Publisher Health

PA MediaA new vaccination programme aimed at protecting newborn babies and older adults against a dangerous respiratory disease is now being rolled out in Scotland.

Nottinghamshire PoliceA doctor warned three years before the Nottingham attacks that Valdo Calocane’s mental illness was so severe he could “end up killing someone”, the BBC can reveal.

The last day Byron Stribling spent with his wife, Harmony, was the Fourth of July in 2021. A great day, he always says.The holiday fell on a Sunday. The congregation at their church in Belzoni, a small town in the Mississippi Delta, blessed the couple and prayed for a safe delivery for Ms. Ball-Stribling. She was eight months pregnant and scheduled to have a C-section five days later.At a barbecue, the Striblings feasted on ribs, collard greens, potato salad and cornbread. But around midnight, Ms. Ball-Stribling threw up and said her chest hurt. “She wanted to lay down, but I told her, ‘We need to go somewhere,’” Mr. Stribling, 32, recalled.Ambulances in the Delta are unreliable, and the only hospital in Belzoni closed over a decade ago. So they piled into his car and sped toward Yazoo City, Miss., the closest town with an emergency room, about 30 miles away.On the way, Ms. Ball-Stribling had a seizure. Panicked, Mr. Stribling called 911. The dispatcher told Mr. Stribling to pull over and start CPR, so he slammed on the brakes and pumped her chest on the side of the road until an ambulance came. But he already knew he had lost her, there on the shoulder of Route 49-W.What killed Harmony Ball-Stribling? The death certificate says the cause of death was complications of pre-eclampsia, a life-threatening blood pressure disorder that can develop during pregnancy, exacerbated by hypertension and hardening of the arteries. But that’s not the whole story.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 agency said there was insufficient data to allow the use of a treatment for PTSD that involves the drug known as Ecstasy, according to the company seeking approval.The Food and Drug Administration on Friday declined to approve MDMA-assisted therapy for the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder, dashing the hopes of many Americans with intractable mental health conditions who are desperate for new treatments.According to Lykos Therapeutics, the company that had sought approval for the treatment, the agency said there was insufficient data to allow its use. The company said that the F.D.A is requesting an additional clinical trial, to continue to assess whether the drug, commonly known as Ecstasy or molly, would be safe and effective.Had it been approved, MDMA would have become the first psychedelic compound to be regulated by federal health authorities.Outright approval by the F.D.A. would have been a watershed moment in the decades-long effort by researchers to demonstrate the healing potential of compounds like LSD and psilocybin, the psychoactive component of so-called magic mushrooms.“This is an earthquake for those in the field who thought F.D.A. approval would be a cinch,” said Michael Pollan, the best-selling author and co-founder of the UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics. His book, “How to Change Your Mind,” helped catalyze public interest in the therapeutic potential of psychoactive compounds, demonized during the nation’s long war on drugs.But the agency’s decision had not been entirely unexpected, after a group of independent experts convened by the F.D.A. to evaluate Lykos’s data met in June and rejected the company’s application. With regard to two central questions, the experts voted overwhelmingly that the company had not proven the treatment was effective, and that its benefits did not outweigh the risks.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 copywriter, he and a partner in 1972 came up with “Try it, you’ll like it” and “I can’t believe I ate that whole thing.” Soon, sales were, well, fizzing.Howie Cohen, an advertising copywriter, often said he was congenitally familiar with indigestion. So perhaps it was only natural that in the 1970s, he, along with an ad agency colleague, would conjure up a catchy slogan that would not only sell more Alka-Seltzer but also become an American pop culture punchline: “I can’t believe I ate the whole thing.”That bedside lament, spoken by the comedian and dialectician Milt Moss — he actually said that thing on camera — vaulted from a 30-second TV commercial to sweatshirts, supermarket windows and even church marquees.It proved even more popular than “Try it, you’ll like it,” the first catchphrase for Alka-Seltzer that Mr. Cohen coined with his business partner, Bob Pasqualina, an art director at the Manhattan agency Wells Rich Greene.Mr. Cohen, who helped popularize products and companies like Petco (“Where the pets go”) and the fast-food chain Jack in the Box (exploding its clown mascot in a TV commercial in announcing a new, more sophisticated menu), died on March 2 at his home in Los Angeles. He was 81.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.

He endured skepticism but won a Nobel Prize for his work upending the conventional wisdom that stress, diet or alcohol caused the painful condition.Dr. J. Robin Warren, the Australian pathologist who shared a Nobel Prize for discovering that most stomach ulcers were caused by the bacterium Helicobacter pylori — and not, as had been widely believed, stress, alcohol or spicy foods — died on July 23 in Inglewood, Australia. He was 87.His death, at a care home, was announced by the University of Western Australia in Perth, where he was an emeritus professor for many years. His daughter-in-law Gigi Warren said the cause was complications after a recent fall.In 1984, Dr. Warren and his collaborator, the gastroenterologist Barry Marshall, published a paper in the British medical journal The Lancet describing their finding that the spiral-shaped bacterium now commonly called H. pylori festered in the stomachs of patients with ulcers and gastritis. Dr. Warren had first noticed the bacterium on a gastric biopsy sample in 1979.The paper’s conclusion upended centuries of conventional wisdom about the cause of ulcers. (Psychoanalysts had even written of the “peptic ulcer personality.”) Doctors typically prescribed stress reduction, a bland diet and, starting in 1977, drugs like Tagamet and Zantac to tame the burning acids. Severe cases were sometimes treated with surgery.Dr. Warren, right, with the gastroenterologist Barry Marshall in 1984. When their study of ulcers was published, gastroenterologists expressed concern about whether to trust potentially paradigm-shifting findings made by two unknown researchers in Australia.University of Western AustraliaWhen the study was published, gastroenterologists were skeptical. They expressed concern about whether to trust potentially paradigm-shifting findings made by two unknown researchers in Australia. And the idea that bacteria could even grow in the stomach was considered blasphemy.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.

