Publisher Health

2 hours ago

In the United States, 1 in 3 households has a pet cat.Caroline Gutman for The New York TimesBut many aspects of feline health remain a mystery, even to experts.Octavio Jones for The New York TimesAnd when one of our kittens became critically ill last year, no one could explain why.Emily Anthes/The New York Timespet theoryWhy Are Cats Such a Medical Black Box?March 11, 2025When my husband and I took our cat to the vet early last year, we were hoping to hear that we had nothing to worry about. Olive, a longhaired tortoiseshell kitten who had been the runt of her litter, was naturally quiet and skittish, prone to hiding in closets and napping behind the shower curtain. That made her hard to read — and sometimes simply to find.But days earlier, we had started wondering whether she might be sick. Did she seem even more reserved than usual? It was hard to say, but we decided to ask her vet just to be safe. The vet immediately noticed that Olive’s gums were pale and that her heart was racing. A quick blood test revealed that she was severely anemic, with a blood-cell volume so low, the vet said, it was “incompatible with life.”So began a monthslong ordeal featuring repeated visits to the veterinary I.C.U., more than a dozen blood transfusions and few solid answers.“Cats have been so understudied,” said Elinor Karlsson, a geneticist at UMass Chan Medical School and the Broad Institute. “They’re going to remain a black box unless something changes on the research side.”Dogs as the default“It’s not reasonable to assume that everything that works in a dog will work in a cat,” said Dr. Bruce Kornreich, who directs the Cornell Feline Health Center. “There’s a lot that we still need to learn.”Octavio Jones for The New York TimesOver the last few decades, veterinary medicine has made enormous strides, allowing pets like Olive to receive highly advanced care. But feline medicine has lagged behind its canine counterpart, and it is not always easy to provide evidence-based medicine for cats. “It’s still considered a bit of a niche interest,” said Dr. Karen Perry, a veterinary orthopedic surgeon with a focus on feline health at Michigan State University.

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Five years after Covid-19 shut down activities all over the world, medical historians sometimes struggle to place the pandemic in context.What, they are asking, should this ongoing viral threat be compared with?Is Covid like the 1918 flu, terrifying when it was raging but soon relegated to the status of a long-ago nightmare?Is it like polio, vanquished but leaving in its wake an injured but mostly unseen group of people who suffer long-term health consequences?Or is it unique in the way it has spawned a widespread rejection of public health advice and science itself, attitudes that some fear may come to haunt the nation when the next major illness arises?Some historians say it is all of the above, which makes Covid stand out in the annals of pandemics.In many ways, historians say, the Covid pandemic — which the World Health Organization declared on March 11, 2020 — reminds them of the 1918 flu. Both were terrifying, killing substantial percentages of the population, unlike, say, polio or Ebola or H.I.V., terrible as those illnesses were.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.

11 hours ago

Five years ago, Covid took hold and the world transformed almost overnight. As routines and rituals evaporated, often replaced by […]

The small study in patients with a rare disorder that causes liver and lung damage showed the potential for precisely targeted infusions.Researchers have corrected a disease-causing gene mutation with a single infusion carrying a treatment that precisely targeted the errant gene.This was the first time a mutated gene has been restored to normal.The small study of nine patients announced Monday by the company Beam Therapeutics of Cambridge, Mass., involved fixing a spelling error involving the four base sequences — G, A, C and T — in DNA. The effect was to change an incorrect DNA letter to the right one. The result was a normal gene that functioned as it should, potentially halting liver and lung damage of patients with a rare disorder.“This is the beginning of a new era of medicine,” said Dr. Kiran Musunuru, a gene therapy researcher at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine.He added that the method offers the hope of treating other genetic diseases precisely by fixing mutations — an alternative to current gene therapies, which either add new genes to compensate for mutated ones, or slicing DNA to silence genes.Dr. Musunuru is a co-founder and equity holder of Verve Therapeutics, a gene therapy company, and receives funding from Beam Therapeutics for research, but not for this study.Dr. Richard P. Lifton, president of Rockefeller University and head of its Laboratory of Human Genetics and Genomics, said the sort of gene editing Beam did, rewriting genes with an infusion, “is a holy grail” that “has the promise for being a one-and-done kind of therapy.”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 a recent interview, the health secretary also suggested that the measles vaccine had harmed children in West Texas, center of an outbreak.In a sweeping interview, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the health and human services secretary, outlined a strategy for containing the measles outbreak in West Texas that strayed far from mainstream science, relying heavily on fringe theories about prevention and treatments. He issued a muffled call for vaccinations in the affected community, but said the choice was a personal one. He suggested that measles vaccine injuries were more common than known, contrary to extensive research.He asserted that natural immunity to measles, gained through infection, somehow also protected against cancer and heart disease, a claim not supported by research.He cheered on questionable treatments like cod liver oil, and said that local doctors had achieved “almost miraculous and instantaneous” recoveries with steroids or antibiotics. The worsening measles outbreak, which has largely spread through a Mennonite community in Gaines County, has infected nearly 200 people and killed a child, the first such death in the United States in 10 years.Another suspected measles death has been reported in New Mexico, where cases have recently increased in a county that borders Gaines County.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.

Intensive management of diabetes pays fewer dividends as patients age and raises the chances of hypoglycemia. But many people have not gotten the message.By now, Ora Larson recognizes what’s happening. “It feels like you’re shaking inside,” she said. “I’m speeded up. I’m anxious.” If someone asks whether she would like a salad for lunch, she doesn’t know how to respond.She has had several such episodes this year, and they seem to be coming more frequently.“She stares and gets a gray color and then she gets confused,” her daughter, Susan Larson, 61, said. “It’s really scary.”Hypoglycemia occurs when levels of blood sugar, or glucose, fall too low; a reading below 70 milligrams per deciliter is an accepted definition. It can afflict anyone using glucose-lowering medications to control the condition.But it occurs more frequently at advanced ages. “If you’ve been a diabetic for years, it’s likely you’ve experienced an episode,” said Dr. Sei Lee, a geriatrician at the University of California, San Francisco, who researches diabetes in older adults.The elder Ms. Larson, 85, has had Type 2 diabetes for decades. Now her endocrinologist and her primary care doctor worry that hypoglycemia may cause falls, broken bones, heart arrhythmias and cognitive damage.Both have advised her to let her hemoglobin A1c, a measure of average blood glucose over several months, rise past 7 percent. “They say, ‘Don’t worry too much about the highs — we want to prevent the lows,’” the younger Ms. Larson 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.

Major cutbacks are planned at NHS England as part of government plans to “avoid duplication” with the Department of Health and Social Care.

We left a world we might not get back to. Many things that we took for granted never returned to […]