Publisher Health

OuraWearable tech – currently dominated by smart watches – is a multi-billion dollar industry with a sharp focus on health tracking.

The agency long benefited from broad bipartisan support. But Republican criticism has intensified, and new choices for top health posts hope to upend the organization.The National Institutes of Health, the world’s leading public funder of biomedical research, has an enviable track record. Research supported by the agency has led more than 100 Nobel Prizes and has supported more than 99 percent of the drugs approved by federal regulators from 2010 to 2019.No surprise, then, that the agency has been called “the crown jewel of the federal government.” But come January, when President-elect Donald J. Trump and congressional Republicans take charge, the N.I.H. may face a reckoning.Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the new administration’s selection for secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the N.I.H., routinely castigates federal scientists and is a staunch critic of conventional pharmaceuticals and vaccines, with a long record of spreading falsehoods about vaccine safety.He has said that he would steer the agency into a yearslong “break” from infectious disease research, focusing instead on chronic diseases.And Mr. Trump’s pick for N.I.H. director, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, the Stanford professor who gained notoriety during the pandemic for supporting the widely maligned idea that the coronavirus should be left to spread freely among healthy Americans, has called for a dramatic restructuring of the N.I.H., which he has said is led by small-minded bureaucrats.While even the agency’s defenders acknowledge that the N.I.H. needs modernization, the radical reforms now proposed would be difficult, if not impossible, without years of legal wrangling and significant support from Congress, experts say.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.

PA MediaSome victims of the infected blood scandal have been told interim compensation payments of £100,000 due to be made before Christmas have been put on hold.

At least 68 people have fallen ill in the outbreak believed to be linked to cucumbers sold in the United States and Canada, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said.At least 68 people, including 18 that needed to be treated at hospitals, have fallen ill across 19 states in a salmonella outbreak that may be linked to cucumbers, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Friday.Federal officials announced they were investigating the outbreak believed to be tied to cucumbers grown by Agrotato, S.A. de C.V. in Sonora, Mexico, and sold by SunFed Produce, which is based in Arizona, and other importers. No deaths have been reported.The C.D.C. said it was working with public health and regulatory officials in several states, including the Food and Drug Administration, to investigate the infections.The cucumbers were sold in the United States and Canada, according to the F.D.A.SunFed recalled all sizes of the product described as “whole fresh American cucumbers.”Craig Slate, the president of SunFed, said in a statement that the company “immediately acted to protect consumers.”“We are working closely with authorities and the implicated ranch to determine the possible cause,” 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.

Working inside the government and out, he lobbied to improve the lives of people with H.I.V. and AIDS, particularly those who belonged to minority groups.A. Cornelius Baker, who spent nearly 40 years working with urgency and compassion to improve the lives of people with H.I.V. and AIDS by promoting testing, securing federal funding for research and pushing for a vaccine, died on Nov. 8 at his home in Washington. He was 63.Gregory Nevins, his companion, said the cause was hypertensive atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease.Mr. Baker — who was gay and who tested positive for H.I.V. — became active in Washington in the 1980s, during the early years of the AIDS epidemic. He soon distinguished himself as an eloquent voice for people with H.I.V. and AIDS. A policy wonk and health-care expert, he held positions in the federal government and with nonprofits, including serving as the head of a clinic for the L.G.B.T.Q. community.“He was very kind, very embracing and inclusive — his circles, both professionally and personal, were the most diverse I’ve ever seen, which was driven by his Christian values,” said Douglas M. Brooks, a director of the Office of National AIDS Policy during the Obama administration. “His ferocity appeared when people were marginalized, othered or forgotten.”In 1995, as the executive director of the National Association of People with AIDS, he helped establish June 27 as National H.I.V. Testing Day. “This effort was designed to help reduce the stigma of H.I.V. testing and to normalize it as a component of regular health screening,” Mr. Baker wrote in 2012 on the website of FHI 360, a global health organization for which he served as technical adviser.As an adviser to the National Black Gay Men’s Advocacy Coalition from 2006 to 2014, Mr. Baker worked with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health to help fund research for the care of Black gay men with H.I.V. and AIDS.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 health secretary pick and his organization have worked around the world to undermine longstanding policies on measles, AIDS and more.Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is in line to lead the Department of Health and Human Services in the next Trump administration, is well-known for promoting conspiracy theories and vaccine skepticism in the United States.But Mr. Kennedy, an environmental lawyer, has also spent years working abroad to undermine policies that have been pillars of global health policy for a half-century, records show.He has done this by lending his celebrity, and the name of his nonprofit group, Children’s Health Defense, to a network of overseas chapters that sow distrust in vaccine safety and spread misinformation far and wide.He, his organizations and their officials have interfered with vaccination efforts, undermined sex education campaigns meant to stem the spread of AIDS in Africa, and railed against global organizations like the World Health Organization that are in charge of health initiatives.How Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Fights Health Policy Abroad:He undermined confidence in the measles vaccine ahead of a deadly outbreak in Samoa.He and his organization promote AIDS falsehoods.He aligned himself with fringe figures, including people who ended up on German security watch lists.His European chapter paid a British lawmaker to speak at a conference promoting vaccine skepticism.His Africa chapter pushes measles misinformation and risky remedies.Along the way, Mr. Kennedy has partnered with, financed or promoted fringe figures — people who claim that 5G cellphone towers cause cancer, that homosexuality and contraceptive education are part of a global conspiracy to reduce African fertility and that the World Health Organization is trying to steal countries’ sovereignty.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.

BBCTerminally ill people are a step closer to being able to choose when they die after

EPAOn Friday, after weeks of fierce and passionate debate, MPs began their formal scrutiny of the bill that would allow terminally ill adults expected to die within six months to seek help to end their own life.

Getty ImagesFixing the struggling palliative care system must be an immediate priority for the government, now that MPs have backed changing the law to allow assisted dying, senior doctors say.

MPs’ vote to back the legalisation of assisted dying in England and Wales is historic.