Publisher Health

It was almost a year ago that Adele Darlington, who is 41 and from Warrington, was in a critical condition in hospital following massive bleeding while giving birth to her baby girl.

It’s not the just the elderly. More than three-quarters of heat-related deaths in Mexico occurred among people younger than 35, researchers reported.As climate change pushes global temperatures higher, attention has focused predominantly on the threat that heat poses to older adults, whose physiology makes them more susceptible to health complications.But a study published on Friday in the journal Science Advances found that certain types of young people — including seemingly hardy working-age adults — may also be particularly vulnerable to rising temperatures.The researchers analyzed deaths in Mexico from 1998 to 2019 and discovered that people younger than 35 accounted for three-fourths of heat-related fatalities.“These age groups are also quite vulnerable to heat in ways that we don’t expect even at temperatures that we don’t think of as particularly warm,” said Andrew Wilson, a first author of the paper and an environmental social scientist at Stanford University.Measuring heat-related deaths is complicated, since death certificates rarely name heat as a cause. A proximate cause of death, like cardiovascular failure, is often listed instead.To get around this, Dr. Wilson and his colleagues used a common statistical approach to estimate how daily mortality rates across Mexico change in response to fluctuations in the “wet bulb” temperature, a measurement that uses humidity and air temperature to capture how well humans can cool their bodies through sweating.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 new rules call for testing unpasteurized milk from dairies across the country and for farm owners to provide details that would help officials identify and track cases more easily.The U.S. Department of Agriculture announced new rules on Friday requiring the testing of the nation’s milk supply for the bird flu virus known as H5N1, nearly a year after the virus began circulating through dairy cattle.Under the new testing strategy, the department will begin testing bulk samples of unpasteurized milk from dairy processing facilities across the country.Farmers and dairy processors will be required to provide samples of raw milk on request from the government. The rules also require farm owners with infected herds to provide details that would help officials identify more cases and contacts.The rules are a departure from the voluntary guidance that the department has issued during the outbreak. Many dairy farms have not complied with voluntary testing of milk or of dairy workers, leaving federal officials in the dark about how widely the virus might have spread.Many experts in the United States and elsewhere, including with the World Health Organization, have sharply criticized the lack of testing of cattle and of people who may be infected with the virus. The virus does not yet spread easily among people, but every untreated infection is an opportunity for it to gain the ability to do so, experts have said.The new rules are an attempt to gain control over the outbreak, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said in a statement.The strategy “will give farmers and farmworkers better confidence in the safety of their animals and ability to protect themselves,” he said, “and it will put us on a path to quickly controlling and stopping the virus’s spread nationwide.”The virus has now been detected in 720 herds in 15 states, although experts believe that figure is a significant underestimate, given the lack of mandatory testing. At least 58 people, most of them farm workers, have also been infected.The agency’s last major mandate on testing came in April, when it issued a federal order requiring that lactating dairy cows be tested for flu before being moved across state lines.Under the new strategy, the Agriculture Department will monitor bulk milk samples from farms nationwide, and work with state officials to identify infected herds.The new rules mandate farms to share raw milk samples upon request. The rules also apply to private laboratories and state veterinarians, who will be required to report raw milk samples that contain virus to the Agriculture Department.The first round of testing under the new rules is scheduled to begin the week of Dec. 16. The program will begin in six states: California, Colorado, Michigan, Mississippi, Oregon and Pennsylvania.

BBCPatients who had probes located in the wrong part of their brain due to failings at an NHS trust suffered unnecessarily for years, a damning report has found.

Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield officials had planned to roll out the changes nationwide but said they were misunderstood.Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield, a major health insurer, on Thursday rolled back a policy change that would have capped payments for anesthesia for patients, and would have denied claims altogether if any given procedure exceeded a time limit.The policy, which was to be tested before a national rollout, prompted controversy — first from anesthesiologists and then, after a flurry of media reports, from legislators in Connecticut and New York, where the policy was to go into effect in February.Anesthesiologists said that the change in reimbursement was unprecedented and would have overturned a formula standard since the 1990s.“No other commercial health insurer, no government payer, Medicare or Medicaid, has ever done anything like this and come up with an arbitrary time limit for anesthesia services,” Dr. Don Arnold, president of the American Society of Anesthesiologists, said.“Surgery and other procedures can take variable lengths of time,” he added. “Certainly procedures and techniques are standardized, but patient needs are unique and they require variable amounts of time, care and attention.”Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter: “Outrageous. I’m going to make sure New Yorkers are protected.”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.

Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield officials had planned to roll out the changes nationwide but said they were misunderstood.Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield, a major health insurer, on Thursday rolled back a policy change that would have capped payments for anesthesia for patients, and would have denied claims altogether if any given procedure exceeded a time limit.The policy, which was to be tested before a national rollout, prompted controversy — first from anesthesiologists and then, after a flurry of media reports, from legislators in Connecticut and New York, where the policy was to go into effect in February.Anesthesiologists said that the change in reimbursement was unprecedented and would have overturned a formula standard since the 1990s.“No other commercial health insurer, no government payer, Medicare or Medicaid, has ever done anything like this and come up with an arbitrary time limit for anesthesia services,” Dr. Don Arnold, president of the American Society of Anesthesiologists, said.“Surgery and other procedures can take variable lengths of time,” he added. “Certainly procedures and techniques are standardized, but patient needs are unique and they require variable amounts of time, care and attention.”Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter: “Outrageous. I’m going to make sure New Yorkers are protected.”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 ImagesFamilies of children operated on by a disgraced surgeon have labelled independent reports into their care as a “whitewash” and a “final insult”.

As one of the nation’s largest health insurers, covering more than 50 million people, UnitedHealthcare has battled a range of complaints and investigations from patients, doctors and lawmakers for its denial of medical claims.Those practices may face new scrutiny after law enforcement officials said that the bullet casings found at the site of the killing of the UnitedHealthcare chief executive Brian Thompson on Wednesday appeared to have messages, including the words “deny” and “delay,” written on them. The shooter’s motive and identity still remained unknown on Thursday, and no evidence has emerged that the killer was a UnitedHealthcare customer.While the words “deny” and “delay” have multiple meanings, they could be a reference to the tactics used by insurers of all kinds to avoid paying claims. The words are so linked to those practices that they were used in the title of a 2010 book probing them, “Delay, Deny, Defend: Why Insurance Companies Don’t Pay Claims and What You Can Do About It.”“An insurance company’s greatest expense is what it pays out in claims,” wrote the book’s author, Jay Feinman, an emeritus professor at Rutgers. “If it pays out less in claims, it keeps more in profits.”No one knows how often private insurers like UnitedHealthcare deny claims because they are generally not required to publish that data. People who bought coverage under Obamacare, a government-funded plan, had 17 percent of their care denied in 2021, according to KFF, a health policy group. Other surveys have found that denials are more prevalent among those with private insurance than those who carried government coverage.UnitedHealthcare, part of the giant conglomerate UnitedHealth Group, reported more than $16 billion in operating profits last year and employed roughly 140,000 people. The company is a frequent lightning rod for criticism over how it handles claims.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.

HANDOUTWeight-loss drug

The NHS in England is busier than it has ever been heading into winter, the country’s medical director is warning.