When Lola was eight years old, she went through a massive growth spurt and started developing acne. Her mother, Elise, thought Lola was just growing fast because of genes inherited from her father. But when she noticed that Lola had grown pubic hair too, she was floored. A visit to an endocrinologist in 2023 confirmed that Lola's brain was already producing hormones that had kick-started puberty. Lola had also been struggling emotionally. 'She would have panic attacks every day at school,' says Elise, who lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and asked that her surname and Lola's real name be omitted. Although eight might seem young to start puberty, it's not as rare as it once was. Data show that girls around the world are entering puberty younger than before. In the 1840s, the average age of first menstruation, or menarche, was about 16 or 17; today, it's around 12. The average age for onset of breast development fell from 11 years in the 1960s to around 9 or 10 years in the United States by the 1990s. Some research hints that the trend mysteriously accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic. (Although some data suggest that puberty is happening earlier for boys too, the shift seems to be less pronounced.)...

Although some people were initially hesitant to be vaccinated against COVID-19 during the pandemic, many did eventually go on to get at least one dose, according to a study of more than one million people in the United Kingdom1. Researchers used data from the REACT study, which tracked the prevalence of SARS-CoV-2 in England and collected data on demographics, health and behaviour during the first two years of the pandemic. The authors linked the information to subsequent vaccine uptake using participants' National Health Service (NHS) records. They analysed the records of 1.1 million people sampled between January 2021, when questions about vaccination status and attitudes were added to the survey, and March 2022. Over the course of the study, almost 38,000 people reported some form of vaccine hesitancy, a rate of 3.3%. Rates of hesitancy peaked at 8% in early 2021 and hit a low of 1.1% at the start of 2022, before rebounding to 2.2%. But 65% of those who were initially hesitant went on to get one or more vaccinations later....

The flu situation in the United States right now is, in a word, bad. Infections have skyrocketed in recent weeks, filling hospitals nearly to capacity; viral levels are 'high' or 'very high' in most of the country. In late December, New York reported the most flu cases the state had ever recorded in a single week. My own 18-month-old brought home influenza six days before Christmas: He spiked a fever above 103 degrees for days, refusing foods and most fluids; I spent the holiday syringing electrolyte water into his mouth, while battling my own fever and chills. This year's serving of flu already seems set to be more severe than average, Seema Lakdawala, a flu virologist at Emory University, told me. This season could be a reprise of last winter's, the most severe on record since the start of the coronavirus pandemic'or, perhaps, worse. At the same time, what the U.S. is experiencing right now 'fits within the general spectrum of what we would expect,' Taison Bell, an infectious-disease and critical-care physician at the University of Virginia Health System, told me. This is simply how the flu behaves: The virus is responsible for one of the roughest respiratory illnesses that Americans regularly suffer, routinely causing hundreds of thousands of people to be hospitalized annually in the U.S., tens of thousands of whom die. (So far this season, the flu has killed more than 5,000 people, including at least nine children.) Influenza is capable of even worse'sparking global pandemics, for instance, including some of the deadliest in history. These current tolls, however, are well within the bounds of just how awful the 'seasonal' flu can be. 'It's another flu year, and it sucks,' Bell said....

The Pitt, HBO Max's hospital-set drama, back for a second season, is a throwback in every sense of the word: formulaic, propulsive, topical. Each episode represents a single hour of one shift in a Pittsburgh emergency department presided over by Dr. Michael 'Robby' Robinavitch (played by Noah Wyle) and the charge nurse Dana Evans (Katherine LaNasa), immersing viewers in the relentless stress of crisis medicine. Season 1 detailed how Robby'a crinkle-eyed stalwart whose stethoscope seems made of thorns'was still suffering from PTSD from his experiences working during the coronavirus pandemic, while a violent attack from a patient made the otherwise flinty Dana reconsider whether her job was still bearable. None of this was unfamiliar to viewers of ER, the groundbreaking NBC hospital drama that ran for 15 seasons, introducing Wyle as the haplessly green medical student John Carter, and that tackled an array of social issues including HIV, sexual violence, and drug addiction. 'The popularity of the show ensured we could do stories we were proud of,' John Wells, one of the show's executive producers, told Today as the series was ending. TV was still in its virtuous Very Special Episode era when ER debuted in 1994, but 30 years later, when Wells, Wyle, and the writer R. Scott Gemmill reunited for The Pitt, antihero narratives and dissociative sadcoms had inured TV viewers to anything earnest or didactic. (A lawsuit is still pending from the estate of Michael Crichton, the creator of ER, over whether The Pitt is an unauthorized reboot of the earlier show or simply a medical drama in the same mold.)...