Publisher Health

The NHS has said it will not pay for the first drug shown to slow the destruction of the brain in Alzheimer’s disease.

A 67-year-old man has become the first person in the UK to try what doctors hope will be a revolutionary new treatment for lung cancer – a vaccine that tells the body how to fight and kill the disease.

BBCThe parents of a young woman who died after being given an AstraZeneca Covid jab have accused the NHS of failing to pass on known safety warnings about the vaccine.

Many older Americans, including those in nursing homes, aren’t getting booster shots.The Food and Drug Administration on Thursday approved the latest slate of annual Covid vaccines, clearing the way for Americans 6 months and older to receive updated shots in the midst of a prolonged summer surge of the virus.Pfizer and Moderna, the vaccine makers, are expected to begin shipping vaccines to pharmacies and doctors’ offices within days. The shots are tailored to a version of the virus that took off this spring before giving way to closely related variants, all of which appear to spread faster.For the frailest Americans, who have been dying of Covid in growing numbers this summer, the shots could offer a reprieve from a virus that disproportionately endangers those whose vaccinations are out of date.But the approval is occurring months after wily new variants began driving up infections, a matter of consternation for some scientists who have urged faster turnarounds for updated shots.In recent weeks, people have been hospitalized with Covid at a rate nearly twice as high as during the same time last summer. By late July, Covid was killing roughly 600 Americans each week, a substantial drop from this winter but double the number from this spring.The availability of boosters has not translated into actual vaccinations. By spring, only one in five adults had received last year’s updated Covid vaccine. Even older Americans, who are at far greater risk of being severely sickened, largely spurned the shots, with only 40 percent of people 75 and older taking last year’s vaccine.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 Clade Ib version of the virus had not been detected outside Africa until last week, when a case in Sweden raised concerns about a wider outbreak.Health officials in Thailand said on Thursday that they had confirmed a case of the version of mpox that prompted the World Health Organization to declare a global health emergency. It’s the second time that the new and deadlier version has been found outside Africa.The announcement of the case in Thailand is likely to stir concerns about the virus spreading more widely, especially after the version was discovered in Sweden last week. Previously the outbreak had been concentrated in the Democratic Republic of Congo.The version of the mpox virus detected in these recent cases is known as Clade Ib. Health officials are particularly concerned about it because it has a death rate of 3 percent, much higher than the 0.2 percent death rate observed in a 2022 outbreak.That earlier outbreak was driven by a version called Clade IIb, which is spread predominantly through sexual contact. Men who had sex with men proved to be the most at risk, but behavioral changes and vaccinations curbed the spread.Clade Ib appears to have spread mainly through heterosexual sex, epidemiologists have said. Another subtype, Clade Ia, has spread through household contact and exposure to affected animals in addition to sexual contact. So far, young children have been the most vulnerable to this subtype.Thai officials said on Wednesday that the infected person was a 66-year-old European man who worked in an African country with an ongoing outbreak. They did not specify which country. The man, who has a home in Thailand, was not reported to have severe symptoms.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.

Getty ImagesThe first drug to slow the progression of early stage Alzheimer’s won’t be available on the NHS because health assessment body NICE says the benefits “are too small to justify the costs”.

A survey revealed similarities between these two altered states of consciousness.One person felt a sensation of “slowly floating into the air” as images flashed around. Another recalled “the most profound sense of love and peace,” unlike anything experienced before. Consciousness became a “foreign entity” to another whose “whole sense of reality disappeared.”These were some of the firsthand accounts shared in a small survey of people who belonged to an unusual cohort: They had all undergone a near-death experience and tried psychedelic drugs.The survey participants described their near-death and psychedelic experiences as being distinct, yet they also reported significant overlap. In a paper published on Thursday, researchers used these accounts to provide a comparison of the two phenomena.“For the first time, we have a quantitative study with personal testimony from people who have had both of these experiences,” said Charlotte Martial, a neuroscientist at the University of Liège in Belgium and an author of the findings, which were published in the journal Neuroscience of Consciousness. “Now we can say for sure that psychedelics can be a kind of window through which people can enter a rich, subjective state resembling a near-death experience.”Near-death experiences are surprisingly common — an estimated 5 to 10 percent of the general population has reported having one. For decades, scientists largely dismissed the fantastical stories of people who returned from the brink of death. But some researchers have started to take these accounts seriously.“In recent times, the science of consciousness has become interested in nonordinary states,” said Christopher Timmermann, a research fellow at the Center for Psychedelic Research at Imperial College London and an author of the article. “To get a comprehensive account of what it means to be a human being requires incorporating these experiences.”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.

