The deceased was over 65 and had other medical conditions, state officials said.A Louisiana patient who had been hospitalized with severe bird flu has died, the first such fatality in the United States, state health officials reported on Monday.The patient was older than 65 and had underlying medical conditions, the officials said. The individual became infected with the bird flu virus, H5N1, after exposure to a backyard flock and wild birds.There is no sign that the virus is spreading from person to person anywhere in the country, and Louisiana officials have not identified any other cases in the state. Pasteurized dairy products remain safe to consume.“I still think the risk remains low,” said Dr. Diego Diel, a virologist at Cornell University.“However, it is important that people remain vigilant and avoid contact with sick animals, sick poultry, sick dairy cattle, and also avoid contact with wild birds,” he added.The news comes on the heels of a report that the patient had carried mutations that might help the virus infect people more easily.The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said late last month that the mutations were not present in virus samples taken from the backyard flock, suggesting that they developed in the patient as the illness progressed.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.

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.

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.

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.

Some older Americans have come to depend on virtual consultations with doctors, covered by Medicare. To keep that option in the future, Congress will have to act quickly. Since his cancer diagnosis last year, Kent Manuel has regularly seen an oncologist near his home in Indianapolis. It’s been a tough time: After spinal surgery for paralysis caused by his cancer, he is regaining the use of his legs with physical therapy but still uses a wheelchair.Now, Mr. Manuel said, “I’m dealing with pain.” His oncologist recommended palliative care, a medical specialty that helps people with serious illnesses cope with discomfort and distress and maintain quality of life.So in November, Mr. Manuel, 72, a semiretired accountant, started seeing Dr. Julia Frydman, a palliative care doctor. “We talk through what works and what doesn’t,” he said. “She listens to what I have to say. She’s very flexible.”The first two medications she prescribed to reduce pain had troublesome side effects. On the third try, though, “I think we’ve landed on something that’s working,” he said. His pain hasn’t fully abated, but it has diminished.Dr. Frydman, the senior medical director at a cancer care technology company called Thyme Care, works hundreds of miles away in a Manhattan office. She and Mr. Manuel used a video telemedicine link — an option that barely existed in traditional Medicare before the Covid pandemic, thanks to restrictive federal policies.Medicare expanded its telemedicine coverage substantially in 2020, and the expansion has regularly been renewed. That could all have ended on Dec. 31.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.