25 minutes agoNikki MitchellFamily photo”I saw my son fighting for his last breath,” says Anna Nikolin-Caisley. “He went in agony.”

A new version of the virus is widespread in wild birds but had not previously been detected in cows.Dairy cows in Nevada have been infected with a new form of bird flu that is distinct from the version that has been spreading through herds over the last year, the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced on Wednesday.The finding indicates that the virus, known as H5N1, has spilled from birds into cows at least twice — leading to these two sets of infections — and that it could continue to do so. It also suggests that the virus may pose a persistent risk to cows and to the people who work closely with them.Before last year, scientists did not know that cows were susceptible to this type of influenza.“This is not what anyone wanted to see,” said Louise Moncla, an evolutionary biologist who studies avian influenza at the University of Pennsylvania. “We need to now consider the possibility that cows are more broadly susceptible to these viruses than we initially thought.”The news was announced in a news release from the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, a division of the Department of Agriculture. Federal agencies have not held a news briefing on bird flu since President Trump took office.The virus that has been spreading through the nation’s dairies is a version of H5N1 known as B3.13, which has infected more than 950 herds in 16 states. Scientists believe that it initially jumped to cows from birds about a year ago, somewhere in the Texas panhandle. That transition took scientists by surprise, and this new one even more so.“I was kind of under the belief that the bird-to-cow movement was a pretty rare event,” said Richard Webby, an influenza expert at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.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.

President Trump’s pause on aid, and the gutting of the primary aid agency, could jeopardize the health of more than 20 million people worldwide, including 500,000 children, experts say.Two weeks into President Trump’s sweeping freeze on foreign aid, H.I.V. groups abroad have not received any funding, jeopardizing the health of more than 20 million people, including 500,000 children. Subsequent waivers from the State Department have clarified that the work can continue, but the funds and legal paperwork to do so are still missing.With the near closure of the American aid agency known as U.S.A.I.D. and its recall of officers posted abroad, there is little hope that the situation will resolve quickly, experts warned.H.I.V. treatment and services were funded through the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR, a $7.5 billion program that was frozen along with all foreign aid on Mr. Trump’s first day in office.Since its start in 2003 during the George W. Bush administration, PEPFAR has delivered lifesaving treatment to as many as 25 million people in 54 countries and had enjoyed bipartisan support. The program was due for a five-year reauthorization in 2023; it survived an effort by some House Republicans to end it and was renewed for one year.Without treatment, millions of people with H.I.V. would be at risk of severe illness and premature death. The loss of treatment also threatens to reverse the dramatic progress made against H.I.V. in recent years and could spur the emergence of drug-resistant strains of H.I.V.; both outcomes could have a global impact, including in the United States.The pause on aid and the stripping down of U.S.A.I.D. have delivered a “system shock,” said Christine Stegling, a deputy executive director at UNAIDS, the United Nations’ H.I.V. division.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.

He marshaled epidemiological research to press for changes in drug policy, alternatives to prison and needle-exchange programs to slow the spread of AIDS.Ernest Drucker, a pioneering public-health researcher who approached drug addiction with compassion, invigorated needle-exchange programs to stem the AIDS epidemic and diagnosed the destructive impact of what he called a “plague” of mass incarceration, died on Jan. 26 at his home in Manhattan. He was 84.The cause was complications of dementia, his son, Jesse Drucker, said.For more than three decades, Dr. Drucker, primed with epidemiological evidence, waged cutting edge campaigns to improve the lot of prison inmates; the homeless; patients with tuberculosis; workers exposed to asbestos; and HIV-infected drug users and their families, who had been ravaged by the repercussions of AIDS. He was an early and vocal proponent of rethinking the country’s approach to illicit drugs, advocating “harm reduction” — a strategy that prioritizes reducing negative consequences over criminal prosecution.A clinical psychologist by training, he was professor emeritus of family and social medicine at Montefiore Medical Center/Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx and had been a senior research associate and scholar in residence at John Jay College of Criminal Justice of the City University of New York in Manhattan, where he biked to work from the Upper West Side.Dr. Helene Gayle, an epidemiologist and a former president of Spelman College in Atlanta, described Dr. Drucker this way in an email to his son: “Unapologetic about taking on issues that others wouldn’t touch. Unapologetic about the humanity in all including those who had suffered the most injustice.”Having run a drug rehabilitation program in the Bronx, Dr. Drucker knew firsthand the destructive capabilities of addictive drugs. But the criminal prosecution of addicts, he argued, only compounded the problem, forcing addicts underground, where dangerous practices like sharing needles resulted in the spread of H.I.V., and saddling them with criminal records that could make them unemployable.“Our demonization of heroin has transformed otherwise benign and controllable patterns of its use into a lethal gamble and has raised the threshold for seeking help when problems do arise,” he wrote in a letter to The New York Times in 1995. “Other countries are adopting ‘harm reduction’ strategies that (without legalizing drugs) acknowledge their widespread use and employ methods (such as needle exchange) to make even injectable use safer.”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.