She turned her diagnosis into a command to live life passionately, leading to a 12-page New York Times profile and a new career as a public speaker.Geri Taylor, whose openhearted disclosures about the ravages of Alzheimer’s were so striking that they made her a public spokeswoman for people with the disease, died on Aug. 4 in Danbury, Conn. She was 81.The cause was complications of Alzheimer’s, her husband, Jim Taylor, said.Ms. Taylor, a former nurse, brought her profession’s competence, knowledge and frankness to her second career as an activist. She and Mr. Taylor became frequent interviewees in news articles about Alzheimer’s, activists in Washington and lecturers for audiences of patients and researchers. They spoke jointly to more than 15,000 people, Mr. Taylor said.All of that followed from a 21,000-word profile of the Taylors published in The New York Times in 2016 — the product of 20 months of work by the reporter N.R. Kleinfield, a specialist in writing stories about people of little fame but great significance.The “familiar face of Alzheimer’s,” Mr. Kleinfield wrote, was “the withered person with the scrambled mind marooned in a nursing home.” But there was also, he added, something else: “the beginning, the waiting period, which Geri Taylor has been navigating with prudence, grace and hope.”Ms. Taylor with her husband, Jim Taylor, in a cab in Las Vegas in 2014. The Taylors helped found an organization called Voices of Alzheimer’s, which pushes for accessible and improved medical care. Michael Kirby Smith for The New York TimesMs. Taylor first learned she was developing Alzheimer’s in 2012, when she was 69, after she had the uncanny experience of looking in the mirror and not recognizing her own face.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.

ReutersThe rapid spread of mpox – what used to be called monkeypox – in Africa has been declared a global emergency.

Lawmakers are zeroing in on MultiPlan, a firm that has helped insurers cut payments while sometimes leaving patients with large bills.Lawmakers on Tuesday called on health insurance regulators to detail their efforts against “troubling practices” that have raised costs for patients and employers.In a letter to a top Labor Department official, two congressmen cited a New York Times investigation of MultiPlan, a data firm that works with insurance companies to recommend payments for medical care.The firm and the insurers can collect higher fees when payments to medical providers are lower, but patients can be stuck with large bills, the investigation found. At the same time, employers can be charged high fees — in some cases paying insurers and MultiPlan more for processing a claim than the doctor gets for treating the patient.The lawmakers, Representatives Bobby Scott of Virginia and Mark DeSaulnier of California, both Democrats in leadership positions on a House committee overseeing employer-based insurance, highlighted MultiPlan as an example of “opaque fee structures and alleged self-dealing” that drive up health care costs. In their letter, they pressed the department for details on its efforts to enforce rules meant to promote transparency and expose conflicts of interest.MultiPlan’s business model focuses on the most common way Americans get health coverage: through an employer that “self-funds,” meaning it pays medical claims with its own money and uses an insurance company to process claims. Insurers such as Aetna, Cigna and UnitedHealthcare have pitched MultiPlan’s services as a way to save money when an employee sees a provider out of network.In many cases, MultiPlan uses an algorithm-based tool to generate a recommended payment. Employers typically pay insurers and MultiPlan a percentage of what they call the “savings” — the difference between the recommendation and the original bill.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.