2010s in medicine

This is a list of events associated with medicine in the 2010s. The decade was marked by several events. Longer-lasting events included the continued outflux of Afghan refugees, who were at risk for various health problems, as well as the 2010s Haiti cholera outbreak.

Decade

As of 2011, Afghanistan maintains its position as the largest source of refugees with one out of every four refugees being an Afghan and with 95% living in Pakistan or Iran. Refugees are at risk of a variety of health problems, including post-traumatic stress and depression, infectious disease such as tuberculosis and malaria, and consequences of possible torture, rape or trauma.
From 2010 to 2013, following the 2010 Haiti earthquake, cholera breaks out in Haiti. This outbreak of cholera in Haiti results in more than 7,050 deaths and sickened more than 531,000.

2010

February

In response to the UK General Medical Council investigation and findings of fraud, the editors of The Lancet medical journal fully retracted a paper by Andrew Wakefield that sparked the MMR vaccine controversy. The vaccine-autism connection proposed in a paper has been described as "the most damaging medical hoax of the last 100 years".

October

06: The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine is awarded to Robert G. Edwards "for the development of in vitro fertilization".

2011

October

03: The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine is jointly awarded to Bruce A. Beutler and Jules A. Hoffmann "for their discoveries concerning the activation of innate immunity" and posthumously to Ralph M. Steinman "for his discovery of the dendritic cell and its role in adaptive immunity".

2012

January

13: India celebrated one year without polio. India had previously been regarded as one of the most difficult countries from which to eliminate polio, due to the high population density and low socioeconomic status in many rural areas.
Schizophrenia was renamed in South Korea from jungshinbunyeolbyung, to johyeonbyung
U.S. pharmaceutical company Gilead Sciences acquires Pharmasset for $11.2 billion, in anticipation of release of the hepatitis C drug sofosbuvir.

May

22: The United States preventive services task force released a guideline advising against routine screening for prostate cancer using the prostate-specific antigen test, concluding that the benefits of the testing outweighs the harms, and sparking a debate about the use of the test.

July

In the USA, GlaxoSmithKline settles a court case with the Department of Justice for $3 billion, the largest pharmaceutical fraud settlement to this date, due to several allegations, including fraudulent of marketing several drugs for off-label uses, the antidepressants Paxil and Wellbutrin, and failure to include data in a Food and Drug Administration submission for the diabetic medication Avandia.

October

08: The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine is jointly awarded to John B. Gurdon and Shinya Yamanaka "for the discovery that mature cells can be reprogrammed to become pluripotent".
26: The National People's Congress of China passed new mental health laws, recognising the increasing awareness of mental health. One of the major changes is the emphasis that treatment must be voluntary in the majority of cases.

2013

April

14: The first kidney grown in a rat in vitro in the U.S. was published.

May

01: China signed a new mental health law into effect.
18: The psychiatry manual DSM-5 was formally published, revising definitions for a wide range of psychiatric illnesses, including a new definition for autism spectrum disorder and substance use disorder
29: Results of a phase 3 study for the first vaccine for enterovirus 71, one cause of hand foot mouth disease, were published, showing a 90% statistically significant efficacy

July

03: A study was published documenting the first human liver grown from stem cells in Japan

October

01: Due to a contentious debate about funding for the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act the government of the United States entered a period of shutdown, causing 800,000 federal workers to be furloughed. October 1, 2013 was also the first day that many insurance exchanges went online and other sections of the act began to be implemented.
07: The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine is jointly awarded to James E. Rothman, Randy W. Schekman, and Thomas C. Südhof "for their discoveries of machinery regulating vesicle traffic, a major transport system in our cells".

2014

October

06: The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine is jointly awarded to John O'Keefe, May-Britt Moser and Edvard I. Moser "for their for their discoveries of cells that constitute a positioning system in the brain".

2015

October

05: The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine is jointly awarded to William C. Campbell and Satoshi Ōmura "for their discoveries concerning a novel therapy against infections caused by roundworm parasites" and to Tu Youyou "for her discoveries concerning a novel therapy against Malaria".

2016

October

03: The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine is awarded to Yoshinori Ohsumi "for his discoveries of mechanisms for autophagy".

2017

October

02: The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine is jointly awarded to Jeffrey C. Hall, Michael Rosbash and Michael W. Young "for their discoveries of molecular mechanisms controlling the circadian rhythm".

2018

October

01: The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine is jointly awarded to James P. Allison and Tasuku Honjo "for their discovery of cancer therapy by inhibition of negative immune regulation".

2019

October

07: The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine is jointly awarded to William Kaelin Jr., Peter J. Ratcliffe and Gregg L. Semenza "for their discoveries of how cells sense and adapt to oxygen availability".

December

01: The first known case of COVID-19 in a human occurs in mainland China, leading to the COVID-19 pandemic.