Some products were sold under the brands of major retailers like Kroger, Price Chopper and Walmart. No illnesses so far have been linked to the waffles.Nearly 700 frozen waffle products, some of them sold under the brands of major retailers like Kroger, Target and Walmart, were recalled on Friday over concerns of potential contamination with the bacteria Listeria monocytogenes, according to their manufacturer.The manufacturer, TreeHouse Foods, issued a voluntary recall and said in a statement that the “issue was discovered through routine testing at the manufacturing facility.”There have been no confirmed reports of illness related to the recalled products, TreeHouse said.TreeHouse, which operates more than two dozen production facilities in the United States and Canada, said that the recall affected products distributed in both countries and in various formats.Frozen waffle brands affected by the recall included several of Kroger’s Simple Truth protein waffles, Target’s Good & Gather Homestyle and Buttermilk flavors, and Walmart’s Great Value Homestyle and Blueberry waffles.Infections from listeria, which are bacteria that can contaminate foods, are rare but can cause potentially serious illnesses.Typical symptoms include fever and headaches. Young children, older adults and pregnant women are at the greatest risk for more serious and potentially life-threatening side effects.Each year in the United States, an estimated 1,600 people are infected with listeria, and about 260 people die from those infections, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.“We see it most severely in people with immune systems that are compromised in some way, and that can be the very young, the very old,” Dr. Stuart C. Ray, a professor of medicine and infectious diseases at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore, said on Saturday.Symptoms “can be as simple as a gastroenteritis, but it can be as severe as a meningitis,” he added.If someone is infected with listeria bacteria, the incubation period can last several days and sometimes several weeks. An infection might not be immediately apparent.Several companies in the deli industry this year have issued recalls related to listeria outbreaks.The deli meat brand Boar’s Head faced scrutiny in recent months after one of its facilities in Virginia was found to contain black mold, dead flies and water dripping over meat. Foods distributed from that facility and containing listeria were linked to nine deaths.And BrucePac, another meat provider, this month recalled more than 10 million pounds of meats and poultry products because of listeria.Food plants and facilities are common epicenters of listeria outbreaks because of the bacteria’s ability to survive cold climates, Dr. Ray said.“It survives on damp surfaces, including in factories and food preparation facilities,” he said. “It can be shared by animals, including livestock, that don’t appear sick. It can creep into our food chain in ways that might not be obvious.”TreeHouse said that customers can check the lot code on their waffle products to see if they are a part of the recall. Consumers should dispose of any products they have in their freezers, or return them to the place of purchase for credit.

One of only about 150 people known to have the rare fatal condition, he traveled internationally to raise awareness and participated in the search for a cure.Sammy Basso, an advocate for research into progeria, an ultrarare fatal disease that causes rapid aging in children, who was known for living with gusto and humor as he faced the certainty of premature death, died on Oct. 5 near his home in Tezze sul Brenta, in the Veneto region of northern Italy. He was 28.Dr. Leslie B. Gordon, medical director of the Progeria Research Foundation, for which Mr. Basso served as global ambassador, said the cause was complications of the disease. Mr. Basso had survived longer than any other known person with progeria.Mr. Basso, who lived with his parents, was diagnosed with progeria at age 2.He was one of only about 150 people worldwide identified with the condition. He traveled internationally, most recently to China, to raise awareness; gave TED Talks; and participated with scientists from Harvard and the National Institutes of Health in a research group that is seeking a cure.“You couldn’t watch a presentation by Sammy without being captivated by his courage, his spunk, his smarts and his sense of humor,” Dr. Francis S. Collins, a former N.I.H. director who has long researched progeria, said in an email.Progeria, also known as Hutchinson-Gilford progeria syndrome, causes children to undergo rapidly accelerated aging; its effects include baldness, wrinkled skin, hardening of the arteries and a wizened stature. Mr. Basso was about 4 feet 5 inches tall and weighed about 44 pounds.At the same time, individuals with the condition, whose average life expectancy is 14.5 years, do not experience senility.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 small-town drugstore closed for the last time on a clear and chilly afternoon in February. Jon Jacobs, who owned Yough Valley Pharmacy, hugged his employees goodbye. He cleared the shelves and packed pill bottles into plastic bins.Mr. Jacobs, a 70-year-old pharmacist, had spent more than half his life building his drugstore into a bedrock of Confluence, Pa., a rural community of roughly 1,000 people. Now the town was losing its only health care provider.Obscure but powerful health care middlemen — companies known as pharmacy benefit managers, or P.B.M.s — had destroyed his business.This has been happening all over the country, a New York Times investigation found. P.B.M.s, which employers and government programs hire to oversee prescription drug benefits, have been systematically underpaying small pharmacies, helping to drive hundreds out of business.The pattern is benefiting the largest P.B.M.s, whose parent companies run their own competing pharmacies. When local drugstores fold, the benefit managers often scoop up their customers, according to dozens of patients and pharmacists.Jon Jacobs packed up medicine on the day he closed his pharmacy in February.Jeff Swensen for The New York TimesMr. Jacobs hugged an employee.Jeff Swensen for The New York TimesNewly Created DesertsNearly 800 ZIP codes that had at least one pharmacy in 2015 now have none.

