Melissa Healy is a health and science reporter with the Los Angeles Times writing from the Washington, D.C., area. She covers prescription drugs, obesity, nutrition and exercise, and neuroscience, mental health and human behavior. She’s been at The Times for more than 30 years, and has covered national security, environment, domestic social policy, Congress and the White House. As a baby boomer, she keenly follows trends in midlife weight gain, memory loss and the health benefits of red wine.
Latest From This Author
A new study examines the factors that caused some states to have COVID-19 mortality rates that were four times higher than others.
Para movernos por un mundo donde el coronavirus es endémico, necesitamos una forma confiable de evaluar nuestro nivel individual de inmunidad. Así es como podemos
In order to move through a world where the coronavirus is endemic, we need a reliable way to assess our individual level of immunity. Here’s how we can.
Rats living in New York City’s sewer system can catch the virus that causes COVID-19. Could they incubate new variants and spread them to people?
Survivors are still being rescued in Turkey and Syria more than a week after a quake killed more than 43,000 people. How long can you live trapped under rubble?
A pandemic allows the Food and Drug Administration to authorize vaccines and drugs for emergency use, even after the health emergency ends.
Evusheld was designed to protect immunocompromised people from serious cases of COVID-19, but the latest Omicron variants have rendered the drug useless.
Suicides tend to occur in clusters that suggest contagion, but there is little evidence that murders or mass shootings follow the same pattern, experts say.
Using machine learning, scientists have trained computers to comb the internet and recognize the early signs of a COVID-19 surge up to 6 weeks in advance.
A preliminary study in Israel finds that seniors who received an Omicron-targeting booster shot were 81% less likely to be hospitalized with COVID-19 than those who skipped it.