Some women are stocking up on the medications, saying they are concerned that the new administration could take steps to restrict access.The day after the election, Beth Ryan ordered two packages of emergency contraception pills and had them sent to her 27-year-old daughter.“We all felt so helpless,” said Ms. Ryan, who lives in Florida, describing her fear that a second Trump administration could further threaten access to reproductive health care. After one of her daughter’s friends, who handles online orders at Target, said he was seeing a burst of demand for Plan B morning-after pills, Ms. Ryan purchased Plan B from Walmart for her daughter in Colorado.“I think I felt better because I could control something,” she said. “I mean, it was something that you could do.”Across the country, some women are taking similar steps, ordering emergency contraceptives, abortion pills or both.There is no national data, but interviews with numerous providers of abortion and contraceptive drugs point to a surge in demand in the immediate aftermath of the election.Wisp, a telehealth provider of medications for reproductive health, said that during the five days after the election it sold more than 10,000 Plan B pills, which do not require a prescription; it sold fewer than 5,000 pills in the same Wednesday-through-Sunday span the week before the election.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.

Trinian Taylor, a 52-year-old car dealer, pushed his cart through the aisles of a supermarket as I pretended not to follow him. It was a bright August day in Northern California, and I had come to the store to meet Emily Auerbach, a relationship manager at Mattson, a food-innovation firm that creates products for the country’s largest food and beverage companies: McDonald’s and White Castle, PepsiCo and Hostess. Auerbach was trying to understand the shopping behavior of Ozempic users, and Taylor was one of her case studies. She instructed me to stay as close as I could without influencing his route around the store. In her experience of shop-alongs, too much space, or taking photos, would be a red flag for the supermarket higher-ups, who might figure out we were not here to shop. “They’d be like, ‘You need to exit,’” she said.Listen to this article, read by Simon VanceListen to this article, read by Simon VanceAuerbach watched in silence as Taylor, who was earning $150 in exchange for being tailed, propelled his cart through snack aisles scattered with products from Mattson’s clients. He took us straight past the Doritos and the Hostess HoHos, without a side glance at the Oreos or the Cheetos. We rushed past the Pop-Tarts and the Hershey’s Kisses, the Lucky Charms and the Lay’s — they all barely registered.Clumsily, close on his heels, Auerbach and I stumbled right into what has become, under the influence of the revolutionary new diet drug, Taylor’s happy place: the produce section. He inspected the goods. “I’m on all of these,” he told us. “I eat a lot of pineapple. A lot of pineapple, cucumber, ginger. Oh, a lot of ginger.”Taylor, who lives in Hayward, Calif., used to nurse a sugar addiction, he said, but he can no longer stomach Hostess treats. A few days earlier, his daughter fed him some candy. “I just couldn’t,” he said. “It was so sweet it choked me.” His midnight snack used to be cereal, but now he stirs at night with strange urges. Salads. Chicken. He has sworn off canned sodas and fruit juices and infuses his water with lemon and cucumber. He dropped a heavy bag of lemons into the cart and sauntered over to the leafy vegetables. “I love Swiss chard,” he said. “I eat a lot of kale.”For decades, Big Food has been marketing products to people who can’t stop eating, and now, suddenly, they can. The active ingredient in Ozempic, as in Wegovy, Zepbound and several other similar new drugs, mimics a natural hormone, called glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1), that slows digestion and signals fullness to the brain. Around seven million Americans now take a GLP-1 drug, and Morgan Stanley estimates that by 2035 the number of U.S. users could expand to 24 million. That’s more than double the number of vegetarians and vegans in America, with ample room to balloon from there. More than 100 million American adults are obese, and the drugs may eventually be rolled out to people without diabetes or obesity, as they seem to tame addictions beyond food — appearing to make cocaine, alcohol and cigarettes more resistible. Research is at an early stage, but they may also cut the risk of everything from stroke and heart and kidney disease to Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.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.

