A drug used to treat Type 2 diabetes and obesity could also slow down the process of ageing, researchers believe.

BBCA family’s dream holiday turned into a nightmare when severe sunburn left a 10-year-old boy requiring hospital treatment.

Getting the expensive fertility treatments covered would be possible, but an uphill battle, health policy experts said.Former President Donald J. Trump said on the campaign trail Thursday that he wants to make in vitro fertilization treatment free for all Americans.“Under the Trump administration your government will pay or your insurance company will be mandated to pay for all costs associated with I.V.F. treatment,” Mr. Trump said on Thursday at a rally in Potterville, Mich.I.V.F. often costs tens of thousands of dollars. Policies to cover those costs would be difficult to implement, experts said.Requiring insurers to pay would most likely mean passing laws in Congress or persuading a panel of experts to add I.V.F. to a list of free preventive women’s health services established by the Affordable Care Act, the health coverage law Mr. Trump tried to repeal.Having the government pay directly for I.V.F. would mean creating essentially a single-payer health care system for a single condition. The approach would require Congress to fund a new division of a federal government to oversee the program.“The president cannot do this on his own,” said Alina Salganicoff, director of the women’s health policy program at KFF, a health research nonprofit. “You need to have federal funds to do this. Congress needs to appropriate money.”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.

AFPA series of “humanitarian pauses” to fighting in Gaza are due to begin on Sunday, to allow hundreds of thousands of children to be vaccinated against polio.

People taking Wegovy were not protected from infection. But in a large trial, their death rates were markedly lower, for reasons that are not clear.Wegovy, the popular obesity drug, may have yet another surprising benefit. In a large clinical trial, people taking the drug during the pandemic were less likely to die of Covid-19, researchers reported on Friday.People on Wegovy still got Covid, and at the same rate as people randomly assigned to take a placebo. But their chances of dying from the infection plunged by 33 percent, the study found. And the protective effect occurred immediately — before participants had lost significant amounts of weight.In addition, the death rate from all causes was lower among subjects taking Wegovy, a very rare finding in clinical trials of new treatments. The result suggests that lower life expectancy among people with obesity is actually caused by the disease itself, and that it can be improved by treating obesity.“Stunning,” Dr. Jeremy Faust, an emergency room physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital who wrote an editorial accompanying the study, said of the data. The study was published in The Journal of the American College of Cardiology.The study was not originally designed to look at the effects of taking Wegovy on people with Covid. But the participants taking the drug were not healthier than the others, said Dr. Harlan Krumholz, a cardiologist at Yale and the editor in chief of the journal.“It is a randomized trial and the infection rates were similar, so this represents top-notch evidence,” he said.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.

BBC NewsFive hospices caring for terminally ill people have planned job cuts in the past two months due to financial pressures, BBC News has learned.

Federal inspectors cited continuing problems at a deli meat plant in Virginia that was linked to an outbreak of listeria, records indicate.Federal meat inspectors documented black mold, water dripping over meat and dead flies at a Virginia Boar’s Head deli meat plant that has now been linked to nine deaths from listeria, according to records.Over the course of a year, food safety inspectors, who are a constant presence in meat facilities across the United States, noted escalating problems at the plant.Under U.S. Department of Agriculture rules, the processing facility, in rural Virginia, was expected to swab for listeria, which the agency considers a “zero tolerance” concern that can spur an immediate recall. Yet the inspectors — who also swab and test for listeria, a lethal bacteria — do not appear to have been the first to prompt a recall of more than seven million pounds of ham, salami, hot dogs and other meats by Boar’s Head.The alarm rang after people like Günter Morgenstein, a hair stylist renowned in coastal Virginia, fell gravely ill. As Mr. Morgenstein, an active 88-year-old known as Garshon, grew frail in the hospital in early July, his family racked their brains to think of everything he had eaten in recent weeks.As listeria illnesses spread, a disease detective in Maryland began to suspect liverwurst as the common thread, given the older age of the hospitalized patients. Her hunch proved correct: Whole genome sequencing matched the patients’ bacteria to Boar’s Head liverwurst bought at a store, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, setting off the recall of 3,500 tons of meat.At the same time, U.S.D.A. inspectors documented flies, bits of meat on food-contact surfaces and mold on a wall at the Boar’s Head plant in Jarratt, Va. From June 2023 through this August, inspectors listed 84 problems at the facility. Listeria was not mentioned in more 80 pages of inspection records on the plant that were released by the agency.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.

