Publisher Health

In its original form, the virus survives in just two countries. But a type linked to an oral vaccine used in other nations has already turned up in the West.Most American parents hardly give thought to polio beyond the instant their child is immunized against the disease. But there was a time in this country when polio paralyzed 20,000 people in a year, killing many of them.Vaccines turned the tide against the virus. Over the past decade, there has been only one case in the United States, related to international travel.That could change very quickly if polio vaccination rates dropped or the vaccine were to become less accessible.Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime vaccine skeptic who may become the secretary of health and human services, has said the idea that vaccination has nearly eradicated polio is “a mythology.”And while Mr. Kennedy has said he’s not planning to take vaccines away from Americans, he has long contended that they are not as safe and effective as claimed.As recently as 2023, he said batches of an early version of the polio vaccine, contaminated with a virus, caused cancers “that killed many, many, many, many, many more people than polio ever did.” The contamination was real, but research never bore out a link to cancer.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.

Outbreaks among the unvaccinated are a predictable consequence of falling immunization rates. But even vaccinated adults may be vulnerable to some illnesses.There were more than more than 32,000 cases of whooping cough in 2024, the highest tally in a decade. In California alone, the disease struck 2,000 people between January and October last year.More than 60 infants younger than 4 months were hospitalized in the state. One died.Whooping cough, or pertussis, is just the most stark example of what happens when vaccination rates decline. But it is far from the only one.The pandemic interrupted childhood immunizations across the country, and rates have not yet recovered. As a result, hundreds of thousands of children are increasingly vulnerable to diseases once largely relegated to history books.Most of them predominantly affect young children, like measles, mumps and rubella. But if immunizations continue to fall over the next few years — because of rising distrust, or more restrictive federal policies — preventable infectious diseases will resurface in all age groups, experts say.“It might take a year or two, but there’s no question,” said Pejman Rohani, an infectious disease epidemiologist at the University of Georgia.“We will have outbreaks,” he said.It’s not just the unvaccinated who will have to worry. Even adults who were vaccinated decades ago may find themselves vulnerable to what are now considered childhood diseases.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.

Azara Ballet in Florida is a place where performers can just be themselves.At Azara Ballet, dancers aren’t expected to make eye contact with the directors and choreographers. If company members need an impromptu break from the harsh stage lights during rehearsal, they take one. They also receive clear directions about hair and makeup well in advance of performances.The priority at Azara is dancers’ health. Founded in 2022 by the dancers Kate Flowers and Martin Roosaare, who are both autistic (and are a married couple), the company, which is based in Sarasota and Bradenton, Fla., is a haven for neurodivergent performers. (The company is made up of 10 dancers, not all of whom are neurodivergent.)“When I am dancing,” Flowers said, “as long as it’s in a good environment and a safe space, the expression through nonverbal movement is something that helps me a lot.”Azara addresses a gap in the dance world: the need for spaces where people who have autism, A.D.H.D. or other conditions that fall under the broad term “neurodivergent” can freely experience the art form. Evidence, both anecdotal and empirical, suggests that there’s a deep connection between dance and these neurological conditions. This relationship has become an area of increased focus for researchers, artists and performing arts organizations in recent years.In November, Azara gathered for a run-through of its program “Voices of Azara” in the black box theater where the show would soon take place. The atmosphere in the theater felt both active — the dancers warmed up, reviewed steps, chatted — and calm: There was tempered lighting, pleasantly cool air and, among the performers, a seemingly innate awareness of the volume of their voices.To begin the rehearsal, Roosaare gave the dancers a rundown of the schedule for the next three hours. Then, they went through the four pieces — all by company members — before receiving notes. As the dancers performed, the music was never overwhelmingly loud, and corrections were never shouted.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.

BBCRay, 62 from south London, became one of the first patients to receive the weight-loss jab Wegovy on the NHS last year and has lost 14kg (just over two stone) in five months.

Geograph/David DixonA man has been arrested on suspicion of attempted murder after a nurse was seriously injured in a stabbing at a hospital.

