Premature birth is a problem throughout the nation including here in Missouri. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, as of 2014, it affected about 1 in 10 infants. Rebecca Smith, from the KBIA Health and Wealth Desk, sat down with Trina Ragain, the State Director of Program Services for the Missouri March of Dimes to discuss the problem.

Boone County is seeing a rise in the number of reported cases of a fairly common sexually transmitted disease – Chlamydia. According to the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services, Boone County had 1000 reported cases in 2015 alone. And this rise in infections has some experts asking why.

Expectant parents might considering hiring a doula to assist with the childbirth process, but to many, the role doulas play in that process remains a mystery. To learn more about doulas's work, KBIA's Sara Shahriari spoke with local doula and student midwife Sabrina Bias – who became interested in the profession after hiring a doula and midwife to assist with one of her own births.

One year ago, while reporting on infant mortality rates in Kennett, Missouri, I met a 27-year-old expectant mother named Marylouisa Cantu. She was pregnant with her seventh child. Her sixth child, a daughter named Alyssa, was born two years earlier and had spent two weeks in a neonatal intensive care unit due to complications from premature birth.

According to the National Eating Disorders Association, in the United States alone, 20 million women and 10 million men suffer from a clinically significant eating disorder at some time in their life, but treatment for these mental illnesses can still be hard to find. So in an effort to reach people suffering from eating disorders, a new clinic, McCallum Place that specializes in the treatment of eating disorders has opened in Columbia.

In January, Missouri Governor Jay Nixon announced the state would expand dental benefits to an estimated 282,000 Medicaid recipients for the Fiscal Year 2016. The expansion is being funded with money collected from a one-time tax amnesty for delinquent taxpayers. This marks the first time dental benefits have been included in Medicaid coverage in Missouri since 2005.

Few inventions have had as dramatic an effect on policing as the Taser stun gun. The tool is billed as a "smart weapon" and often called a non-lethal alternative to guns for the thousands of law enforcement agencies that have adopted them across the country and the world. In fact, the company's website estimates more than 160,000 lives have been saved by use of the weapon. But just how safe are the Taser weapons actually, and what is the public health cost of assuming they are non-lethal? Those

According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, in 2014 alone, there were more than 1.3 million Americans living in nursing homes. One research group in Columbia is working on developing technology that will help the elderly age better, more safely and hopefully - at home.

"If you ask a 15-year-old who's never been addicted to drugs, 'would you take heroin?' [they'd say,] 'Oh my gosh no,'" says Missouri State Representative Holly Rehder (R-Sikeston). "But after two years of addiction, and they can't afford to buy the pills anymore, and someone offers them heroin for ten bucks - it's not the bogeyman anymore."

Phoenix Health Programs has been serving the Columbia community for more than 40 years. It offers various services for people struggling with substance...