Many patients thought to be in vegetative or minimally conscious states may be capable of thought, researchers reported.When people suffer severe brain damage — as a result of car crashes, for example, or falls or aneurysms — they may slip into a coma for weeks, their eyes closed, their bodies unresponsive.Some recover, but others enter a mysterious state: eyes open, yet without clear signs of consciousness. Hundreds of thousands of such patients in the United States alone are diagnosed in a vegetative state or as minimally conscious. They may survive for decades without regaining a connection to the outside world.These patients pose an agonizing mystery both for their families and for the medical professionals who care for them. Even if they can’t communicate, might they still be aware?A large study published on Wednesday suggests that a quarter of them are.Teams of neurologists at six research centers asked 241 unresponsive patients to spend several minutes at a time doing complex cognitive tasks, such as imagining themselves playing tennis. Twenty-five percent of them responded with the same patterns of brain activity seen in healthy people, suggesting that they were able to think and at least somewhat aware.Dr. Nicholas Schiff, a neurologist at Weill Cornell Medicine and an author of the study, said the study shows that up to 100,000 patients in the United States alone might have some level of consciousness despite their devastating injuries.The results should lead to more sophisticated exams of people with so-called disorders of consciousness, and to more research into how these patients might communicate with the outside world, he said: “It’s not OK to know this and to do nothing.”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.

Four years ago, Casey Harrell sang his last bedtime nursery rhyme to his daughter.By then, A.L.S. had begun laying waste to Mr. Harrell’s muscles, stealing from him one ritual after another: going on walks with his wife, holding his daughter, turning the pages of a book. “Like a night burglar,” his wife, Levana Saxon, wrote of the disease in a poem.But no theft was as devastating to Mr. Harrell, 46, as the fading of his speech. He had sung his last Whitney Houston song at karaoke. A climate activist, he had delivered his last unassisted Zoom presentation to fellow organizers.Last July, doctors at the University of California, Davis, surgically implanted electrodes in Mr. Harrell’s brain to try to discern what he was trying to say. That made him the latest test subject in a daunting scientific quest, one that has attracted deep-pocketed firms like Elon Musk’s company Neuralink: connecting people’s brains to computers, potentially restoring their lost faculties. Doctors told him that he would be advancing the cause of science, but that he was not likely to reverse his fortunes.Yet the results surpassed expectations, the researchers reported on Wednesday in The New England Journal of Medicine, setting a new bar for implanted speech decoders and illustrating the potential power of such devices for people with speech impairments.“It’s very exciting,” said Dr. Edward Chang, a neurosurgeon at University of California, San Francisco, who was not involved in Mr. Harrell’s case but has developed different speech implants. A device that just years ago “seemed like science fiction,” he said, is now “improving, getting optimized, so quickly.”Mr. Harrell’s team sank into his brain’s outer layer four electrode arrays that looked like tiny beds of nails. That was double the number that had recently been implanted in the speech areas of someone with A.L.S., or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, in a separate study. Each array’s 64 spikes picked up electric impulses from neurons that fired when Mr. Harrell tried to move his mouth, lips, jaw and tongue to speak.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 World Health Organization declared a global health emergency over an outbreak that has spread to more than a dozen African countries.Mpox was declared a global health emergency on Wednesday for the second time in three years, as the World Health Organization urged action on a virus spreading rapidly through more than a dozen African countries.The outbreak is most severe in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which has reported 15,600 mpox cases and 537 deaths, according to the U.N. agency. The mpox epidemic there has already proved more deadly than one in 2022, the last time an emergency was announced.Here is what to know about mpox, which was known as monkeypox before health officials, responding to complaints about the word, recommended its current name in 2022.What is mpox and how is it spread?The mpox virus is endemic to Central and Western Africa. The disease is similar to smallpox but less contagious, and the virus is spread primarily through close contact with infected animals or people, and the consumption of contaminated meat.Mpox can also be spread through sexual contact, and there is a risk of transmission to a fetus.Who is currently being affected?Ninety-six percent of the mpox deaths reported in June were in Congo, a country already assailed by an internal conflict and humanitarian crisis. But the disease has now been identified in 13 countries, including for the first time in the East African nations of Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda and Uganda.There are differences between the outbreaks in various regions and countries, depending on the circumstances in each community, according to Dr. Sylvie Jonckheere, an adviser on emerging infectious diseases for Doctors Without Borders. But they share a common feature, she said: “We do not know how to control this outbreak.”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.

Nottinghamshire PoliceThe critical report into the mental healthcare given to Valdo Calocane – a paranoid schizophrenic who fatally stabbed three people in Nottingham last year – is damning.

The World Health Organization (WHO) has declared the mpox outbreak in parts of Africa a public health emergency of international concern.

The epidemic is concentrated in the Democratic Republic of Congo, but the virus has now appeared in a dozen other African countries.The rapid spread of mpox, formerly called monkeypox, in African countries constitutes a global health emergency, the World Health Organization declared on Wednesday.This is the second time in three years that the W.H.O. has designated an mpox epidemic as a global emergency. It previously did so in July 2022. That outbreak went on to affect nearly 100,000 people, primarily gay and bisexual men, in 116 countries, and killed about 200 people.The threat this time is deadlier. Since the beginning of this year, the Democratic Republic of Congo alone has reported more than 14,000 mpox cases and 524 deaths. Those most at risk include women and children under 15.“The detection and rapid spread of a new clade of mpox in eastern D.R.C., its detection in neighboring countries that had not previously reported mpox, and the potential for further spread within Africa and beyond is very worrying,” said Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the W.H.O.’s director general.The outbreak has spread through 13 countries in Africa, including a few that had never reported mpox cases before. On Tuesday, the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention declared a “public health emergency of continental security,” the first time the organization has taken that step since the African Union granted it the power to do so last year.“It’s in the interests of the countries, of the continent and of the world to get our arms around us and stop transmission as soon as we can,” said Dr. Nicole Lurie, the executive director for preparedness and response at the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, a nonprofit that finances vaccine development.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.

