Getty ImagesA mother whose premature baby died after receiving contaminated feed at a hospital has told an inquest it was “the worst experience” a parent could have.

Gareth WilliamsA father has said his 24-year-old daughter’s suicide hit him like a “depth charge” which “shred things in ways that are difficult to describe”.

Patients received “substantial” payments, their lawyers said, and the clinic agreed to staffing changes.Yale agreed on Monday to pay dozens of patients who had filed lawsuits claiming that they had endured excruciatingly painful egg retrieval procedures after a nurse at its fertility clinic secretly swapped their anesthesia for saline.The amount of money Yale paid was not disclosed, but the plaintiffs’ lawyers said it was “substantial.” In court filings late last year, they proposed a settlement of roughly $2 million for each patient.“This mutual agreement allows both parties to move forward and begin healing,” Karen Peart, a spokeswoman for Yale, said.The 93 patients involved in the settlement were seen at Yale Fertility Center in 2020. Some of their shocking stories were told in “The Retrievals,” a popular 2023 podcast from Serial Productions and The New York Times.In the lawsuits, the patients described their egg retrievals — short surgical procedures that typically use fentanyl as an anesthetic — as intensely painful. Many said they had complained to Yale but were ignored.Unbeknown to the patients, a nurse with a drug addiction had tampered with most of the clinic’s fentanyl supply, replacing the powerful narcotic with a salt and water solution. A subsequent Yale investigation found that, from June to October 2020, approximately 75 percent of the fentanyl given to patients was either diluted or completely replaced with saline.That nurse, Donna Monticone, was sentenced in May 2021 to four weekends of incarceration and three months of house arrest.In 2022, Yale University paid $308,000 to settle a Department of Justice investigation into whether Yale had failed to keep its fentanyl supply secure. And a Drug Enforcement Administration audit of the facility identified more than 600 discrepancies in its record-keeping for controlled substances like fentanyl and ketamine.Other health care providers have faced similar lawsuits over stolen fentanyl. Last week, the families of 16 patients who died at an Oregon hospital sued the facility for lacking safeguards to prevent a nurse from swapping fentanyl with tap water. The patients died after contracting bacterial infections from the unfiltered water.The patients’ experiences at Yale gained new attention with “The Retrievals.” The five-part podcast included accounts from patients who said they had screamed out in pain during the procedures and had complained to their doctors, only to be dismissed.Joshua Koskoff, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, said that a key part of the finalizing the settlement was assurances from Yale that the clinic had made changes to prevent similar situations.“The women in this case were absolutely insistent that there would be no monetary settlement until the university had addressed all the problems that resulted in this occurring,” he said.Yale University changed its fertility clinic to have “rigorous processes, procedures, and safeguards in place,” Ms. Peart, the university spokeswoman, said. Those include additional staff training and a new doctor in charge of the facility.

Neuroimaging found girls experienced cortical thinning far faster than boys did during the first year of Covid lockdowns.A study of adolescent brain development that tested children before and after coronavirus pandemic lockdowns in the United States found that girls’ brains aged far faster than expected, something the researchers attributed to social isolation.The study from the University of Washington, published on Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, measured cortical thinning, a process that starts in either late childhood or early adolescence, as the brain begins to prune redundant synapses and shrink its outer layer.Thinning of the cortex is not necessarily bad; some scientists frame the process as the brain rewiring itself as it matures, increasing its efficiency. But the process is known to accelerate in stressful conditions, and accelerated thinning is correlated with depression and anxiety.Scans taken in 2021, after shutdowns started to lift, showed that both boys and girls had experienced rapid cortical thinning during that period. But the effect was far more notable in girls, whose thinning had accelerated, on average, by 4.2 years ahead of what was expected; the thinning in boys’ brains had accelerated 1.4 years ahead of what was expected.“That is a stunning difference,” said Patricia K. Kuhl, a director of the Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences at the University of Washington and one of the study’s authors. The results, she added, suggested that “a girl who came in at 11, and then returned to the lab at age 14, now has a brain that looks like an 18-year-old’s.”Dr. Kuhl attributed the change to “social deprivation caused by the pandemic,” which she suggested had hit adolescent girls harder because they are more dependent on social interaction — in particular, talking through problems with friends — as a way to release stress. 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 NHS was “creaking at the seams” when the pandemic hit – and this undermined the care given to both coronavirus patients and those needing treatment for other conditions, the Covid public inquiry has been told.

A US military veteran who received the world’s first whole-eye transplant has made significant progress a year later and has been able to resume his normal life, researchers say.

The Princess of Wales has spoken of her relief at completing her course of chemotherapy, in a highly personal video released by Kensington Palace.

Urban wet markets are fertile grounds for viral transmission, experts say. Outbreaks of bird flu have already occurred.Hundreds of chickens are squeezed into rows of tiny stacked wire cages, urine and feces dribbling onto the ducks, the geese and the rabbits confined below. The stench spreads even outside, to the sidewalk, where a mixture of feathers and blood sticks to the shoes of children walking to school.This is a live animal market in Queens. There are about 70 such establishments in New York City’s bustling neighborhoods, some disturbingly close to schools and residential buildings. Most markets butcher and sell chickens, ducks and quail. About one in four also slaughters larger animals, like sheep, goats, cows and pigs.As bird flu spreads to every corner of the globe, markets like these are worrying public health experts. They are the petri dishes in which the next pandemic virus might emerge, jumping from bird to bird, or to other animals held just a few feet away, until finally adapting to humans.A leading theory suggests that the coronavirus pandemic began in a live animal market in Wuhan, China. If a similarly contagious virus were to evolve in a New York animal market, some experts fear there would be little to stop it from marching rapidly through the city. Tourists from all over the world might carry it back to their homes.Indeed, some animal markets in the city already have experienced bird flu outbreaks, and operators have had to kill hundreds of birds. New York State inspectors closed seven establishments that were hit by bird flu in 2022 and 2023 for five days on average, but allowed them to reopen after cleaning and disinfection.In the Northeast alone, about 25 million birds are sold at live markets each year, said Ann Linder, an associate director at Harvard Law School’s Animal Law and Policy Program.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.

Richard Knights/BBCThe chairwoman of an inquiry into more than 2,000 mental health-related deaths has said “we may never know” the true number of people who died.

At the Somerset County jail in rural Maine, prisoners addicted to opioids used to receive a daily pill to keep cravings in check. But as soon as they were released, their access to the medicine ended.As their cravings surged, they were re-entering society at high risk for withdrawal, relapse and overdose — dangers that newly released prisoners confront nationwide.“A lot of these inmates are our neighbors and it’s in our best interest to assimilate them back into the community, but some would end up dying,” said the Somerset County sheriff, Dale P. Lancaster. “For me, that’s not acceptable.”Hoping to change those grim outcomes, Sheriff Lancaster decided to try providing a different — and far less common — form of the medication, buprenorphine: an extended-release shot that subdues urges for about 28 days.According to a recent analysis in the journal Health and Justice about his jail’s pilot project, the switch had a remarkable effect. The long-acting injection afforded newly released prisoners a crucial buffer period after they were discharged, with more time to set up continuing addiction treatment and stabilize their lives.The jail’s experience is “an important step in showing where we as a society can go to cut back on people dying from this disease,” said Dr. Josiah Rich, a national expert in addiction and incarceration at Brown University, who was not involved in the project.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.