BBCWe are now in the era of weight-loss drugs.

Several federal agencies are investigating whether the large chain of psychiatric hospitals held patients without medical justification.The Veterans Affairs Department is investigating whether Acadia Healthcare, one of the country’s largest chains of psychiatric hospitals, is defrauding government health insurance programs by holding patients longer than is medically necessary, according to three people with knowledge of the inquiry.The investigation, led by the agency’s inspector general, comes three weeks after Acadia told investors that it was facing scrutiny for its admissions practices from several other federal investigators, including prosecutors in Manhattan and a grand jury in Missouri. The company, which relies on government insurance programs like Medicare and Medicaid for much of its revenue, said it was also expecting to receive inquiries from the Securities and Exchange Commission and other agencies.Acadia told investors that it was “fully cooperating with authorities and, at this time, cannot speculate on whether the outcome of these investigations will have any impact on its business or operations.” The company has denied claims that it was improperly holding patients and has said that all decisions about care are made by licensed medical professionals.The Veterans Affairs Department did not immediately respond to questions about the new investigation.The New York Times reported in September that Acadia was holding patients against their will in ways that appeared to violate state laws. The Times reported that some patients arrived at emergency rooms seeking routine mental health care but then were sent to Acadia facilities and locked in. The company’s employees often held patients until their insurance coverage ran out, even when there was no medical justification.The Times article was based on official complaints, court records and interviews with patients, as well as more than 50 current and former Acadia employees.Last month, Acadia agreed to pay almost $20 million to settle Justice Department claims that the company had defrauded government health insurers by holding patients longer than medically necessary and admitting people who didn’t need to be there. Acadia did not acknowledge wrongdoing in that case, which covered conduct from 2014 through 2017.The fresh round of investigations are focused on recent events. The veterans agency is looking into whether Acadia billed insurance programs for patients who were stable enough to be released and did not need intensive inpatient care, according to two of the people with knowledge of the investigation, who requested anonymity because it has not been made public.Several former Acadia employees in Georgia and Missouri have also recently been interviewed by agents from the F.B.I. and the inspector general’s office of the Health and Human Services Department.

Jeannie AmbroseMore than a thousand patients with advanced breast cancer are being denied a drug that can keep them alive for longer. It is already available in 19 countries in Europe – including in Scotland – but not in the rest of the UK.

GettyThe government has suggested weight-loss drugs could boost the economy by helping obese people in England get back to work.

When scientists win the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, they typically thank family and colleagues, maybe their universities or whoever funded their research.This year, as the molecular biologist Gary Ruvkun accepted the most prestigious award of his career, he spent a few minutes lauding his experimental subject: a tiny worm named Caenorhabditis elegans, which he called “badass.”“No one ever thought to use that term for a worm,” he said during a news conference. “We are asserting ourselves now, and I was asserting this before the Nobel-stinking-Prize.”This isn’t the worm’s first brush with international stardom, nor is it the first time C. elegans has been thanked for aiding award-winning work. Dr. Ruvkun’s award was actually the fourth Nobel Prize resulting from C. elegans research, cementing the lowly soil worm’s outsize role in scientific discovery.The one-millimeter nematode has helped scientists understand how healthy cells are instructed to kill themselves and how the process goes awry in AIDS, strokes and degenerative diseases. (That work was the subject of the 2002 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.)Self-proclaimed “worm people” were recognized by the Nobel committee in 2006 for discovering gene silencing, which became the basis for an entirely new class of drugs. Two years later, the chemistry prize went to scientists who used nematodes to help invent cellular “lanterns” that allowed biologists to see the inner workings of a cell.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.

Using Google’s AlphaFold, researchers identified the bundle of three sperm proteins that seem to make sexual reproduction possible.They’re the original odd couple: One is massive, spherical and unmoving. The other is tiny, has a tail and never stops swimming. Yet the union of egg and sperm is critical for every sexually reproducing animal on Earth.Exactly how that union occurs has long been a mystery to scientists. A study published Thursday in the journal Cell that relied on Nobel Prize-honored artificial intelligence technology shows that an interlocked bundle of three proteins is the key that lets sperm and egg bind together. That crucial bundle is shared by animals as distantly related as fish and mammals, and most likely including humans.For nearly all animals on Earth, life begins with a sperm cell making its way to an egg’s cell membrane. Somehow, the two cells recognize each other and bind together. Then, in a flash, the sperm head passes into the egg, as if stepping through a door. Now the fused cell is a zygote and ready to grow into a new animal.In earlier research, scientists had found four proteins on mammal sperm that are also present on fish sperm and are needed for fertilization. But no one knew whether they might work as a team to enter an egg, or how.In the new study, Andrea Pauli, a molecular and developmental biologist at the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology in Vienna, and collaborators across several institutions asked how sperm proteins might team up during fertilization.The researchers relied on AlphaFold, a technology that shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry last week. It uses A.I. to predict the shape of a protein. With AlphaFold, the team could compare the four sperm proteins shared across mammals and fish against a library of about 1,400 other proteins found on cell surfaces in zebrafish testes, looking for potential partners.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.

Getty ImagesThe NHS has had a bumper year for offering hormone replacement therapy (HRT),