Publisher Health

4 hours agoMichelle Roberts, Nat Wright and Adam EleyBBC News

The research could further complicate the polarized politics of abortion because the drug in the study is the key ingredient in a pill used for emergency contraception.A new study suggests a possible alternative to the abortion pill mifepristone, a drug that continues to be a target of lawsuits and legislation from abortion opponents.But the potential substitute could further complicate the politics of reproductive health because it is also the key ingredient in a contraceptive morning-after pill.The new study, published Thursday in the journal NEJM Evidence, involved a drug called ulipristal acetate, the active ingredient in the prescription contraceptive Ella, one of two types of morning-after pills approved in the United States. (The other, Plan B One-Step, which does not require a prescription, contains a different drug and does not work in a way that would terminate a pregnancy, according to scientific evidence.)In the study, 133 women who were up to nine weeks’ pregnant took twice the dose of the ulipristal acetate contained in Ella, followed by misoprostol, the second drug used in the typical medication abortion regimen. All but four of the women completed the termination of their pregnancies without further intervention, a 97 percent completion rate that is similar to the regimen using mifepristone. (The others finished the process with additional medication or a procedure.)There were no serious complications, and the study concluded that using ulipristal acetate in the two-drug medication abortion regimen was safe.Dr. Beverly Winikoff, the lead author of the study and the president of Gynuity Health Projects, a reproductive health research organization, said that after the Supreme Court overturned the national right to abortion in 2022, she began wondering about a possible role for ulipristal acetate, which has a similar chemical structure to mifepristone.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.

A group of 15 states have reached a tentative new deal that would require them to set aside hundreds of millions of dollars from the settlement in a legal-defense fund for the family.Seven months after the Supreme Court struck down a deal that would have resolved thousands of opioid cases against Purdue Pharma, the company’s owners, members of the Sackler family, have increased their cash offer to settle the litigation — but with a novel catch.Under the framework for a new deal, the Sacklers would not receive immunity from future opioid lawsuits, a condition that they had long insisted upon but that the court ruled was impermissible.Instead, they would pay up to $6.5 billion — $500 million more than the previous agreement — but with a new condition: Claimants, including states, municipalities and individuals, would have to set aside as much as $800 million in an account akin to a legal-defense fund for the billionaires to fight such cases, according to people familiar with the negotiations.Some details of the framework — but not the legal-defense fund — were announced on Thursday by the New York attorney general, Letitia James. She said the overall settlement totaled $7.4 billion, which would include $897 million from Purdue.New York could receive as much as $250 million, she said.“The Sackler family relentlessly pursued profit at the expense of vulnerable patients and played a critical role in starting and fueling the opioid epidemic,” Ms. James said.When the deal is finalized, she added, the Sacklers will “no longer have control of Purdue and will never be allowed to sell opioids in the United States again.”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 cases have spurred new pet food safety rules and poultry surveillance efforts.Federal officials who spent the last year grappling with a surge of bird flu infections in cows and people are now confronting a spate of new cases in cats, some of which have died after eating contaminated, uncooked pet food.Since early December, more than two dozen cases have been confirmed in domestic cats in the United States. Officials have linked some of the cases to virus-laden raw milk, which is known to pose a serious risk to cats. But other cats fell ill after eating commercially available raw pet food — the first known cases in the country linked to pet food.The cases have already prompted one pet food manufacturer to recall some of its products. And last week, federal officials announced new pet food safety rules and poultry surveillance efforts.Bird flu “is an emerging contaminant in animal food,” Dr. Steve Grube, a chief medical officer at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, said at a briefing last week.Still, experts and officials said that there was no need for pet owners to panic. There is no evidence that infected cats have passed the virus on to people, and the cases have been linked specifically to unpasteurized milk and uncooked meat or poultry products.Most commercial pet foods are cooked or heat-treated. “The heat of processing should be enough to inactivate the virus,” said Phyllis Entis, a food safety microbiologist who worked for Canada’s food safety agency.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.

Hospitals in England have been “hit by a surge” of norovirus – the winter vomiting bug – adding to mounting pressure on the NHS, health officials say.

The private jet took off from the Caribbean island of Antigua in April carrying three highly flammable tanks of compressed oxygen and a terminally ill cancer patient.Kim Hudlow had chartered the plane for her husband, David. She crouched by his side on the five-hour journey to Florida, frantically adjusting the valve on one of the oxygen tanks as he struggled to breathe. A doctor had just told her he was dying. She was terrified he wouldn’t survive the flight.It was an abrupt turnaround. Six days earlier, Ms. Hudlow and her husband, who had late-stage esophageal cancer, had arrived on the tropical island full of hope that a novel blood-filtering treatment offered there would save Mr. Hudlow’s life — or at least prolong it.They were among about two dozen families lured to Antigua by a California start-up called ExThera Medical and its secretive billionaire partner, Alan Quasha.ExThera, which has about 50 employees, makes a single product: a filter that it says can be used to remove the tumor cells that circulate in patients’ blood and enable cancer to metastasize. Early last year, the company sold thousands of the devices to Mr. Quasha’s private equity firm, Quadrant Management, which began using them on late-stage cancer patients at a small clinic in Antigua.Quadrant, which invests on behalf of Mr. Quasha and his family and doesn’t have outside investors, charged $45,000 for each course of treatment and advised patients to return to the clinic for regular sessions. It also urged them to abstain from chemotherapy between treatments.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.

