Physician-backed insights to optimize your health and reduce long-term risks.
Any bite, scratch, or saliva contact with a bat, raccoon, skunk, fox, or a stray cat or dog counts as a rabies exposure. So does waking up to a bat in the room, even without a visible mark. Wash the wound hard with soap under running water for 15 minutes, then go to an emergency room the same day. The vaccine-plus-immune-globulin series started before symptoms begin almost always works. A squirrel, mouse, or vaccinated pet you know generally does not count.
Ischemic strokes in adults under 55 are rising because the vascular damage of middle age is arriving earlier. High blood pressure, extra weight, elevated blood sugar, and smoking now show up in people's 30s and 40s. The useful part is that the same levers likely work harder in a younger body. Addressing them together is linked to roughly 70% to 80% lower stroke risk, and the benefit is likely largest when you start in your 30s or 40s.
The practical defense against Florida's dengue outbreak is unchanged and effective: a daytime-active repellent on exposed skin, screens on your windows and doors, and no standing water around the house. Most infections stay mild, but a defined minority (older adults, people with diabetes, pregnant women, those who have had dengue before) face sharply higher odds of severe disease. The state is in the middle of the largest continental US dengue outbreak since the 1940s, and no dengue vaccine is available to residents here.
For most people, a West Nile bite passes without a symptom, and the 2026 US surge doesn't change that. What it does change is the calculus for a defined group: older adults, and anyone with diabetes, high blood pressure, kidney disease, or a suppressed immune system. There's no vaccine and no antiviral. The medicine right now is repellent on exposed skin, long sleeves outdoors, and dumping standing water weekly.
Worry when a fever or bad headache in the two weeks after a mosquito bite comes with something neurologic: confusion, a stiff neck, tremor, new weakness, trouble walking, a drooping face. Most West Nile infections cause nothing at all, and most of the rest are a self-limited flu-like illness. The dangerous share announces itself through the nervous system, and it has worse odds in older adults, people with weakened immunity, and those with major chronic conditions.
Yes, several autoimmune diseases are becoming more common, and better detection explains only part of the rise. The useful response isn't a panic panel of blood tests. It's a short list of risks that credibly matter and that you can act on: don't smoke, keep your weight and cardiovascular health in good shape, limit heavy exposures like silica dust and air pollution where you can, and take persistent symptoms and family history seriously.