After developing chronic pain, I started looking into what scientists do — and still don’t — understand about the disease. Here is what I learned.Most of us don’t think about pain until we have it. And when we do, it’s typically something we get over after a few days or weeks. That was my own experience, until the summer of 2023. One day I woke to find that my arms hurt. There was no obvious explanation, nothing I’d done. The pain was intense. I couldn’t do much of anything: drive, cook, type, even sleep. I’d always been a healthy person who did a lot of sports, and I figured this strange pain was just bad luck. But as weeks turned into months, and no cause or treatment could be found, I began to realize that I wasn’t alone: that all around me was an ongoing epidemic of chronic pain.As my condition persisted, I started looking into what scientists do — and still don’t — understand about chronic pain. Mostly I was shocked to learn how little we know about its causes. But I also discovered that we’re now on the cusp of a revolution, one that is already transforming how we think about — and treat — chronic pain. (Read the full magazine article.)Chronic pain is not just a symptom, but a disease.We used to think that we may die in pain but don’t die of it. Now chronic pain is often considered an illness in its own right, one that occurs when our nerves become hyperactivated or “sensitized.” This can happen even if we have healed from the injury to which we can trace our pain — or for no reason at all. Scientists used to be mystified by persistent pain but now recognize that chronic pain is a disorder of the central nervous system. In some cases, pain signals just keep firing, driven by what researchers now think is a complex set of genetic, endocrinological and immunologic processes.A quarter of the world’s population suffers from chronic pain.In the United States some 100 million people have chronic pain; globally, it’s as many as two billion. Despite these numbers, and the financial, physical and emotional toll that chronic pain takes, it has received only a fraction of the funding that diseases like cancer and diabetes have. And there is no national center for the study of chronic pain. But researchers are finally beginning to understand the underlying mechanisms of pain — and how to treat it.Some people are more likely to suffer chronic pain than others.Women are more likely to develop chronic pain than men. No one is entirely sure why, but researchers point to two possible reasons: because women are at higher risk for autoimmune disorders, and because their hormonal fluctuations can aggravate pain. What we do know is that developing chronic pain isn’t necessarily a product of the severity of your illness. Some people with relatively mild tissue damage experience terrible pain, while others with severe damage feel mostly fine. And once a person has one kind of chronic pain, they’re more likely to develop another.Researchers now believe that chronic pain, like cancer, could end up having a range of genetic and cellular drivers that vary both by condition and by the particular makeup of the person experiencing 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.

Here’s a strange story: One day two summers ago, I woke up because my arms — both of them — hurt. Not the way they do when you’ve slept in a funny position, but as if the tendons in my forearms and hands were moving through mud. What felt like sharp electric shocks kept sparking in my fingers and sometimes up the inside of my biceps and across my chest. Holding anything was excruciating: a cup, a toothbrush, my phone. Even doing nothing was miserable. It hurt when I sat with my hands in my lap, when I stood, when I lay flat on the bed or on my side. The slightest pressure — a bedsheet, a watch band, a bra strap — was intolerable.It was August, and every doctor seemed to be away on vacation. The ones I did manage to see were politely stumped. It wasn’t carpal tunnel, tennis elbow or any other injury they could identify. I did nothing unusual the day before: an hour of work on my laptop, followed by a visit with a friend. We sat in her backyard and talked.For the first few weeks, I could barely sleep. Over the following months, I lost weight — almost a pound a week. I couldn’t drive, or cook, or use my laptop for work, or even hold a book or a pen. I would have been bored, except the pain was so tiring that I could barely function. I spent the days shuffling around the house listening to audiobooks and doing voice-to-text searches for “nerve pain arms” with my phone flat on the table, then carefully, painfully, scrolling through the results.I think we’re past the point where I have to explain that chronic pain is not the result of imbalanced humors or a wandering uterus or possession by demons. But for more modern skeptics, this is where I should add that chronic pain also isn’t just “all in your head” or “not really that bad” — or any of the other ways in which people who suffer from it are still regularly gaslit and dismissed.Personally, I never had to contend with not being believed, almost certainly because I’m an otherwise healthy, reasonably well-off white woman with a clean medical history and no significant record of anxiety or depression. Instead, I was taken seriously. A whole gamut of tests was run. My wrists were X-rayed. I had an M.R.I. on my cervical spine. Each new doctor ordered new blood tests: some for vitamin deficiencies, others for autoimmune diseases like rheumatoid arthritis.But when none of those tests could point to an obvious cause, I fell into the mystery bucket. Not the fascinating, fun kind of mystery that gets solved by a medical savant. This was the other kind, in which you are punted from doctor to doctor until you run out of specialists, who, this being real life, are far too overscheduled to fixate on one patient’s oddball 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.

