Reducing the risk of transfusion-transmitted HIV from blood donations is important for public health and the U.S. currently uses time-based deferrals to assess donor eligibility. Now the FDA is proposing individual risk-based questions to reduce the risk of transfusion-transmitted HIV similar to policies in place in countries like the United Kingdom and Canada.

Blood donations are important and FDA believes the implementation of the proposed individual risk-based questions will not compromise the safety or availability of the blood supply. The new draft recommendations are based on data from other countries with similar HIV epidemiology that have instituted this approach, as well as ongoing surveillance of the U.S. blood supply.

Food is not medicine, anyone claiming it is medicine is selling you something, like a diet plan, but nutrients can impact cancer cells.

How that applies consistently is unknown so a new tool hopes to create an exploratory method using mice. Mice don't translate well to humans, they are not little people, but they can exclude effects in humans and that has value also. 

Sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) is a diagnosis of exclusion, a general term for death during the first year of life that lacks an obvious cause.

Though it is a leading cause of death, its etiology is complex and remains largely unknown so assumptions are things like sleeping in a dangerous position, a general failure during the critical development period, or an unknown underlying biological vulnerability.

Many parents say they are worried about the negative effects of screen time on children. Too much of anything can have negative effects, from books to music to TV, but the solution is to impose diversity so they eventually enjoy different activities.

The screen time problem got even worse due to government lockdowns imposed during the COVID-19 pandemic. Rather than wear masks in a park, it generally led to more screen time and less outdoor time for children. 

Empathy is critical to having supportive conversations about mental health. But this skill can be tricky to learn, especially in the moment when a person is sharing something hard. 

Antibiotics are popular in America among everyone but pharmaceutical companies. Part of the reason is cultural; everyone wants antibiotics to be cheap, but want to be able to sue companies if anything new causes a side effect. Meanwhile, the government has doubled the cost and red tape to put anything on the market this century (COVID-19 vaccines and a few other products exempted) and research for new molecules is costly. That adds up to little interest.