Publisher Health

Former Prime Minister Lord David Cameron has backed moves to legalise assisted dying for terminally ill adults.

Getty ImagesResearchers say they have found the first new treatment for asthma attacks in 50 years.

President-elect Donald J. Trump’s selections to run the nation’s health agencies are alarming infectious disease experts.President-elect Donald J. Trump had already succeeded in rattling the nation’s public health and biomedical establishment by the time he announced on Tuesday that he had picked Dr. Jay Bhattacharya to run the National Institutes of Health. But amid growing fears of a deadly bird flu pandemic, perhaps no one was more rattled than experts in infectious disease.Dr. Bhattacharya, a Stanford University medical economist and outspoken opponent of lockdowns, masking, school closures and other Covid-19 mitigation measures, and Mr. Trump’s other health picks have one thing in common. They are all considered Covid contrarians whose views raise questions about how they would handle an infectious disease crisis.Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Mr. Trump’s choice for health secretary, has said he wants the N.I.H. to focus on chronic disease and “give infectious disease a break for about eight years.” Dr. Martin Makary, the president-elect’s choice to run the Food and Drug Administration, incorrectly predicted in 2021 that the nation was “racing toward an extremely low level of infection.”Dr. David Weldon, a Republican former congressman who is Mr. Trump’s choice to lead the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, has espoused the debunked theory that thimerosal, a mercury compound in certain vaccines, causes autism. As a congressman, he introduced legislation that would strip the C.D.C. of its role in ensuring vaccine safety, saying the agency had a “conflict of interest” because it also promotes vaccination.And Dr. Mehmet Oz, the talk show host who has been picked by Mr. Trump to run Medicare and Medicaid, prodded officials in the first Trump administration to give emergency authorization for the malaria drug hydroxychloroquine to treat Covid-19. The F.D.A. later revoked the authorization when studies showed the drug carried risks, including serious heart issues, to coronavirus patients.Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has said he wants to focus on chronic diseases rather than infectious diseases as head of the Department of Health and Human Services. Haiyun Jiang 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.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and other candidates for top health posts are at odds with the drug industry, setting the stage for tense battles over regulatory changes.Drug company executives had hoped that a second Trump administration would be staffed by friendly health policy officials who would reduce regulation and help their industry boom.But some of President-elect Donald Trump’s proposed nominees are instead alarming drug makers, according to interviews with people in the industry.For health secretary, Mr. Trump chose Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime vaccine skeptic with no medical or public health training who has accused drug companies of the “mass poisoning” of Americans.Mr. Trump’s pick to lead the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is Dr. Dave Weldon, a former congressman from Florida who raised doubts about vaccines and pushed to move most vaccine safety research from the agency.And Mr. Trump’s choice to run the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the former television host Dr. Mehmet Oz, has scant experience in managing a large bureaucracy like the one he may now oversee; the agency is in charge of health care programs that cover more than 150 million Americans.In Mr. Trump’s first term as president, pharmaceutical executives largely cheered his health policy nominees. They had ties to the moderate wing of the Republican Party and decades of conventional experience, including at major drug companies.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.

Talking about your advance care directive with your loved ones will make life — and death — easier later on.Instead of talking about politics around the Thanksgiving table this year, consider a less fraught topic: death.It’s something few of us want to think about, but death is a fact of life that we will all encounter, often first as a caregiver and then, inevitably, when we reach our own.As uncomfortable as it can be, discussing what medical care you want to receive at the end of your life is “one of the most loving things” you can do for your family, said Dr. Jennifer Gabbard, the director of the Palliative Medicine Research Program at the Wake Forest University School of Medicine.Understanding your wishes ahead of time can make difficult decisions a little easier on your loved ones and comfort them in knowing that they’re doing the right thing.These discussions aren’t just for people in their golden years, either. If you’re young and healthy, you can frame it as an “in case I get hit by a bus” conversation, said Omni Kitts Ferrara, the director of education at the International End-of-Life Doula Association.Death is a fraught topic, so it’s worth thinking about how to make these conversations less stressful for your family and friends. Here’s a framework for what to cover.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.

