Sayed wins the Senate race in Michigan, for example, that could supercharge a debate around Medicare-for-all. It could also provide momentum to any progressives who run for president — Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, to name one obvious example — and decide to make Medicare-for-all a pillar of their platform.
But if El-Sayed and other progressives were to fall short, that could make Democrats more timid about being ambitious in the 2028 campaign and afterward. Still, he’s far from the only candidate in a crucial race to put their support behind Medicare-for-all. There is Randy Villegas in an important California House race. Troy Jackson has bet on it as part of his bid to topple Sen. Susan Collins in Maine. All of these races will send a signal to the party about what the public wants and is willing to turn out for.
In some ways, winning elections is the easy part. Legislating is hard, and any eventual healthcare law will surely involve compromises and unexpected surprises. Who knows what will be happening in the world in 2029?
“The bottom line is: 2026 is a healthcare election,” the leaders of the advocacy group Protect Our Care wrote in a campaign memo this month. “After November, it’s up to Democrats to keep up the fight to deliver relief to families and make healthcare affordable and accessible for every American.”
Microsoft AI chief Mustafa Suleyman. | Getty Images
For years, AI leaders have touted healthcare as one of the clearest examples of where their technology will improve lives. Now "it is finally here," Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman tells The Verge. The company claims to have developed an AI-powered tool it says can diagnose conditions up to four times more accurately than human doctors.
The findings, published Thursday in one of the world's most prestigious journals, Science, are based on tests pitting Microsoft's AI system against human physicians on a series of scenarios drawn from medical case reports and emergency department data. Microsoft compiled the cases into its own benchmark, S …
France has reported the first ever human case of Shamonda virus, a disease that had so far only affected animals, in a patient that died in early October.
The patient was severely immunocompromized and had been receiving treatment for a serious illness that made them more susceptible to infection and complications, the country’s agriculture, food and health authorities said Thursday.
Brain complications observed in the patient before their death “would most likely be linked to the infection with the Shamonda virus,” the authorities said.
They added that this is “an exceptional case in a highly immunocompromized patient,” and that there is “no health risk for the general population.”
Health authorities have highlighted the potential of zoonotic spillover — or the jump of diseases from animals to humans — being behind the next pandemic. Currently, over 60% of emerging infectious disease threats are of zoonotic origin, including Covid-19 and Ebola. As diseases adapt and jump from wild animals to pets to humans, their potential for pandemic threats evolves too. For this reason, scientists have been on high alert for the bird flu.
The Shamonda virus, which spreads between animals through bites from infected midges, was detected in European farm animals for the first time this year. It had previously been found only in countries outside Europe, predominantly in Africa. It is mainly observed in cattle, but there have been cases of infections in horses, sheep, goats and an alpaca.
Since the summer, the virus has been detected in farm animals in Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain and Switzerland, the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control said. In cattle, its symptoms include fever, diarrhea, lethargy, reduced milk production and mild respiratory signs.
It’s still not clear whether the virus caused or contributed to the patient’s death and how the infection was acquired, the ECDC said. French authorities said they believe the patient might have been infected by a midge bite while in eastern France, an area where the virus has been circulating in animals since the spring.
The ECDC said it is “carefully monitoring the situation” and is in touch with French authorities and European partners to “investigate the potential public health implications of this first human infection.”
Christina Applegate at the 2023 Screen Actors Guild awards. | Valerie Macon/AFP via Getty Images
Christina Applegate, the actor who has been one of the most visible faces of multiple sclerosis since her 2021 diagnosis, made a stunning revelation this week: She does not have MS after all. And her doctors still don’t know what is causing her debilitating symptoms.
“I’m back at square one,” Applegate told fellow actor Jamie Lynn Sigler, who does have MS, on Sigler’s podcast MeSsy. “I was not happy at all. Everybody else was so happy.”
It is a harrowing predicament for Applegate, and hopefully her medical team is able to get her the diagnosis and treatment she needs. But the fact is, her experience is not unique. Even as more and more Americans get diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, misdiagnosis remains all too common. According to one meta-analysis, roughly 15 percent of MS diagnoses may actually be false positives.
How could such a common medical condition — roughly 1 million Americans are living with the disease, about one in every 350 people — remain such a mystery? After Applegate’s announcement, I called some leading experts on MS to ask why diagnosing the disease is such a challenge, and what they want people to know. Here’s what I learned.
Why MS can be challenging to diagnose
Multiple sclerosis is an autoimmune condition: The body mistakenly attacks cells meant to protect your brain and spinal cord, and the resulting damage interrupts nerve signals and causes the disease’s telltale symptoms of motor impairment, tingling sensations, and vision problems. Some people experience a rollercoaster of relapses and remissions; others see the disease steadily progress, eventually leading to serious disability.
The reality is, scientists still don’t really know what causes MS to develop, said Dr. Andrew Solomon, a neurologist at the University of Vermont who specializes in MS. Smoking is a known risk factor. Obesity and metabolic problems play a role, but we need more research. Even the precise role of genetics remains something of a mystery. “We don’t really know what causes or triggers the autoimmune response in any given individual,” Solomon said.
