Ozempic and Wegovy Ease Knee Osteoarthritis Pain in Large Study

A large trial showed that semaglutide, sold as Ozempic for diabetes and as Wegovy for obesity, was better than any current medications in alleviating symptoms.The blockbuster drug semaglutide, sold as Ozempic for diabetes and as Wegovy for weight loss, now has a new proven benefit: It markedly soothed knee pain in people who are obese and have moderate to severe osteoarthritis, according to a large study.The effect was so pronounced that some arthritis experts not involved with the clinical trial were taken aback.“The magnitude of the improvement is of a scope we haven’t seen before with a drug,” said Dr. Bob Carter, deputy director of the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases. “They had an almost 50 percent reduction in their knee pain. That’s huge.”Dr. David T. Felson, an arthritis expert and professor of medicine at Boston University School of Medicine, said the study “changes the landscape,” adding that the pain reduction is greater than anything that can be achieved short of knee replacement surgery.The results were published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine.Knee osteoarthritis affects nearly one in five Americans over the age of 45. Those with obesity are especially likely to develop it because their weight puts more stress on the knee and because obesity is associated with inflammation, which contributes to deterioration of cartilage.There are no good medical treatments. Doctors can suggest patients take over-the-counter pain relievers like acetaminophen or ibuprofen. But long-term use of those medications can damage vital organs.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

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Does Kamala Harris Back Free Health Care for Illegal Immigrants?

Donald Trump and other Republicans have said repeatedly that she does. Her history on the issue is complicated.One of former president Donald J. Trump’s final television ads before Election Day reprises an old talking point.The segment, released Oct. 17, declares that Vice President Kamala Harris “wants struggling seniors to pay more Social Security taxes while she gives Medicare and Social Security to illegals.”The first half of the statement is inaccurate. Ms. Harris has not suggested raising Social Security taxes for seniors; instead, she has said she supports eliminating the $168,000 income cap on the taxes workers pay to fund Social Security, a threshold above which income becomes exempt. Under that proposal, Social Security taxes would increase for working people who earn almost three times median annual pay, not for struggling seniors.The latter half of the ad’s claim — that Ms. Harris supports giving taxpayer-funded health benefits to illegal immigrants — is a misrepresentation of Ms. Harris’s current proposals. Ms. Harris made statements in 2019 that could be understood this way, but she has stepped back from that position in recent months as her health care platform has become clearer. Mr. Trump has also misstated the Biden administration’s policy. Here is a look at what that is and what Ms. Harris has said about the issue.What is the current federal policy?Immigrants who live in the United States illegally do not qualify for federally funded coverage through Medicare, Medicaid or the Children’s Health Insurance Program, which provides health coverage for low-income children. In most states, they are also ineligible to buy private health coverage through the Affordable Care Act marketplaces.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

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Heart-Valve Patients Should Have Earlier Surgery, Study Suggests

The results of a new clinical trial have overturned the “wait and see” approach that cardiologists have long favored for symptom-free patients.For decades, people with failing heart valves who nevertheless felt all right would walk out of the cardiologist’s office with the same “wait and see” treatment plan: Come back in six or 12 months. No reason to go under the knife just yet.A new clinical trial has overturned that thinking, suggesting that those patients would be much better off having their valves replaced right away with a minimally invasive procedure.The trial, whose results were published this week in The New England Journal of Medicine, could change the way doctors treat severe aortic stenosis, a narrowing of the valve that controls blood flow from the heart. The disease, which has a prognosis worse than that of most cancers, afflicts more than 3 percent of people ages 65 and older. It is expected to become more common as people live longer.Replacing people’s heart valves, even if they were not yet experiencing any ill effects, appeared to roughly halve their risk of being unexpectedly hospitalized for heart problems over at least two years, the trial found.Patients who were put on the more conservative treatment plan overwhelmingly ended up needing surgery anyway: Roughly 70 percent of them developed symptoms and needed to have their valves replaced within two years, suggesting that the disease worsens more quickly than previously understood.“You may be able to at least prevent that progression and perhaps improve patient outcomes by treating earlier,” said Dr. Gregg Stone, a professor of medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, describing the implications of the trial. The findings, he said, “will have a major effect on practice.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

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Was Stone-Age Scandinavia Struck by Plague?

