Sara Mearns, the New York City Ballet principal, announced her 10-year struggle on Instagram. She tested out her new hearing aids in “The Nutcracker.”Sara Mearns stepped onto the stage as the Sugarplum Fairy wearing something more precious than a jewel-encrusted tiara. In her ears, invisible to all, were hearing aids.“I heard every single noise possible,” she said. “Backstage, onstage. The shoes on the stage sounded like cymbals in my ears. The music was so loud. The audience was ridiculously loud. Everything was magnified. It almost sounds artificial. I’m like, is it really like this? Is this real?”It’s been only three weeks since Mearns, 38, was fitted with semi-permanent hearing aids and one week since she stepped back into the role of Sugarplum in “George Balanchine’s The Nutcracker” for the first time since 2020. Her first performance, on Dec. 30, was shaky, she said. But on Friday night, her second — sensitive and seamless — “the feelings came back of Oh, you know how to do this,” Mearns said in an interview. “There’s nothing you need to worry about. You just need to go out there and enjoy yourself and be yourself and command the stage, and I really did feel like myself again.”Mearns as the Sugarplum Fairy in “The Nutcracker” on Dec. 30, her first performance with her new hearing aids.Erin BaianoIn videos posted to Instagram stories before those shows, Mearns, the acclaimed, musically penetrating New York City Ballet principal, spoke about coping with hearing loss for the past 10 years. “I won’t miss entrances anymore or not hear the music,” she said on Instagram, “or have to ask the pianist to play louder or have them turn the monitors up.”She was able to hear things she hadn’t heard in years. Chirping birds. Wind. Clicking shoes. “I was just bawling walking down the street,” she said of her trek to her Lincoln Center dressing room where she filmed the videos.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.

A new study assesses the effects of sugar-laden beverages on global health, with higher rates of consumption found in Latin America and parts of Africa.Across the world, the consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages is responsible for about 340,000 deaths each year from Type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease, according to a study published Monday that is one of the largest attempts to assess how the spread of Western eating habits is affecting global health.The study, in the journal Nature, also found that sugary drinks were linked to 2.2 million additional cases of Type 2 diabetes and 1.2 million cases of cardiovascular disease in 2020, with a disproportionate share of those cases concentrated in sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America.As it happens, those two continents have also experienced the biggest jump in the consumption of soft drinks in recent years as soda companies, faced with declining sales in North America and Europe, have sought new customers in the developing world.The estimated death toll of 340,000 is a significant increase from previous assessments of how sugar-sweetened drinks affect global health. A 2015 study published in the journal Circulation estimated 184,000 deaths worldwide in 2010 from sugary drink consumption.The negative health effects of sugar-sweetened drinks — carbonated soda, energy drinks and juices with added sugar — are well-documented. By rapidly flooding the body with empty calories, they often take the place of foods and beverages with more nutritional value.Regular consumption of the extra sugar in the drinks can lead to obesity, harm liver function and increase the risk of heart disease, hypertension and Type 2 diabetes, an especially insidious disease that can lead to blindness, amputations and premature death.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.

Tomiko Itooka, a Japanese woman who was the world’s oldest person according to Guinness World Records, has died, an Ashiya city official said Saturday. She was 116.
Yoshitsugu Nagata, an official in charge of elderly policies, said Itooka died on Dec. 29 at a care home in Ashiya, Hyogo Prefecture, central Japan.
Itooka, who loved bananas and a yogurt-flavored Japanese drink called Calpis, was born on May 23, 1908. She became the oldest person last year following the death of 117-year-old Maria Branyas, according to the Gerontology Research Group.
When she was told she was at the top of the World Supercentenarian Rankings List, she simply replied, “Thank you.”
When Itooka celebrated her birthday last year, she received flowers, a cake, and a card from the mayor.
Born in Osaka, Itooka was a volleyball player in high school, and long had a reputation for a sprightly spirit, Nagata said. She climbed the 3,067-meter (10,062-ft) Mount Ontake twice.
She married at 20, and had two daughters and two sons, according to Guinness.
Itooka managed the office of her husband’s textile factory during World War II. She lived alone in Nara after her husband died in 1979.
She is survived by one son and one daughter, and five grandchildren. A funeral service was held with family and friends, according to Nagata.
According to the Gerontology Research Group, the world’s oldest person is now 116-year-old Brazilian nun Inah Canabarro Lucas, who was born 16 days after Itooka.