When it comes to weeding out corporate influence, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s ideas often align best with some of Trump’s loudest critics.There is no denying the bromance between President-elect Donald J. Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., two men with famously big egos and a desire to expose what they view as a corrupt federal bureaucracy.But if Mr. Kennedy is confirmed to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, several of his key priorities may run counter to those of an administration with a game plan bent on deregulation. Mr. Trump’s choice for White House chief of staff, Susie Wiles, comes from a lobbying firm that represented the very industries that Mr. Kennedy hopes to disrupt.Over the past two decades, Mr. Kennedy, a lawyer and longtime environmentalist, has turned his passion toward health issues, many of which — apart from his questioning of vaccine safety — traditionally align better with the Democratic Party he left behind. When it comes to tearing down corporate capture among the giants — Big Pharma, Big Ag, Big Food, among others — Mr. Kennedy’s ideas echo those of some of the incoming Trump administration’s loudest critics.Michelle ObamaMr. Kennedy, who recently criticized Mr. Trump’s penchant for fast food, has been clear about his plans to go after ultra-processed foods that contribute to the growing rates of diabetes and obesity in the United States. Those goals sound familiar to anyone who lived through the Obama administration, when Michelle Obama started the Let’s Move! campaign as first lady to encourage healthier diets and lifestyles among children.Ms. Obama was a driving force behind former President Barack Obama’s creation of a task force on childhood obesity. Under his administration, federal agencies released updated nutrition labels and the ubiquitous “MyPlate” icon that replaced the food pyramid. Most consequentially, she championed the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act, which increased funding and raised nutritional standards for school lunches. The vegetable requirements and rules for sodium and flavored drink products under that law, signed in 2010, were dialed back under the first Trump administration.Gavin NewsomThe week before the election, Mr. Kennedy declared the “first thing” he would do as part of the Trump administration would be: “Tell the cereal companies, ‘Take all the dyes out of their food.’” But in California, Gov. Gavin Newsom has already beaten him to it.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.

BBCHannah Newby has a chance to have the family she’s “always dreamed of” on the NHS.

President-elect Donald J. Trump said on Tuesday evening that he had selected Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a Stanford physician and economist whose authorship of an anti-lockdown treatise during the coronavirus pandemic made him a central figure in a bitter public health debate, to be the director of the National Institutes of Health.“Together, Jay and RFK Jr. will restore the NIH to a Gold Standard of Medical Research as they examine the underlying causes of, and solutions to, America’s biggest health challenges, including our Crisis of Chronic Illness and Disease,” Mr. Trump wrote on social media, referring to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., his choice to lead the N.I.H.’s parent agency, the Department of Health and Human Services.If confirmed by the Senate, Dr. Bhattacharya would lead the world’s premier medical research agency, with a $47 billion budget and 27 separate institutes and centers, each with its own research agenda, focusing on different diseases like cancer and heart disease.Dr. Bhattacharya is the latest in a series of Trump health picks who came to prominence during the coronavirus pandemic and who hold views on medicine and public health that are at times outside the mainstream. The president-elect’s health choices, experts agree, suggest a shake-up is coming to the nation’s public health and biomedical establishment.Dr. Bhattacharya is one of three lead authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, a manifesto issued in 2020 that contended that the virus should be allowed to spread among young healthy people who were “at minimal risk of death” and could thus develop natural immunity, while prevention efforts were targeted to older people and the vulnerable.Through a connection with a Stanford colleague, Dr. Scott Atlas, who was advising Mr. Trump during his first term, Dr. Bhattacharya presented his views to Alex M. Azar II, Mr. Trump’s health secretary. The condemnation from the public health establishment was swift. Dr. Bhattacharya and his fellow authors were promptly dismissed as cranks whose “fringe” policy prescriptions would lead to millions of unnecessary deaths.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.

US President-elect Donald Trump has picked a leading Covid lockdown sceptic Jay Bhattacharya to be the next director of a key US public health agency.

The £200m rescue package to increase access to NHS dentistry this year is not on track, a spending watchdog says.