A large study found that men lost seven years of life expectancy and women lost nine years, compared with counterparts without the disorder.A study of more than 30,000 British adults diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or A.D.H.D., found that, on average, they were dying earlier than their counterparts in the general population — around seven years earlier for men, and around nine for women.The study, which was published Thursday in The British Journal of Psychiatry, is believed to be the first to use all-cause mortality data to estimate life expectancy in people with A.D.H.D. Previous studies have pointed to an array of risks associated with the condition, among them poverty, mental health disorders, smoking and substance abuse.The authors cautioned that A.D.H.D. is substantially underdiagnosed and that the people in their study — most of them diagnosed as young adults — might be among the more severely affected. Still, they described their findings as “extremely concerning,” highlighting unmet needs that “require urgent attention.”“It’s a big number, and it is worrying,” said Joshua Stott, a professor of aging and clinical psychology at University College London and an author of the study. “I see it as likely to be more about health inequality than anything else. But it’s quite a big health inequality.”The study did not identify causes of early death among people with A.D.H.D. but found that they were twice as likely as the general population to smoke or abuse alcohol and that they had far higher rates of autism, self-harming behaviors and personality disorders than the general population. In adulthood, Dr. Stott said, “they find it harder to manage impulses, and have more risky behaviors.”He said health care systems might need to adjust in order to better serve people with A.D.H.D., who may have sensory sensitivity or difficulty managing time or communicating with clinicians during brief appointments. He said he hoped treatments for substance abuse or depression could be adapted for patients with A.D.H.D.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.

Scientific meetings were canceled, and research data on the bird flu outbreak was delayed, amid confusion over the directive.The Trump administration, moving quickly to clamp down on health and science agencies, has canceled a string of scientific meetings and instructed federal health officials to refrain from all public communications, including upcoming reports focused on the nation’s escalating bird flu crisis.Experts who serve on outside advisory panels on a range of topics, from antibiotic resistance to deafness, received emails on Wednesday telling them their meetings had been canceled.The cancellations followed a directive issued on Tuesday by the acting director of the federal Department of Health and Human Services, who prohibited the public release of any public communication until it had been reviewed by a presidential appointee or designee, according to federal officials and an internal memo reviewed by The New York Times.The directive enjoins the public release of “regulations, guidance documents, and other public documents and communications,” including any “notice,” “grant announcement,” news releases, speaking engagements or official correspondence with public officials, until they have received approval.The new stricture applies to messages to email groups and to social media posts, and included a ban on announcements to The Federal Register, without which many official processes cannot continue. Some notices sent by the Biden administration in its final week were quickly withdrawn.The cancellations and communications crackdown sent a chill through employees of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the broader scientific community. The directive was first reported by The Washington 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.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President Trump’s pick to be health secretary, is keeping his financial stake in major litigation against Merck over a widely used vaccine given to young people, according to ethics records made public Wednesday and court documents. That conflict of interest could raise questions for lawmakers as Mr. Kennedy aims to run agencies that regulate the drug maker.The ethics records said Mr. Kennedy would continue to collect fees for cases in which he referred clients to Wisner Baum, a law firm suing Merck over Gardasil, a vaccine that protects against the human papillomavirus, or HPV, and is administered to adolescents to prevent cervical and other cancers later in life.The arrangement has earned Mr. Kennedy, one of the nation’s fiercest vaccine critics, more than $2.5 million in recent years, according to records filed with federal election officials for his presidential run and with the Office of Government Ethics as part of the confirmation process.A spokeswoman for Mr. Kennedy did not respond to a request for comment.The first of many lawsuits claiming that young people were harmed by the vaccine is on trial in Los Angeles Superior Court. Mr. Kennedy has used X, the social media platform, to promote the claims; in 2022 he posted a video to recruit additional plaintiffs. Merck said the allegations have no merit.In the ethics records, Mr. Kennedy wrote that he is entitled to receive 10 percent of fees “awarded in contingency fee cases referred to the firm.” The records, which noted that he is not a lawyer in any of the cases, said he would retain a financial interest in cases even if confirmed, as long as the cases do not involve the government, such as those brought through the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program.Wisner Baum has paid Mr. Kennedy about $856,000 in 2024 and $1.6 million the year before, financial records filed with the government show. It was not clear from the records how much of that money came from cases involving Merck. Mr. Kennedy has also worked with Wisner Baum on other litigation, including cases related to the pesticide Roundup.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.

5 hours agoJoanna MorrisBBC News, North East and Cumbria