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The snake struck 11-year-old Beatrice Ndanu Munyoki as she sat on a small stone, which lay atop a larger one, watching the family’s eight goats. She was idly running her fingers through the dirt when she saw a red head dart from between the stones and felt a sharp sting on her right index finger.Never a crier, she ran to her father, David Mutunga, who was building a fence. He cut the cloth belt on her dress into strips with a machete, tied her arm in three places and rushed her to a hospital 30 minutes away on a motorcycle taxi.As the day stretched on, her finger grew darker, but the hospital in Mwingi, a small town in Kenya, had no antidote for that kind of venom. Finally that evening in November 2023, she was taken by ambulance to another hospital and injected with antivenom.When the finger blistered, swelled and turned black despite a second dose the next day, “I understood that they will now remove that part,” Mr. Mutunga said with tears in his eyes. Beatrice’s finger was amputated.In Kenya, India, Brazil and dozens of other countries, snakes vie for the same land, water and sometimes food as people, with devastating consequences. Deforestation, human sprawl and climate change are exacerbating the problem.According to official estimates, about five million people are bitten by snakes each year. About 120,000 die, and some 400,000 lose limbs to amputation.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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Virginia nurse Erin Elizabeth Ann Strotman was arrested and charged with malicious wounding and felony child abuse in connection to an ongoing investigation involving Henrico Doctors’ Hospital’s neonatal intensive care unit. (Washington Post)
An additional 107 women joined a sexual misconduct lawsuit filed last year against former Cedar-Sinai ob/gyn Barry Brock, MD, bringing the total to 167 women in all. (CBS News)
The oldest woman in the world, Tomiko Itooka, 116, died Saturday in Japan. ( AP )
Some health insurers are restricting coverage of prosthetic limbs for amputees while joint replacements continue without hurdles. (KFF Health News)
Changing alcohol labels to reflect the Surgeon General’s advisory about cancer risks could take decades, an expert maintained. (The Hill)
In the year-end federal spending package, a provision to extend pandemic-era telehealth flexibilities — a linchpin in care for many older Americans — was extended for 3 months, rather than 2 years. (New York Times)
Medicaid cuts may create a crisis for people with disabilities, experts warned. (STAT)
How likely is Medicaid to be expanded in Mississippi? (Mississippi Today)
Only 39% to 56% of adults who received a standard pathology report in a hypothetical scenario accurately identified a cancer diagnosis in their record, compared with 93% who received a patient-centered pathology report. (JAMA)
Legislation in Massachusetts to more closely regulate private equity firms reached Democratic Gov. Maura Healey’s desk. (MassLive.com)
Also, a new report from a Massachusetts’ auditor’s office found hospitals did not receive adequate monitoring from an independent state agency charged with assessing their financial health. (WCVB)
Tuberculosis rates dropped sharply after families living in poverty in Brazil received cash benefits. (Nature Medicine)
Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine (R) vetoed provisions of a bill that aimed to protect medical free speech, arguing that the legislation would “totally gut” the state’s capacity for regulating misconduct. (10 WBNS)
Here’s how to make New Year’s exercise goals stick. (Washington Post)
Jeff Baena, filmmaker and husband of actress Aubrey Plaza, was found dead Friday. His death was ruled a suicide. (AP)

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Tackling the NHS backlog is one of the government’s key six missions – and now

BBCTwo elderly patients have been in the emergency department of the Royal Victoria Hospital (RVH) in Belfast for more than five days, BBC News NI can reveal.

Phil Tragen/The Christie/PA MediaThe first patient in the UK with advanced bowel cancer to receive a liver transplant after the disease spread to it has said she had been given “a second chance at life”.

But the report, on the experiences of 13 patients, found that the drug had no benefit for some people and that some who benefited said the improvement didn’t last.Can Paxlovid treat long Covid? A new report suggests it might help some patients, but which patients might benefit remains unclear.The report, published Monday in the journal Communications Medicine, describes the cases of 13 long Covid patients who took extended courses of the antiviral drug. Results were decidedly mixed: Nine patients reported some improvement, but only five said it lasted. Four reported no improvement at all.Perhaps more than anything, the report underscores that nearly five years after the pandemic began, there is still little known about what can help the millions of people with long Covid. While some people improve on their own or with various therapies and medications, no treatment has yet been shown to be widely successful.“People with long Covid are eager for treatments that can help,” said Alison Cohen, an epidemiologist at the University of California, San Francisco, who is an author of the new report and has long Covid herself. “There’s been a lot of research, but it continues to be slow going.”Paxlovid, made by Pfizer, is considered a tantalizing prospect because it can prevent severe illness during active Covid infections and because patients who take the five-day course during the infection have been less likely to develop long Covid later.In addition, a theory that some long Covid cases may be caused by remnants of virus in the body suggests that an antiviral like Paxlovid might vanquish those symptoms by extinguishing lingering virus.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 government has unveiled a new pledge to cut the list of patients waiting more than 18 weeks for NHS treatment in England by nearly half a million over the next year.