New research by geneticists hints at the deadly work of Yersinia pestis 5,000 years ago.At the end of the Stone Age, some 5,300 years ago, the populations of Scandinavia and northwest Europe plummeted, and farming communities evaporated. “People stopped building megaliths, like Stonehenge,” said Frederik Seersholm, a geneticist at the University of Copenhagen. “Settlements were abandoned. Everyone vanished.”The so-called Neolithic decline, which lasted several centuries, is believed to have allowed a nomadic herding culture known as the Yamnaya to migrate west, altering the genetic makeup of early Europeans. The cause of this demographic collapse has been an open question, with the suspects including wars and agricultural crises.A new genomic study published in July in the journal Nature makes the case for another candidate, which had been found in people living at the time but was never thought to have been widespread: the plague.Until now, it was unclear how virulent the Neolithic plague was within a human population. “There is a hypothesis that the oldest plague bacterium lacked epidemic potential,” said Dr. Seersholm, the lead author of the paper. “That hypothesis no longer holds.”The researchers propose that a Stone Age pandemic originated in small farming villages and spread to mega-settlements and far-off lands along with traders who traveled by horse-drawn cart. “We can’t prove that this was exactly how it happened, not yet, anyway,” Dr. Seersholm said. “Still, it’s significant that we can show it could have happened.”‘Bring out your dead’Plague is caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis. The bubonic and septicemic forms — mainly infecting the lymph nodes and blood — are typically transmitted through fleas and rats. The more deadly pneumonic form, which affects the lungs, travels on airborne droplets and is contagious in people and animals.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

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Can John Green Make You Care About Tuberculosis?

With a forthcoming nonfiction book and an online army of Nerdfighters, the young-adult author aims to eliminate an entirely curable global scourge.You can roughly guess a person’s age based on how they know John Green. Older millennials met Mr. Green and his brother, Hank, on YouTube in the late 2000s, when they were performing songs about Harry Potter and cultivating a fan base of “Nerdfighters.” Younger millennials probably know him as the author of “The Fault in Our Stars,” “Looking for Alaska” and other best-selling young-adult novels that feature complex and frequently tragic teenage characters. Generation Z-ers herald Mr. Green as a beloved professor: Since 2012, he has hosted video lessons on history, literature and religion for an educational web series called “Crash Course.”Members of Generation Alpha now comprise many of his 2.8 million followers on TikTok. Fans are drawn to the brothers’ inside jokes and eclectic interests, like a holiday centered on a photo of Mr. Green with a mustache, or an annual charity event called the Project for Awesome (put on by the Foundation to Decrease World Suck). But even dedicated Nerdfighters were surprised by Mr. Green’s intense focus on eradicating tuberculosis, a disease that kills 1.6 million people annually. TB is caused by a bacterium that is estimated to infect one-quarter of the world’s population, but the disease receives little attention in wealthy nations.Mr. Green has emerged as an unlikely spokesman in the global effort to fight the disease. His latest project, a book called “Everything Is Tuberculosis,” interweaves the social and scientific histories of tuberculosis with the present-day story of a young man from Sierra Leone named Henry Reider. The book will be published in March by a division of Penguin Random House.In a recent interview, Mr. Green described the book as his attempt to understand how tuberculosis could be both entirely curable and the deadliest infectious disease in the world. It explores what the disease’s persistence as a scourge “says about us as a species — what that says about the worlds we’ve chosen, the world we might choose instead,” he said.In countries like the United States, where testing and treatments are readily available and the prevalence of the disease remains low, tuberculosis is rarely mentioned outside of global-public-health labs and classroom discussions of 20th-century literature. But it thrives where tests and medication are expensive or otherwise inaccessible, funding is lacking and people are malnourished and live in poorly ventilated quarters.Mr. Green said that he aims to bridge the “empathy gap” that exists for the disease, which disproportionately affects people in sub-Saharan Africa, Eastern Europe and Asia.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

