Publisher Health

The care received by 800 patients at a world-renowned NHS hospital is to be reviewed by expert clinicians after a specialist surgeon was suspended.

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President Trump has selected Susan Monarez, the acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, to lead the agency permanently.The president withdrew his first nominee, Dr. Dave Weldon, just hours before his confirmation hearing. If confirmed by the Senate, Dr. Monarez, an infectious-disease researcher, will be the first nonphysician to lead the agency in more than 50 years.“Americans have lost confidence in the C.D.C. due to political bias and disastrous mismanagement,” the president wrote on TruthSocial, adding that Dr. Monarez would work with the health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., to address the chronic disease epidemic and restore the agency’s accountability.“As an incredible mother and dedicated public servant, Dr. Monarez understands the importance of protecting our children, our communities, and our future,” Mr. Trump wrote.Dr. Monarez assumed the acting director position a few days after Mr. Trump took office in January, leaving her perch as deputy director of a new federal biomedical research agency created during the Biden administration.Dr. Monarez was expected to serve until Mr. Trump’s first choice for the job, Dr. Weldon, could be confirmed. But after Mr. Trump decided to withdraw the nomination, Republican aides in the Senate said that Dr. Weldon had failed to impress them with a plan for 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.

The F.D.A. approved an artificial vessel to restore blood flow in patients, despite its own scientists flagging questionable study results and potentially fatal ruptures of the product.When the biotech company Humacyte designed a study to see if its lab-grown blood vessel worked, it decided to measure whether blood was flowing freely through the high-tech tube 30 days after it was implanted in a person.As those days passed, some of the 54 patients in the study ran into trouble. Doctors lost track of one. Four died. Four more had a limb amputated, including one who developed a clot and infection in the artificial vessel, Food and Drug Administration records show.Humacyte, which is traded on the Nasdaq, counted all those patients as proof of success in talks with investors and in an article in JAMA Surgery.At the F.D.A., though, scientists counted the deaths, amputations and the lost case as failures, records show, noting a lack of information to determine if the vessels were clear.Still, the agency approved the vessels in December without a public review of the study. Top officials authorized it over the concerns of staff members who said in F.D.A. records that they found the study severely lacking or were alarmed by the dire consequences for patients when the vessels fell apart.Now the company is ramping up its marketing efforts to hospitals and for use on the battlefield.When a patient’s blood vessel is damaged, doctors typically find a blood vessel from another part of the body and graft it to repair blood flow. They turn to artificial vessels when patients are too badly injured to harvest a vein.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.

3 hours ago

Popular DNA testing firm 23andMe has filed for bankruptcy protection, and announced that its co-founder and CEO, Anne Wojcicki, has resigned with immediate effect.

Senior scientists at the National Institutes of Health fear that research on conditions like obesity, heart disease and cancer will be undermined by President Trump’s policies.A week after Donald J. Trump was inaugurated, a senior scientist at the National Institutes of Health was preparing to give an invited talk at a scientific meeting when an urgent call came in from an administrative assistant.There is a total communications ban, the scientist was told, and you cannot give the speech.As soon as the scientist got back to the office, another ban went into effect — one that prohibited researchers from submitting papers to journals for publication.Seven senior investigators working in different parts of the National Institutes of Health described rules put in place on orders from the Department of Government Efficiency that risk hampering and undermining American medical science. All spoke on the condition of anonymity because they feared for their jobs for speaking publicly.One said that DOGE had begun a reign of “chaos and confusion.” The scientists warned that it had the potential to seriously weaken the N.I.H. — the crown jewel of American science, with a vast network of thousands of researchers in 27 centers dedicated to treating disease, improving health and funding medical research.Rules change seemingly from day to day.Can scientists order necessary supplies to do their research? Yes. No. Maybe.Can they travel? A 30-day ban was put in place on Feb. 26. What happens next? No one knows.“It really is quite chilling,” one of the scientists said. “They are controlling information, causing chaos, disrupting everyone, keeping us off-balance.”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.

4 hours ago