Publisher Health

Teams evaluating high-tech surgical robots and insulin-delivery systems were gutted by Trump layoffs even though industry fees, not taxpayers, financed the employee salaries.In recent years, the Food and Drug Administration hired experts in surgical robots and pioneers in artificial intelligence. It scooped up food chemists, lab-safety monitors and diabetes specialists who helped make needle pricks and test strips relics of the past.Trying to keep up with breakneck advances in medical technology and the demands of a public troubled by additives like food dyes, the agency enticed scores of midcareer specialists with remote roles and the chance to make a difference in their fields.In one weekend of mass firings across the F.D.A., much of that effort was gone. Most baffling to many were the firings of hundreds whose jobs were not funded by taxpayers. Their positions were financed through congressionally approved agreements that routed fees from the drug, medical device and tobacco industries to the agency.Known as user fees, the money provides adequate staffing for reviews of myriad products. While criticized by some, including the nation’s new health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., as a corrupting force on the agency, the industry funds are also widely viewed as indispensable: They now account for nearly half of the agency’s $7.2 billion budget.Though the F.D.A. is believed to have lost about 700 of its 18,000 employees, some cuts hit small teams so deeply that staff members believe the safety of some medical devices could be compromised.Among the layoffs were scientists supported by the fees who monitor whether tests pick up ever-evolving pathogens, including those that cause bird flu and Covid. They hobbled teams that evaluate the safety of medical devices like surgical staplers, new systems for diabetes control and A.I. software programs that scan millions of M.R.I.s and other images to detect cancer beyond the human eye. The cuts also eliminated positions for employees who have played a role in assessing the brain-implant technology in Elon Musk’s Neuralink devices.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.

1 hour agoChloe AslettBBC News, Yorkshire

32 minutes agoSmitha MundasadHealth reporter

But the study, whose publication was delayed by a pause in public communications by the agency, leaves key questions unanswered.Two dairy workers in Michigan may have transmitted bird flu to their pet cats last May, suggests a new study published on Thursday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.In one household, infected cats may also have passed the virus to other people in the home, but limited evidence makes it difficult to ascertain the possibility.The results are from a study that was scheduled to be published in January but was delayed by the Trump administration’s pause on communications from the C.D.C.A single data table from the new report briefly appeared online two weeks ago in a paper on the wildfires in California, then quickly disappeared. That odd incident prompted calls from public health experts for the study’s release.The new paper still leaves major questions unanswered, including how the cats first became infected and whether farmworkers spread the virus to the cats and to other people in the household, experts said.“I don’t think we can say for sure if this is human-to-cat or cat-to-human or cat-from-something-else,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, director of the Pandemic Center at the Brown University School of Public Health.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.

Funds for vital health programs around the world remain frozen and their work has not been able to resume, despite a federal judge’s order that temporarily halted the Trump administration’s dismantling of the government’s main foreign aid agency.Interviews with people working on health initiatives in Africa and Asia found that parents in Kenya whose children are believed to have tuberculosis cannot get them tested. There is no clean drinking water in camps in Nigeria or Bangladesh for people who fled civil conflict. A therapeutic food program cannot treat acutely malnourished children in South Sudan.“We have people traveling 300 kilometers from the mountains to try to find their medications at other hospitals, because there are none left where they live,” said Maleket Hailu, who runs an organization that assists people living with H.I.V. in the Tigray region of Ethiopia and relied on funding from the United States Agency for International Development. “U.S.A.I.D. was providing the medications and transporting them to rural places. Now these people are thrown away with no proper information.”A State Department spokesperson said on Tuesday that the office of Secretary of State Marco Rubio had issued more than 180 waivers permitting lifesaving activities to resume, and that more were being approved each day. The department did not reply to a request to provide a list of the 180 projects.But even programs with waivers are still frozen, according to people in more than 40 U.S.A.I.D.-funded groups, because the payments system that U.S.A.I.D. used to disburse funds to the organizations has not operated for weeks. Without access to that money, programs cannot function.Organizations usually receive their grants in small increments, by submitting requisitions for activities they will imminently carry out. They rely on that quick turnaround to keep operating. Many of the groups affected are nonprofits that have no other source of funds.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.

There are a record number of patients in hospital with Norovirus in England.

Declarations of love, snoring, exercising and other boundary violations can really derail a therapeutic relationship.In her first session with a new therapist in San Diego, Elise, 37, immediately felt turned off. Not because of anything the therapist said, but because of the fact that she was riding a stationary bike during their conversation.Maria Danna, 35, was alarmed when her therapist in Portland, Ore., “vigorously shook a maraca at my face” in order to “pick up the energy I was giving off in session.”And Carson, who sought help from a psychiatrist in Ohio for severe postpartum depression and anxiety, felt troubled when the doctor sent her thousands of text messages and eventually revealed his sexual feelings for her.Therapy is transformative for many people, regardless of whether they have a mental illness. But what do you do if your therapist is unprofessional, inept or even abusive?Last year, The New York Times asked readers whether they had ever had a bad experience with a therapist, and we received more than 2,700 responses.Among them were examples of ethical violations, unprofessional behavior and interactions that were simply bizarre. (Some readers who shared their stories asked to be referred to only by their first names to protect their privacy.)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.

17 minutes agoSharon BarbourBBC North East and Cumbria health correspondent

Since 2023, Dr. Mehmet Oz, the celebrity doctor nominated by President Trump to head the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, has been a high-priced pitchman for iHerb, a California supplement retailer.He has aggressively promoted iHerb products on social media, recommending supplements that he says will stimulate hair growth and provide smoother skin. Olive oil, which iHerb sells, he said, “might be able to actually help with Alzheimer’s.”It turns out Dr. Oz is also a sizable investor in the supplement company, according to filings released on Wednesday by the Office of Government Ethics.Dr. Oz pledged to sell the vast majority of his multimillion-dollar holdings, which are varied and include investments in numerous health care companies and two artificial intelligence firms.But the fate of his iHerb holding, one of the largest in his portfolio and valued at an unspecified figure in the range of $5 million to $25 million, is unclear, according to experts who reviewed his disclosure forms.In one filing, Dr. Oz pledged to divest his iHerb holdings “as soon as practicable but not later than 90 days after confirmation” by the Senate to the government post.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.

2 hours agoJames CookScotland editor