And that’s where the challenge in diagnosing it begins.
First, the testing can be imprecise; there is not a single test that reliably diagnoses MS. If a doctor suspects their patient may have MS, they usually undergo an MRI, which their physicians then scour for lesions that are typically associated with the disease. But those scans are still subject to interpretation: Other rare conditions sometimes resemble MS in imaging, as can diseases of blood vessels in the brain. You can also receive a spinal fluid analysis to check for abnormalities in your immune system, which the vast majority of MS patients have.
The nature of MS symptoms adds to the difficulty. They can often be vague early on: brain fog or fatigue or a general malaise. The tingling or vision problems can be similar to symptoms for other conditions that are not MS, and they are easily dismissed if they go into temporary remission, as often happens during the initial phases of the disease.
“Neurological symptoms sometimes can be vague — numbness, pins and needles — and it’s usually short-lived,” Dr. Saud Sadiq, chief research scientist and director of the Tisch Multiple Sclerosis Research Center of New York, told me. “Unless they’re taken seriously initially, they may be ignored because by the time the patient goes through the healthcare system and is actually referred to a neurologist, the symptoms have abated.”
If your doctor is diagnosing you with MS, ask directly: What’s the evidence?
“Because it’s so heterogeneous, it doesn’t present in the same way in everybody and can have varying severity, it can be hard to diagnose sometimes,” Solomon said.
Lastly, when people are experiencing debilitating symptoms, there is pressure to deliver some diagnosis — and that may push some doctors to leap to MS even if they are not sure, Solomon said. The recent advent of effective treatments that help manage the disease’s symptoms, especially when it is caught early, may add to that pressure, even if the better course would be to continue monitoring the person before they start a medication.
“There may be a lot of clinicians who, if they can’t find a better explanation than MS, may be inclined to diagnose MS, even if they don’t really meet our diagnostic criteria, because they’re worried about missing a window of opportunity to treat somebody,” Solomon said.
There is reason to hope the MS misdiagnosis problem could get better. The National Multiple Sclerosis Society released new diagnostic criteria in 2024 that Solomon said more physicians should become familiar with to better distinguish MS from problems like migraines or vascular disease. And because imaging is involved in diagnosis, there is optimism that AI could be a powerful new tool in delivering more accurate results.
What everyone should know about MS symptoms and diagnosis
The good news is that MS, when diagnosed properly, is a treatable condition these days. “The prognosis with new drugs is extremely good for long-term care,” Sadiq told me. “If patients stick to treatment at a good MS center, you can look forward to a life without disability in 2026.”
So it is worth being vigilant and talking to your doctor if you experience any concerning symptoms. You should seek care if you have numbness or pins and needles that persists for more than 24 to 48 hours, Sadiq said, or have motor problems, like one hand won’t work as you try to play piano. Dr. Annette Langer-Gould, who develops and evaluates programs for MS care at Kaiser Permanente, said numbness in your abdomen, chest or back, as opposed to your extremities, is a particular cause for concern. If one eye has normal vision and the other is blurred, that’s another good reason to get checked out.
If you do get tested, make sure the actual images of your MRIs end up being reviewed by an expert in MS. “The most common reasons the disease is still misdiagnosed are related to the providers’ lack of expertise usually in reading MRI scans,” Langer-Gould said. The spinal tap may sound scary, and doctors sometimes don’t recommend them because their insurance reimbursement is low — but they add to the confidence of a diagnosis. They are worth it, she said.
“American patients are very afraid of the spinal tap,” Langer-Gould said. “My message to patients is: Listen, just get the spinal. This way we’ll be sure.”
And do not be afraid to seek a second opinion for such a serious diagnosis, Sadiq added. Every state has a recognized MS center. If your doctor is diagnosing you with MS, ask directly: What’s the evidence? If your doctor is recommending that you start treatment, it could also be worth checking whether they have a relationship with a pharmaceutical company that affects how you perceive their judgment, Langer-Gould said.
People who have already been diagnosed may also be shaken by the Applegate news and question whether their own diagnosis might be wrong. Solomon said that folks should have a frank conversation with their physician about how exactly their case met the diagnostic criteria. With proper imaging and the spinal fluid tests, you can get to a confident diagnosis for the vast majority of people. But be your own advocate to make sure you’re satisfied.
“For many people, the diagnosis actually can be very straightforward,” Solomon said. “We really have no question about what it is.”
Nigeria has become the fifth country to detect the rapidly-spreading Ebola strain, with its first confirmed case in a woman who traveled from Uganda.
The patient started showing symptoms on Oct. 7, four days after her arrival in the Western African country. She was later admitted to a private hospital in the capital Abuja, where laboratory testing confirmed the Ebola diagnosis, the country’s health minister and the World Health Organization said Tuesday. She is currently in isolation and receiving medical care.
Nigeria’s health ministry and disease agency are working with the WHO and Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention to “contain that infection and prevent its further spread.”
