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It was once seen as the disease of kings, afflicting only the lazy and gluttonous. These days, however, gout is everywhere — and a bitter battle has broken out among physicians about how best to treat it. A form of arthritis, gout is characterized by unsightly bulges under the skin and incredible pain in the joints. Typically seen in older men, the disease now increasingly afflicts women and younger adults, often accompanied by obesity, diabetes, and high blood pressure. (McFarling, 1/25)

Drugs approved in recent years that can cure hepatitis C may have severe side effects, including liver failure, a new report suggests. The number of adverse events appears relatively small, and the findings are not conclusive. But experts said the report was a warning that should not be ignored. It involves nine widely used antiviral drugs that were heralded as a huge advance because they greatly increased cure rates, seemingly with few side effects. (Grady, 1/24)

To stay in the United States, asylum-seekers need to prove that they are at risk of persecution in their home countries. But often they have little evidence to back them up. The paper trails from their past lives — such as hospital or police records — are often inaccessible. If they were tortured in a secret government prison or persecuted by the police, that kind of official record may not exist at all. Instead, what remain are the stories that migrants tell, and whatever marks those experiences have left on their bodies and minds. So these cases depend on doctors and psychologists who can translate scars and symptoms into evidence — and who can tell when a person’s ability to testify may have been altered by trauma. (Boodman, 1/25)

Hundreds of people around the country are still suffering from complications linked to injections of tainted medicine produced at a Massachusetts pharmacy in 2012. A nationwide outbreak of fungal infections was tied to the shipment of nearly 18,000 contaminated vials of preservative-free methylprednisolone, a steroid, made by the New England Compounding Center in Framingham, Mass. (Jolicoeur, 1/24)

Pertussis is a highly contagious bacterial respiratory infection that’s spread by coughing, sneezing or being at a breathing space near someone who’s infected. Although it can be treated with antibiotics, it can lead to severe complications and sometimes death in babies. Meanwhile adults may not even know that they have pertussis and chalk up the pesky cough to the flu virus. Nearly 21,000 cases of pertussis were reported in the United States in 2015, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It’s a drop from a high of 48,000 in 2012, but also much higher than a total of 4,600 in 1994. (Miller, 1/24)

According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, even FDA-approved cardiorespiratory monitors — the kind doctors prescribe for use at home to detect apnea or abnormally low heart rates — have not been shown to save babies from dying suddenly in their cribs. What's more, routine in-hospital monitoring hasn't been shown to detect which infants are at risk of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) when they go home. (McCullough, 1/24)

About 100,000 Marylanders and 5 million people nationwide live with Alzheimer's, and many are dependent on family and friends to help with everyday tasks. The cost of caring for those with the disease and other forms of dementia was about $236 billion in 2016, according to the Alzheimer's Association. Without a cure, that cost could escalate to $1.1 trillion by 2050. (McDaniels, 1/24)

For several years, researchers have been fiercely debating how many campus rapes are committed by serial offenders. A 2002 study based on surveys of 1,882 college men and published in Violence and Victims, an academic journal, found that as many as 63 percent of those who admitted to behaviors that fit the definition of rape or attempted rape said they had engaged in those behaviors more than once. But in 2015, a study of 1,642 men at two different colleges was published in JAMA Pediatrics and found that while a larger number of men admitted to behaviors that constituted rape, a smaller percentage of them, closer to 25 percent, were repeat offenders. The difference could affect how universities approach rape investigations and prevention. (Saul, 1/24)