Health News

Some villagers in the eastern Amazon are spurning Brazilian government advice to take the malaria drug hydroxychloroquine to keep the novel coronavirus at bay and are drinking tea of jambú, also known as the toothache plant.

A cheap and widely used steroid called dexamethasone has become the first drug shown to be able to save the lives of COVID-19 patients in what scientists said is a "major breakthrough" in the coronavirus pandemic.

Brazil set record on Tuesday for new confirmed cases of the novel coronavirus in a single day, as its case load grew by 34,918 patients in 24 hours to 923,189 total infections, the most in the world outside the United States.

Americans have started returning to more normal lifestyles with the end of coronavirus lockdowns. But what activities are safe?

More than 170 of Guinea-Bissau's 2,000 health workers have contracted COVID-19, a World Health Organization expert said on Tuesday, warning that hospitals were close to being overwhelmed.

Mexico went into the coronavirus outbreak insisting it would beat the pandemic without mass testing, but with deaths surging as it prepares to exit lockdown, the strategy looks increasingly untenable.

Germany appealed to the public on Tuesday to download a new smartphone app to help break the chain of coronavirus infections, one of several such apps that European governments hope will revive travel and tourism safely.

The number of people who died from coronavirus infection in France rose by 111 to 29,547 on Tuesday with the health ministry including weekly data for the death toll in nursing homes.

A U.S. appeals court on Tuesday upheld a ruling that struck down a Trump administration rule that required pharmaceutical companies to include the wholesale prices of their drugs in television advertisements.

The unlisted biotech firm CureVac will become the second company to launch human trials of an experimental coronavirus vaccine in Germany, two people familiar with the plans told Reuters on Tuesday.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on Tuesday reported 2,104,346 cases of coronavirus, an increase of 18,577 cases from its previous count, and said that the number of deaths had risen by 496 to 116,140.

A Catholic archbishop in Cameroon says he has developed two plant-based remedies for COVID-19 which are given free to those who test positive for the respiratory disease.

A rash of accounting glitches in Chile led to the omission of more than 31,000 confirmed coronavirus cases, or nearly one-sixth of the country's total so far, health officials said on Tuesday.

The number of people infected with the coronavirus in the Americas is fast approaching 4 million with almost 204,000 deaths, and the pandemic continues to accelerate, World Health Organization (WHO) regional director Carissa Etienne said on Tuesday.

Britain is continuing medical trials to see if it can combine other drugs with a steroid treatment shown to reduce deaths among some COVID-19 patients, Chief Scientific Adviser Patrick Vallance said on Tuesday.

The Trump administration aims to narrow its financial support to about seven experimental coronavirus vaccines from the 14 it has been working with so far, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) said on Tuesday.

France's president and top drugmaker announced plans on Tuesday to bolster domestic production of medicines as countries scramble to strengthen their healthcare industries to counter the coronavirus pandemic.

Amazon.com Inc said on Tuesday it has launched a new system using artificial intelligence to enforce social distancing at its offices and warehouses, in its latest move to reduce the risk of coronavirus transmission among its workers.

People under 20 are around half as susceptible to COVID-19 as people aged 20 or above, according to research published on Tuesday, and clinical symptoms of the pandemic disease appear in only about a fifth of infections in children and teens.

French drugmaker Sanofi on Tuesday said it would invest 610 million euros ($679.4 million) at two of its French sites to turn them into a hub dedicated to research, development and production of vaccines.