Two new Canadian studies are the largest to date looking at death rates and psychosis associated with cannabis use disorder.Hospital and emergency room patients diagnosed with cannabis use disorder — defined as an inability to stop using cannabis even when the drug is causing harm — died at almost three times the rate of individuals without the disorder over the next five years, according to a study published on Thursday, the largest on the subject.Patients with cannabis use disorder were 10 times as likely to die by suicide as those in the general population. They were also more likely to die from trauma, drug poisonings and lung cancer. Those numbers suggest that cannabis use disorder is about half as dangerous as opioid addiction and slightly less dangerous than alcohol use disorder, the researchers said.A second report, published on Tuesday, found that more cases of schizophrenia and psychosis in Canada have been linked to cannabis use disorder since the drug was legalized.“Many people think, ‘Oh, cannabis is not harmful — it’s organic, it’s natural; how great,’” said Dr. Laura Bierut, a psychiatrist at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis who is an author of an editorial accompanying the study of death risk. But the marijuana sold today is far more potent, and more harmful, than what baby boomers smoked in the 1960s and 1970s, she said.“It is a public health threat just like alcohol,” Dr. Bierut said.Recent research suggests that three in 10 cannabis users will develop cannabis use disorder, defined as being unable to stop using cannabis even though it’s causing serious health and social problems. As with alcohol, many people use marijuana recreationally without adverse effects or addiction.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.

Their new method takes 32 minutes.A colleague approached Ernesto Di Maio, a materials scientist in Naples, Italy, and an expert in plastic foams, with a blunt suggestion: “You should do something cooler.” The colleague had a project in mind, Dr. Di Maio recalled. He wanted a perfectly boiled egg.The task was harder than it might seem, as many home cooks know. The yolk and the egg white, or albumen, have different chemical compositions, which call for different heating temperatures. Dr. Di Maio and his colleagues also welcomed the chance to one-up the Michelin-star chef Carlo Cracco, an egg evangelist who charges $52 for an egg yolk dish at his restaurant in Milan.The scientists devised a way of cooking an egg that requires no special culinary skill or fancy gadgets. It took about 300 eggs, though the researchers “didn’t eat all of them,” said Pellegrino Musto, a polymer expert at the National Research Council of Italy.The researchers said their method, published on Thursday, preserves the distinct textures of the egg as well as its nutritional value.The two parts of the egg require different cooking temperatures because they have different chemical components. “The albumen is mainly composed of water and proteins,” said Emilia Di Lorenzo, a graduate student in Dr. Di Maio’s lab at the University of Naples Federico II who recently published a paper on foaming pizza. “Yolk, on the other hand, is much richer in nutrients.”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.

22 minutes agoGetty ImagesHospitals in England have just had their busiest week of this winter so far.

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