An outbreak in the conflict zone could reignite a global plague, experts fear.In July, health officials made an unsettling discovery in Gaza: Poliovirus, a global scourge, was found in samples of wastewater. This month, the news got worse. A 10-month-old baby contracted polio and is now paralyzed in one leg.It’s the first confirmed case of polio in Gaza in 25 years. Now international agencies are sending more than 1.6 million doses of oral poliovirus vaccine to the conflict zone in an ambitious effort to immunize 640,000 children under age 10.Israel has agreed to three pauses in military operations, starting Sunday, to facilitate the campaign.Health officials had been warning for months that the conflict in Gaza could eventually give way to major regressions in infectious diseases. Transmission of poliovirus — which attacks the nervous system and can lead to spinal and respiratory paralysis, and in some cases death — may already be widespread, some experts fear.Here’s what you should know.How could there be polio in Gaza?Of the three naturally occurring “wild-type” viruses, only Type 1 remains; Type 2 and Type 3 have been eradicated.But there is another form to worry about: so-called vaccine-derived poliovirus. This form now accounts for most outbreaks worldwide.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 widespread use and enormous expense of blockbuster drugs like Wegovy are forcing state governments to make painful choices.This month, North Carolina did something enthusiastically that most states have been reluctant to try: It started covering new obesity medicines like Wegovy for its poorest residents as part of its Medicaid program.For Kody Kinsley, the state’s health and human services secretary, the choice was easy. Those poor residents are disproportionately affected by obesity and its related diseases. “From a base-line justice perspective,” he said, “why are we even talking about it?”The reason many people are talking about it is the price tag. Expensive drugs are nothing new in the U.S. health system, but these are an unprecedented type of blockbuster because so many people could benefit: More than a third of American adults meet the clinical definition of obesity. The combination of high prices and high demand is forcing every insurer, public and private, to make tough decisions.Just this spring, the North Carolina state employees’ health plan dropped coverage of the same class of drugs, citing unsustainable costs, ending coverage for nearly 25,000 people who were taking them.That means the civil-service administrators who will be helping the state’s poorest residents get access to Wegovy and its siblings have lost their own employer coverage for the very same drugs.The costs of the drugs, known as GLP-1 agonists, can add up quickly. Novo Nordisk’s Wegovy and Eli Lilly’s Zepbound — the two GLP-1 drugs that have been approved specifically for weight loss — each come with a sticker price over $1,200 a month, and need to be taken long-term for sustained effect. (Ozempic has the same active ingredient as Wegovy, but has been approved for diabetes.)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.

How do I repair my marriage? How can I strengthen my friendships? Catherine Pearson, a writer on the Well desk, helps readers find answers to these questions and more.Times Insider explains who we are and what we do and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.For Catherine Pearson, no topic is taboo. As a reporter on the Well desk of The New York Times, she has written about sexual libido differences in relationships, the male loneliness epidemic and postpartum depression.Every now and then, something really hits home.“I had a lot of friends who were razzing me, like, ‘You’re the person writing a 5-Day Friendship Challenge?’” Ms. Pearson said in an interview. “I’m pretty introverted, but I am making more of an effort now.”Ms. Pearson joined The Times in the spring of 2022 from The Huffington Post, where she spent 11 years writing about gender and health. Her coverage for Well focuses on families, romantic relationships and friendships, with an emphasis on forging better connections.”It’s everything that matters to people,” she said of her beat. “I try to be mindful of not giving the same advice you read over and over, like, ‘Put yourself out there.”In an interview from her home in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, Ms. Pearson discussed the challenges of finding sources and one piece of advice that has stuck with her. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Where did your journalism career begin?My first writing job was at a boating magazine, of all places. I was fresh out of college and needed to make money. It ended up being an interesting place to learn the ins and outs of journalism, partly because I had absolutely no idea what I was writing about. I had to learn very technical boating vocabulary. At the time, the outlet was also getting decimated by layoffs. So I ended up doing things that a 22-year-old had no business doing, like helping ship a magazine to the printer and signing off on final proofs of issues.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.