The case underscores the difficulty in stopping the spread of the highly-infectious disease. The Democratic Republic of the Congo, the epicenter of the outbreak, is currently grappling with the fastest-growing and deadliest Ebola outbreak in the country’s history, caused by the Bundibugyo strain for which there are no approved vaccines or treatments. As of Oct. 19, Congo reported 9,552 confirmed cases, including 4,602 related deaths.
In Nigeria, where there is a more established private health care market and less reliance on international aid for services, health authorities are working to track down and monitor people who may have been exposed, with 44 close contacts already identified.
“There is no need for panic,” the health ministry wrote on social media. “What matters is staying informed, practising good hand hygiene, knowing the symptoms and seeking guidance from public health authorities if you suspect exposure.”
The disease has also recently spread to Kenya, in Eastern Africa, with nine confirmed cases all linked to a man who traveled from Congo to Uganda before taking a flight to Kenya. He died at a hospital in Nairobi after testing positive for Ebola on Oct. 5.
Jean Kaseya, director-general of Africa CDC, told Devex last week this case illustrated the difficulties in contact tracing. Health authorities were still trying to ascertain who was on his flight, and if they had made onward travel, he said.
The WHO has urged “all countries in the region to sustain a high level of readiness as the outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo continues to evolve.”
The U.N. health agency, which first declared the outbreak in Congo on May 15, also advised against any restriction of travel to, or trade with, affected countries.
The most recent Ebola epidemic has killed thousands in Congo. A few cases have spilled over to its neighboring countries, including Kenya and Uganda. | Lucas Mukasa/Anadolu via Getty Images
The Ebola virus is spreading at an unprecedented rate this year.
In the first five months since the outbreak began in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), the World Health Organization (WHO) has reported 9,415 confirmed cases and 4,536 deaths in the country. While the virus has remained relatively contained by the DRC’s borders, case counts in neighboring Kenya and Uganda are also climbing (albeit more slowly). There are 20 confirmed cases in Uganda and eight in Kenya, and much of central and eastern Africa has tightened its borders.
The last major Ebola epidemic of this scale began in 2014 and continued through 2016 in West Africa. Over that period, it ultimately killed more than 11,000 people throughout West Africa. Nearly four years later, a smaller outbreak plagued Congo in its North Kivu region, leading to 2,229 deaths before it was contained.
The 2026 crisis hasn’t yet reached the same levels as the 2014 outbreak, but the speed of its spread is far greater.
As the chart below shows, around 150 days after the outbreak was declared, 2,599 Ebola cases had been reported in the 2014 West African epidemic. At the same time point this year, the number of cases came to 8,978 and has continued to climb.
There is no straightforward explanation for this rapid spread
One of the reasons the latest epidemic has been so difficult to slow down can be traced back to the fact that it’s a different viral strain — known as Bundibugyo — than the ones behind previous epidemics.
The Bundibugyo virus comes from the same family as the Ebola virus that caused the 2014 West Africa and 2018 Congo epidemics, causing the fatal fevers associated with Ebola. But the rare strain is different enough that it doesn’t respond to the same medical solutions. While the Zaire virus led to vaccines and treatment to mitigate the spread, we still don’t have a vaccine for Bundibugyo.
That doesn’t mean Bundibugyo is entirely novel, though. The 2026 outbreak is the third outbreak related to the Bundibugyo viral strain: In 2007, Uganda faced a minor outbreak, and the eastern province of Congo, which is now the epicenter of the epidemic, saw a handful of cases in 2012.
Luckily, these two outbreaks were contained in a span of months, largely due to efforts by the country’s Ministry of Health and international aid partnerships with the WHO, the US Agency for International Development (USAID), and international humanitarian organizations such as the UN Children’s Fund and Red Cross.
More than a decade later, these efforts have been substantially curbed by USAID cuts. Tracing requires physical testing capacity: the tests themselves, health workers, and protective equipment for those treating suspected cases. Reduced access to such resources is especially dangerous with strains like Bundibugyo – in the absence of an effective vaccine, tracing the spread of disease and isolating potential disease contacts is especially important.
But cuts to aid, which covers disease surveillance efforts, made it more difficult to identify this year’s Bundibugyo outbreak until it was too late, creating a “critical four-week detection gap between the onset of symptoms of the presumed index case…and the laboratory confirmation of the outbreak,” according to a WHO situation report from May.
In August, the United States aimed to close at least some part of the vacuum it left, providing an additional $242 million to its $23 million original pledge in May.
Aside from international efforts, DRC faces the added layer of internal conflict and humanitarian crisis. The eastern provinces, including Ituri, have experienced years of conflict that have weakened the public infrastructure, including the healthcare system. Last year, nearly 25 percent of Congolese people faced food insecurity, and 4.5 million children were clinically malnourished, creating a population especially vulnerable to disease. The violence has also overwhelmed hospitals and displaced millions, disrupting the public health response, especially as mistrust in health authorities also runs rampant.
Even as emergency trials for a vaccine are underway, many of the factors that have facilitated the rapid spread may make treatment and outreach still more difficult. It’s hard to predict when the current outbreak will be handled, and how many more people will be affected before it does.
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