1 hour agoCatherine SnowdonBBC News

The New York Times wants to hear from readers reflecting on what life looks like now, five years later.As the five-year anniversary approaches of the World Health Organization’s declaration of the coronavirus pandemic, The New York Times is interested in exploring the extent to which life has changed. (We also want to hear from you if you have lost someone to Covid or another cause of death in the last five years.)Have your daily routines changed? Do you make different decisions regarding your relationships? Has Covid changed your overall outlook, or did it for an extended period of time? Do you think of your life as having a prepandemic dividing line? When did your life start to feel “post”-pandemic — if it ever has — and why?We may reach out to hear more about your submission, but we will not publish any part of your response without contacting you first, and we will never publicly share your personal information.Share Your Story

The New York Times is interested in exploring how the response to loss may have changed in the last five years.The coronavirus pandemic has shifted grieving for many Americans, as more than a million people died from Covid, a figure that is very likely undercounted. The New York Times is interested in exploring how your relationship to grief may have changed in the last five years. (We also want to hear from you on the extent to which your life may have changed otherwise since the pandemic began.)We may reach out to hear more about your submission, but we will not publish any part of your response without contacting you first, and we will never publicly share your personal information.Share Your Story

2 days agoKatharine Da CostaHigh strength nicotine pouches that are being sold illegally in the UK could cause inadvertent overdosing and harm to teenagers and young adults, experts have warned.

27 minutes agoAsha PatelBBC News, Nottingham

The study may suggest that other researchers should be less optimistic about the prospects for treating a range of other conditions with newer weight-loss drugs.The idea was so tantalizing. Drugs in the GLP-1 class, which includes Wegovy and Ozempic, have proved miraculous in treating weight loss and other diseases. And some researchers hoped that the drugs could also help with some of the most difficult diseases to treat — those of the brain, like Parkinson’s.But now, at least for Parkinson’s, that hope seems dimmed. A rigorous study that randomly assigned Parkinson’s patients to take exenatide, a relative of Ozempic, showed absolutely no benefit or slowing of the course of the degenerative disease after 96 weeks.And there were no effect on patient symptoms, no effect on brain scans, no subgroup that showed any benefit. No matter how the researchers sliced the data the results were the same.The study, published Tuesday in The Lancet, is bad news for the half million Americans who have been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. Symptoms include tremors, stiffness and difficulty with balance. Patients also may develop dementia. Treatments, including medications and deep brain stimulation, can help with symptoms. But no treatment has been shown to slow the disease’s progress.“It’s hugely disappointing,” said Dr. Thomas Foltynie of University College London, who led the trial. “We were expecting we would come through and we would get a positive result.”Parkinson’s experts shared his sentiment.“This is a sobering moment,” said Dr. Michael S. Okun, a Parkinson’s disease expert at the University of Florida and the national medical adviser for the Parkinson’s Foundation. “This is a really well done study and it came up empty-handed.”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.