Publisher Health

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She was legally blind and used a motorized wheelchair, but she managed to capture what she called the “ironic reality” of New York City on film.Flo Fox, an indomitable photographer who was born blind in one eye and later lost her vision in the other from multiple sclerosis, which also eventually paralyzed her from the neck down, but who never stopped shooting what she called the “ironic reality” of New York’s streetscape, died on March 2 in her apartment in Manhattan. She was 79.Her son and only immediate survivor, Ron Ridinger, said the apparent cause was complications of pneumonia.Inspired at 13 by a candid photograph of a street scene taken by Robert Frank, she asked her mother for a camera but was told to wait until she finished high school. After graduating, she designed clothing for the theater and television commercials.“Bottoms Up,” 1978.Flo Fox, via Two by Two Media“Laundry Room Blues,” 1978.Flo Fox, via Two by Two MediaMs. Fox’s son, Ron, in 1973.Flo Fox, via Two by Two Media“Someone to Talk To,” 1973.Flo Fox, via Two by Two MediaIt wasn’t until she was 26 — and had married, given birth and been divorced — that she finally got a camera, buying a Minolta with her first paycheck from a new costume design job. She stopped her design work after her multiple sclerosis advanced, incapacitating her hands and making it hard to work with clothing patterns, Mr. Ridinger said in an interview. She eventually survived mostly on Social Security and Medicaid.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.

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An indefatigable gardener, she was concerned, a colleague said, with “all the things that have to happen for us to get our food.”Joan Dye Gussow, a nutritionist and educator who was often referred to as the matriarch of the “eat locally, think globally” food movement, died on Friday at her home in Piermont, NY., in Rockland County. She was 96.Her death, from congestive heart failure, was announced by Pamela A. Koch, an associate professor of nutrition education at Teachers College, Columbia University, where Ms. Gussow, a professor emeritus, had taught for more than half a century.Ms. Gussow was one of the first in her field to emphasize the connections between farming practices and consumers’ health. Her book “The Feeding Web: Issues in Nutritional Ecology” (1978) influenced the thinking of writers including Michael Pollan and Barbara Kingsolver.“Nutrition is thought of as the science of what happens to food once it gets in our bodies — as Joan put it, ‘What happens after the swallow,’” Ms. Koch said in an interview.But Ms. Gussow beamed her gimlet-eyed attention on what happens before the swallow. “Her concern was with all the things that have to happen for us to get our food,” Ms. Koch said. “She was about seeing the big picture of food issues and sustainability.”Ms. Gussow, an indefatigable gardener and a tub-thumper for community gardens, began deploying the phrase “local food” after reviewing the statistics on the declining number of farmers in the United States. (Farm and ranch families made up less than 5 percent of the population in 1970 and less than 2 percent of the population in 2023.)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.

Shortly before noon on Friday, Dr. Francis Collins, the former director of the National Institutes of Health, stood on the steps below the Lincoln Memorial tuning his acoustic guitar — a “very sweet” Huss & Dalton, he said, with a double-helix of DNA winding down the neck in pearl inlay. The nation’s anxious scientists could use a song.Dr. Collins, a biomedical researcher renowned for leading the Human Genome Project in the 1990s, had steered the N.I.H. through three presidencies, into 2021, and continued working at the agency until his abrupt retirement a week ago. Now he was a headline speaker for Stand Up for Science, a rally to protest the Trump administration’s drastic cuts to the federal work force and to federally funded science.The organizers weren’t sure how many people would show up — they later estimated that the crowd had peaked at 5,000 — nor quite what to expect. In 2017, tens of thousands gathered on the Washington Mall for the March for Science. The collective mood then was as much perplexity as defiance at Mr. Trump’s suggestions that America could be made greater by greatly reducing the Environmental Protection Agency and perhaps never mentioning climate change ever again.This year’s crowd was met by Lincoln, over-large and stone-faced in his chair. The organizers had chosen the site for its postcard view of Capitol Hill, perhaps less aware that the 16th president was a champion of science. He established the National Academy of Sciences in 1863 and, an avid astronomer, often visited the Naval Observatory. Early in his career, Lincoln often carried a volume of Euclid under his arm; he studied the mathematician’s argumentative logic to hone his own as a lawyer.Dr. Francis Collins, former director of the National Institutes of Health, invoked the Gettysburg Address — “of the people, by the people, for the people” — and noted that it applied to taxpayer-funded science, too. “We have to sing about this,” he said.Eric Lee/The New York TimesA scientific S.O.S.Jason Andrew for The New York TimesBeaker, the Muppet lab assistant.Jason Andrew for The New York TimesWe 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 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is planning to conduct a large-scale study to re-examine whether there is a connection between vaccines and autism, federal officials said Friday.Dozens of scientific studies have failed to find evidence of a link. But the C.D.C. now falls under the purview of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has long expressed skepticism about the safety of vaccines and has vowed to revisit the data.“As President Trump said in his Joint Address to Congress, the rate of autism in American children has skyrocketed. C.D.C. will leave no stone unturned in its mission to figure out what exactly is happening,” Andrew Nixon, a spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services, said in a statement Friday. He did not offer details about the scope or methods of the project.The news comes in the midst of a rapidly spreading measles outbreak in West Texas, driven by low vaccination rates, that has infected nearly 200 people and killed two. Last year, about 82 percent of the kindergarten population in the county most affected had received the measles vaccine, far below the 95 percent needed to stave off outbreaks. According to Texas health officials, 80 of those infected were unvaccinated and 113 had “unknown vaccination status.”Asked in an interview about the C.D.C.’s plans to re-examine whether autism is connected to vaccination, Xavier Becerra, health secretary to President Joseph R. Biden Jr., said, “All I’ll say is that C.D.C. can do many things. They can walk and chew gum, but I would hope C.D.C. is being used to help us get a grip on measles before another life needlessly dies, perishes.”The rate of autism diagnoses in the United States is undeniably on the rise. About 1 in 36 children have one, according to data the C.D.C. collected recently from 11 states, compared with 1 in 150 children in 2000. Researchers attribute most of the surge to increased awareness of the disorder and changes in how it is classified by medical professionals. But scientists say there are other factors, genetic and environmental, that could be playing a role, too.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.

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Scientists on overseas projects must say whether they work with communist governments and help combat “Christian persecution.”The Trump administration has asked researchers and organizations whose work is conducted overseas to disclose ties to those regarded as hostile, including “entities associated with communist, socialist or totalitarian parties,” according to a questionnaire obtained by The New York Times.The online survey was sent this week to groups working abroad to research diseases like H.I.V., gather surveillance data and strengthen public health systems. Recipients received funding from Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the United States Agency for International Development and other federal sources.The questionnaire appears to be very similar to one sent earlier this week to partners of the United States Agency for International Development, which has been all but dismantled by the Trump administration. Both were titled “Foreign Assistance Review.”Recipients were instructed to respond within 48 hours. Some grantees interviewed by The Times feared that impolitic or unsatisfactory answers could lead to cancellation of funding.“Taxpayer dollars must not fund dependency, socialism, corrupt regimes that oppose free enterprise, or intervene in internal matters of another sovereign nation,” the questionnaire said.“A truly prosperous America prioritizes domestic growth, innovation, and economic strength over foreign handouts,” it added.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.