Dionisia Moreno, a 70-year-old Indigenous farmer, still remembers when Shallap River, nearly 13,000 feet up in the Cordillera Blanca, brought crystal clear water brimming with trout to her village, Jancu. “People and animals alike could drink the water without suffering,” she said. “Now the water is red. No one can drink it.”At a glance the river looks like a casualty of mining pollution; Peru is a major producer of copper, silver and gold, and the waters near abandoned mines often run a shade of rust. But the culprit is climate change. The Cordillera Blanca mountain range harbors the world’s largest concentration of tropical glaciers, which are particularly sensitive to rising temperatures and are a major source of freshwater in Peru.For thousands of years, the glaciers were replenished with ice in the winter. But they have shrunk by more than 40 percent since 1968, uncovering rocks that, when exposed to the elements, can trigger chemical reactions that leach toxic metals into the water and turn it acidic.The process, known as acid rock drainage, “creates a cascade reaction that pollutes water sources,” said Raúl Loayza, a biologist at Peru’s Cayetano Heredia University who researches water quality in the Andes. “It’s a big problem and is getting worse and worse.”Dionisia Moreno washing her food with water from mountain canals. Glacial retreat has exposed rocks that turn the waters vital to Indigenous communities acidic and toxic.Alipia Cruz and her children Jeyson, 9, and Ruth, 11, draw water from their well in Cacapaqui village for consumption. Ms. Cruz said the spring water now tastes sour and members of her family suffer from stomach aches.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.

The ruling found that two state laws — one barring use of abortion pills, and one banning all forms of abortion — violated the state Constitution’s “fundamental right to make health care decisions.” A Wyoming judge ruled on Monday that two state abortion bans — including the first state law specifically banning the use of pills for abortion — violated the Wyoming Constitution and could not be enforced.Judge Melissa Owens of Teton County District Court wrote in her ruling that both the ban on medication abortion and a broader ban against all methods of abortion “impede the fundamental right to make health care decisions for an entire class of people, pregnant women.” She added, “The abortion statutes suspend a woman’s right to make her own health care decisions during the entire term of a pregnancy and are not reasonable or necessary to protect the health and general welfare of the people.”Enforcement of the two abortion bans, passed last year, had been temporarily halted by Judge Owens while the court case proceeded. Her decision on Monday blocks the laws permanently, although the state is expected to appeal. Efforts to reach the state attorney general’s office and the governor’s office were unsuccessful on Monday night.The suit to block the bans was filed by a group of plaintiffs that included two abortion providers in Wyoming; an obstetrician-gynecologist who often treats high-risk pregnancies; an emergency-room nurse; a fund that gives financing to abortion patients; and a woman who said her Jewish faith required access to abortion if a pregnant woman’s physical or mental health or life was in danger.An amendment to the Wyoming Constitution, approved by an overwhelming majority of the state’s voters in 2012, guarantees adults the right to make their own health care decisions.In court last year, the state, represented by Jay Jerde, a special assistant attorney general for Wyoming, argued that even though doctors and other health providers must be involved in abortions, there were many instances in which abortion was not “health care” because “it’s not restoring the woman’s body from pain, physical disease or sickness.”Mr. Jerde also argued that the constitutional amendment allowing people to make decisions about their own health care did not apply to abortion because terminating a pregnancy affected not just the woman making the decision, but the fetus as well.Judge Owens rejected both of those arguments. She wrote: “The uncontested facts establish that the abortion statutes fail to accomplish any of the asserted interests by the state. The state did not present any evidence refuting or challenging the extensive medical testimony presented by the plaintiffs.”Dr. Giovannina Anthony, an obstetrician-gynecologist and abortion provider who was one of the plaintiffs in the case, said on Monday night that she was “grateful and relieved that the judge agreed that abortion is health care and that abortion bans violate the rights of pregnant women.”Dr. Anthony said she expected the state to appeal. “This is not the end of the fight in Wyoming, but for now we can continue to provide evidence-based care without fear of a prison sentence.”