A new tablet being developed to cure intestinal worms has shown promising results in trials and could help eradicate the parasitic infection, which affects about 1.5 billion people globally, researchers say.

A rising star among New Age motivational speakers, he was brought down by a disaster during one of his retreats in Arizona, where three people died in a sweat lodge.James Arthur Ray, an Oprah-endorsed motivational speaker who spent two years in prison for manslaughter after the 2009 deaths of three people in a sweat lodge, the culmination of a three-day spiritual program he ran in the Arizona desert, died on Jan. 3 in Henderson, Nev. He was 67.His brother, Jon Ray, announced the death on social media. He did not say where in Henderson Mr. Ray died or cite a cause, but he did say the death was unexpected.Mr. Ray was struggling to succeed as a motivational speaker when he appeared in “The Secret,” a 2006 documentary made by the Australian television producer Rhonda Byrne. The “secret,” which Mr. Ray and others espoused, was the idea that positive thinking can literally make the world shift in your favor.Things began to move quickly for Mr. Ray. He appeared on Oprah Winfrey’s show, where she lavished praise on him. Within months he was standing in front of sold-out crowds of hundreds, then thousands. In 2008 he published “Harmonic Wealth: The Secret of Attracting the Life You Want,” written with Linda Sivertsen, which reached The New York Times’s best-seller list.He was, Fortune magazine declared in 2008, “the next big thing in the highly competitive world of motivational gurus.”Mr. Ray spoke at what he called a “Harmonic Wealth Weekend” in Jersey City, N.J., in March 2009, a few months before three people died at his Arizona retreat.Yana Paskova 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.

Scientists have identified a gene that causes production of a substance in some citrus that interferes with many medications.You may be among the millions of people who have seen a surprisingly specific warning like this on the labels of drugs you take:Avoid eating grapefruit or drinking grapefruit juice while using this medication.Such warnings are issued for dozens of substances, including docetaxel, a cancer drug; erythromycin, an antibiotic; and some statins, the cholesterol-lowering drugs prescribed to more than a third of American adults over 40.The problem is a set of molecules, furanocoumarins. High levels of furanocoumarins interfere with human liver enzymes, among other processes. In their presence, medications can build up to unhealthy levels in the body. And grapefruits and some related citrus fruits are full of them.But there is no such warning for other kinds of citrus, such as mandarins and other oranges. Citrus researchers at the Volcani Center in Israel reported Wednesday in the journal The New Phytologist that, by crossing mandarins and grapefruit, they’ve uncovered genes that produce furanocoumarins in some citrus fruits. It’s a finding that opens the possibility of creating grapefruit that doesn’t require a warning label.Scientists had worked out the compounds’ structures and pieced together a basic flowchart of how they are made years ago, said Yoram Eyal, a professor at the Volcani Center. But the precise identities of enzymes catalyzing the process — the proteins that snip off a branch here, or add a piece there — remained mysterious. He and his colleagues knew that one way to identify them was to breed citrus high in furanocoumarins with those without. If the offspring of such a cross had varying levels of the substances, it should be possible, by digging into their genetics, to pinpoint the genes for the proteins.“We were afraid to approach it, because it’s very time-consuming and it takes many years,” he said, noting how involved it can be to grow new trees from seeds and assess their genetics. “But finally, we decided we have to dive in.”When they examined the offspring of a mandarin and a grapefruit, the researchers saw something remarkable. Fifty percent of the young plants had high levels of furanocourmains, and 50 percent had none. That particular signature meant something very specific, in terms of how the ability to make these substances is inherited.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.