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Despite Covid ‘Amnesia,’ the Pandemic Simmers Beneath the 2024 Race

Dueling Trump and Harris rallies outside Atlanta offer a case study in how anger and anxiety over Covid-19, a proxy for the larger debate over trust in government, have shaped the 2024 race.Robert F. Kennedy Jr. walked onstage after a parade of pyrotechnics at former President Donald J. Trump’s rally outside Atlanta last week and immediately invoked a name that became a bugaboo of the right and a subject of wild conspiracy theories during the coronavirus pandemic: Bill Gates.Mr. Gates, Mr. Kennedy informed the crowd, had “been indicted in the Netherlands for lying to the public about the Covid-19 vaccine.” Thousands of red-hatted Trump backers roared their approval. In fact, there had been no indictment; according to the Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf, a judge in the Netherlands ruled that a civil suit accusing Mr. Gates of “vaccination damage” may go forward.The next night, at a rally for Vice President Kamala Harris in a different Atlanta suburb, former President Barack Obama blamed Mr. Trump for thousands of coronavirus deaths. More Americans would be alive today, he said, “if we had had a competent administration” that was “trying to do things better instead of talking about injecting bleach into your arm.”As the most divisive American presidential race in recent history barrels toward a close, many Americans have developed what Wendy Parmet, an expert in public health law at Northeastern University, calls “amnesia” about the coronavirus pandemic. The economy, immigration, abortion and threats to democracy now top the list of voters’ concerns.But anger and anxiety about Covid-19 are woven into all those issues, simmering underneath as a proxy for the larger debate over trust in government that has shaped the 2024 race.Last week’s dueling rallies in Atlanta, home to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, offer a case study in the lingering effects of the pandemic on American politics. They tell the story of two Americas, red and blue.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

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Why Is Harris So Passionate About Abortion Rights? Her Past Work Holds Clues.

For a politician who has been criticized for shifting positions on some issues, this is an area where she has shown unwavering conviction.In April 2004, Kamala Harris was less than four months into her new job as San Francisco’s district attorney, a high-profile position that thrust her into the local headlines, when she flew to Washington, D.C., to become one face in a sea of more than a million.People from around the country descended on the National Mall for the March for Women’s Lives, organized by groups including Planned Parenthood and the National Organization for Women, to call for the protection and expansion of reproductive health care, including abortion rights. Ms. Harris traveled with about 30 female Bay Area leaders, including Laurene Powell Jobs, the billionaire philanthropist, and Susie Tompkins Buell, the founder of the Esprit clothing brand and the North Face outdoor recreation-wear company. They were there primarily to protest President George W. Bush’s signing of a bill that outlawed abortions late in pregnancy, typically after 20 weeks, and allowed criminal prosecutions of doctors who performed them. The women said that the president was politicizing a matter of personal health.Twenty years later, Vice President Harris has made abortion rights — an issue that has benefited Democrats around the country since the Supreme Court overturned the national right to an abortion in 2022 — a centerpiece of her campaign for the presidency.While some Democrats, including President Biden, have become far more outspoken about abortion rights since the fall of Roe v. Wade, interviews with friends and former associates of Ms. Harris, and a review of her work as a prosecutor, show that she has been publicly passionate about the issue for decades. For a politician who has been criticized for wavering and flipping on some issues, this is one area, former associates say, where her conviction has always been clear.“It was always a given,” said Ms. Tompkins Buell in an interview, recalling that at the 2004 march, Ms. Harris warned the women in their “posse,” as they called it, that they could not take their reproductive freedoms for granted.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

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