A rise in the disease in younger people was not followed by an increase in deaths, a study found, and might be a sign of overdiagnosis.One of the first warnings came in a paper published in 2021. There was an unexpected rise in pancreatic cancer among young people in the United States from 2000 to 2018. The illness can be untreatable by the time it is discovered, a death sentence.With publication of that report, by Dr. Srinivas Gaddam, a gastroenterologist at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, researchers began searching for reasons. Could the increase be caused by obesity? Ultraprocessed foods? Was it toxins in the environment?Alternatively, a new study published on Monday in The Annals of Internal Medicine suggests, the whole alarm could be misguided.The authors of the paper, led by Dr. Vishal R. Patel a surgical resident at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, did not dispute the data showing a rising incidence. They report that from 2001 to 2019 the number of young people — ages 15 to 39 — diagnosed with pancreatic cancer soared. The rate of pancreatic surgeries more than doubled in women and men.The problem is that the expected consequence of such a rise in cancers did not occur. With more pancreatic cancers in young people, there should be more pancreatic cancer deaths. And there were not. Nor were more young people getting diagnosed with later-stage cancers. Instead, the increase was confined to cancers that were in very early stages.Many cancers will never cause harm if left alone, but with increasingly sensitive tools, doctors are finding more and more of them. Because there usually is no way to know if they are dangerous, doctors tend to treat them aggressively. But they would never have shown up in death statistics if they had not been found.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.

TV presenter Davina McCall is out of intensive care and has made an “enormous leap forward” in the last 24 hours, following her surgery to remove a rare brain tumour.

Getty ImagesPlans aimed at preventing companies that run children’s homes in England from making excessive profits will be set out by the government on Monday.

BBCWaiting lists for gynaecology appointments across the UK have more than doubled since February 2020, BBC research reveals.

One person has died and nearly 40 people have been sickened in an E. coli outbreak tied to multiple brands of recalled organic carrots sold by Grimmway Farms, officials said.One person has died and 39 people have become ill in an E. coli outbreak linked to organic carrots, federal regulators said on Sunday.The infections were tied to multiple brands of recalled organic whole bagged carrots and baby carrots sold by Grimmway Farms, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said. Fifteen people have been hospitalized, according to the agency.Carrots currently on store shelves are unlikely to be affected by the recall but those in consumers’ refrigerators or freezers may be, the authorities said.“If you have any recalled carrots in your home, throw them out or return them to the store,” the C.D.C. said.Grimmway Farms, which is based in Bakersfield, Calif., said in a statement on Saturday that it had recalled multiple sizes and brands of its bagged organic baby and whole carrots.The recalled products include organic whole carrots, which do not have a best-if-used-by date on the bag but were available for purchase at retail stores from Aug. 14 through Oct. 23, 2024. The recall also involved organic baby carrots with best-if-used-by dates from Sept. 11 through Nov. 12, 2024.The carrots were sold under multiple brand names and at several retailers, including Trader Joe’s and Wegmans.The states with the most outbreaks were Minnesota, New York and Washington, according to the Food and Drug Administration.E. coli infections typically start four days after a person consumes a contaminated food. Symptoms include diarrhea and severe stomach cramps. If those symptoms last more than two days or if the patient experiences a fever higher than 102 degrees or dehydration, medical help is required.Some people may also develop serious kidney problems and need to be hospitalized. Most people recover without treatment after five to seven days, the C.D.C. said.The carrots recall comes after an E. coli outbreak last month related to McDonald’s Quarter Pounder hamburgers resulted in one fatality and more than 100 cases of illness, according to the C.D.C. The agency said that slivered onions were the likely source of that outbreak.

A small study found ChatGPT outdid human physicians when assessing medical case histories, even when those doctors were using a chatbot.Dr. Adam Rodman, an expert in internal medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, confidently expected that chatbots built to use artificial intelligence would help doctors diagnose illnesses.He was wrong.Instead, in a study Dr. Rodman helped design, doctors who were given ChatGPT-4 along with conventional resources did only slightly better than doctors who did not have access to the bot. And, to the researchers’ surprise, ChatGPT alone outperformed the doctors.“I was shocked,” Dr. Rodman said.The chatbot, from the company OpenAI, scored an average of 90 percent when diagnosing a medical condition from a case report and explaining its reasoning. Doctors randomly assigned to use the chatbot got an average score of 76 percent. Those randomly assigned not to use it had an average score of 74 percent.The study showed more than just the chatbot’s superior performance.It unveiled doctors’ sometimes unwavering belief in a diagnosis they made, even when a chatbot potentially suggests a better one.And the study illustrated that while doctors are being exposed to the tools of artificial intelligence for their work, few know how to exploit the abilities of chatbots. As a result, they failed to take advantage of A.I. systems’ ability to solve complex diagnostic problems and offer explanations for their diagnoses.A.I. systems should be “doctor extenders,” Dr. Rodman said, offering valuable second opinions on diagnoses.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.