Over the past three decades, routine immunizations have prevented 1.1 million deaths and saved the United States $540 billion, the C.D.C. estimated.There’s no way to put a price on the pain and suffering prevented by childhood vaccines. But as it turns out, you can pinpoint the savings to the country.For nearly three decades, childhood vaccines — including those that target measles, tetanus and diphtheria — have saved the United States $540 billion in health care costs, according to a new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.Routine childhood vaccinations have prevented approximately 508 million cases of illness, 32 million hospitalizations and 1,129,000 deaths, the agency estimated on Thursday.“These vaccine programs, when you create the right infrastructure to implement them, they pay for themselves right away,” said William Padula, a health economist at the University of Southern California who was not involved in the new research.The savings estimate includes money that would have been spent on treating the initial infection and managing later, related conditions. The figure dwarfs the cost of developing the shots.But vaccine-preventable illnesses can also cause indirect economic effects if children become permanently disabled from an infection, or parents miss work while caring for their sick children.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.

About 1,000 senior doctors have written to the British Medical Association (BMA) saying they are “extremely disappointed” with the stance taken on gender services.

The condition has put significant strain on patients and society — at a global economic cost of about $1 trillion a year, a new report estimates.About 400 million people worldwide have been afflicted with long Covid, according to a new report by scientists and other researchers who have studied the condition. The team estimated that the economic cost — from factors like health care services and patients unable to return to work — is about $1 trillion worldwide each year, or about 1 percent of the global economy.The report, published Friday in the journal Nature Medicine, is an effort to summarize the knowledge about and effects of long Covid across the globe four years after it first emerged.It also aims to “provide a road map for policy and research priorities,” said one author, Dr. Ziyad Al-Aly, the chief of research and development at the V.A. St. Louis Health Care System and a clinical epidemiologist at Washington University in St. Louis. He wrote the paper with several other leading long Covid researchers and three leaders of the Patient-Led Research Collaborative, an organization formed by long Covid patients who are also professional researchers.Among the conclusions:About 6 percent of adults globally have had long Covid.The authors evaluated scores of studies and metrics to estimate that as of the end of 2023, about 6 percent of adults and about 1 percent of children — or about 400 million people — had ever had long Covid since the pandemic began. They said the estimate accounted for the fact that new cases slowed in 2022 and 2023 because of vaccines and the milder Omicron variant.They suggested that the actual number might be higher because their estimate included only people who developed long Covid after they had symptoms during the infectious stage of the virus, and it did not include people who had more than one Covid infection.Many people have not fully recovered.The authors cited studies suggesting that only 7 percent to 10 percent of long Covid patients fully recovered two years after developing long Covid. They added that “some manifestations of long Covid, including heart disease, diabetes, myalgic encephalomyelitis and dysautonomia are chronic conditions that last a lifetime.”The consequences are far-reaching, the authors wrote: “Long Covid drastically affects patients’ well-being and sense of self, as well as their ability to work, socialize, care for others, manage chores and engage in community activities — which also affects patients’ families, caregivers and their communities.”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.

Many patients are eager to discontinue Wegovy or Zepbound when their weight loss plateaus. But doctors say it’s difficult to go cold turkey.Susana Parks was delighted when she lost 40 pounds on Eli Lilly’s obesity drug, Zepbound. But now that she is at her goal weight, she has questions: Can she stop taking the drug? And if she does, how can she maintain her weight loss?“I can’t stop cold turkey or I will gain it back — that is clear,” said Ms. Parks, 60, of Bend, Ore. “Do I go to a lower dosage? Do I take it every two weeks instead of weekly? How do I maintain?”These questions are becoming common, obesity medicine specialists say, as more and more people lose weight with obesity drugs. Some struggle to pay for the medicine, have difficulty finding it to purchase or just don’t want to stay on a drug longer than they believe they need to.When doctors are confronted with these queries, here is what they advise — and what they can’t say.What will happen if I stop taking the new weight-loss drugs after losing weight?Dr. David Cummings, a weight-loss specialist at the University of Washington, has been asked this question by many patients. He explains that the makers of the drugs conducted large studies in which people took the drugs and then stopped.“On average, everyone’s weight rapidly returned,” Dr. Cummings said. And, he said, other medical conditions, like elevated blood sugar and lipid levels, return to their previous levels after improving.He also tells patients that while on average, weight is regained when the drugs are stopped, individuals vary in how much weight and how quickly it returns.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.