The private health industry lobby group “Partnership for America’s Health Care Future” engages in marketing and publicity strategies similar to Big Tobacco and other unhealthy commodity industry groups to shape public perception of universal health care policies as negative in the United States, according to a study published July 16, 2025 in the open-access journal PLOS Global Public Health by Kendra Chow from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, United Kingdom, and colleagues.

In an opinion piece published July 16 in the open-access journal PLOS Climate, Jeremy Jacobs of Vanderbilt University and Shazia Khan of Yale School of Medicine draw attention to the rollback of government efforts to collect data on climate change, and how the loss of this infrastructure imperils public health efforts.

 Many people might be aware of an ongoing opioid epidemic, with thousands of people dying every year from overdoses. But many who are misusing opioids are also using—and dying from—stimulant drugs as well, according to a study published July 2 in the open access journal PLOS Mental Health by Yutong Li from the University of Alberta, Canada, and colleagues.

Researchers at UChicago Medicine found that a slight increase in walking cadence led to meaningful improvements in physical function for older adults who were frail or at risk of becoming frail. They also developed and tested an app to help measure walking pace more accurately.

When trying to understand the health of long-past populations, sometimes you have to rely on nothing but the bones. In anthropology, porous cranial lesions (PCLs) — areas of pitting on the roof of the eye socket (called cribra orbitalia) and on top of the skull (called cribra cranii) — have traditionally been considered tell-tale signs of poor childhood health in past populations, but have rarely been tested.