In late 2018, after an otherwise-normal Christmas holiday, Laurie Beatty started acting strange. An 81-year-old retired contractor, he grew unnaturally quiet and began poring over old accounting logs from a construction business he sold decades earlier, convinced that he had been bilked in the deal. Listen to this article, read by Robert PetkoffOver the course of several days, Beatty slipped further into unreality. He told his wife the year was 1992 and wondered aloud why his hair had turned white. Then he started having seizures. His arms began to move in uncontrollable jerks and twitches. By the end of May, he was dead. Doctors at the Georges-L.-Dumont University Hospital Center in Moncton, the largest city in the province of New Brunswick, Canada, zeroed in on an exceedingly rare condition — Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, caused by prions, misfolding proteins in the brain — as the most likely culprit. The doctors explained this to Beatty’s children, Tim and Jill, and said they would run additional tests to confirm the post-mortem diagnosis. Three months later, when the siblings returned to the office of their father’s neurologist, Dr. Alier Marrero, that’s what they were expecting to hear. Instead, Marrero told them that Laurie’s Creutzfeldt-Jakob test had come back negative. “We were all looking at one another,” Tim says, “because we were all very confused.” If Creutzfeldt-Jakob hadn’t killed their father, then what had? What Marrero said next was even more unsettling.“There’s something going on,” they recall him saying. “And I don’t know what it is.”Dr. Alier Marrero, a neurologist, reported more than 20 cases to a national monitoring program in Canada early in the outbreak.Brendan George Ko for The New York TimesIt turned out that Laurie Beatty was just one of many local residents who had gone to Marrero’s office exhibiting similar, inexplicable symptoms of neurological decline — more than 20 in the previous four years. The first signs were often behavioral. One patient fell asleep for nearly 20 hours straight before a friend took her to the hospital; another found himself afraid to disturb the stranger who had sat down in his living room, only to realize hours later that the stranger was his wife. 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.

Matt McBriar, one half of dance music duo Bicep, has announced he is receiving treatment for a “large and pretty rare” brain tumour.

Global trends in economics, climate and technology are weighing on young adults, a report finds. It recommends overhauling how we approach mental health care.Chloé Johnson, 22, has been feeling hopeless lately.She’s struggling to focus on classes at her local community college in Dallas while also working full-time, making $18 an hour as a receptionist.Her car broke down, so the $500 that she had managed to save will now go toward a down payment for a used vehicle.And she was recently passed over for a promotion.“Right now it just feels, like, very suffocating to be in this position,” said Ms. Johnson, who was diagnosed last year with bipolar II disorder, depression and A.D.H.D. “I’m not getting anywhere or making any progress.”It’s an endless loop: Ms. Johnson’s mental health has worsened because of her financial difficulties and her financial problems have grown, partly because of the cost of mental health treatment but also because her disorders have made it more difficult to earn a college degree that could lead to a more lucrative job.“I’ve failed several classes,” she said. “I burn out really easily, so I just give up.”The mental health of adolescents and young adults has been on the decline and it’s partly because of “harmful megatrends” like financial inequality, according to a new report published on Tuesday in the scientific journal The Lancet Psychiatry. The global trends affecting younger generations also include wage theft, unregulated social media, job insecurity and climate change, all of which are creating “a bleak present and future for young people in many countries,” according to the authors.Why focus on global trends?The report was produced over the course of five years by a commission of more than 50 people, including mental health and economic policy experts from several continents and young people who have experienced mental illness.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 Biden has had a deep personal interest in cancer research since his son Beau died of an aggressive brain cancer in 2015.Freed from the campaign trail and the grinding pursuit of another term, President Biden traveled to New Orleans on Tuesday to focus on a project close to his heart: the “moonshot” effort to sharply cut cancer deaths in the United States that he carried over from his time as vice president and has become a hallmark of his presidency.Speaking at Tulane University, Mr. Biden and the first lady, Jill Biden, announced eight research centers, including one at Tulane, that will collectively receive $150 million in research awards aimed at pioneering new methods of precision cancer surgery.Before addressing a crowd on campus, the president and the first lady met with a team of researchers who demonstrated the technology under development at Tulane. It uses imaging of cells on tumor sites to verify for surgeons that cancer cells have been fully removed and to reduce the need for follow-up surgeries.Standing in front of a sign reading “curing cancer faster,” Mr. Biden described touring cancer centers in Australia and Ireland, and being frustrated by a lack of international collaboration.“We don’t want to keep information — we want to share it,” he said.The awards announced on Tuesday are to be made through the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, or ARPA-H, which was founded in 2022 and is aimed at driving biomedical innovation.The other award recipients were Dartmouth College; Johns Hopkins University; Rice University; the University of California, San Francisco; the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign; the University of Washington; and Cision Vision in Mountain View, Calif.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.