Publisher Health

After the health secretary promoted vitamin A as a cure, parents in West Texas began giving their children high doses, sometimes to prevent infection.Doctors in West Texas are seeing measles patients whose illnesses have been complicated by an alternative therapy endorsed by vaccine skeptics including Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the health secretary.Parents in Gaines County, Texas, the center of a raging measles outbreak, have increasingly turned to supplements and unproven treatments to protect their children, many of whom are unvaccinated, against the virus.One of those supplements is vitamin A, which Mr. Kennedy has promoted as a near miraculous cure for measles. Physicians at Covenant Children’s Hospital in Lubbock, Texas, say they’ve now treated a handful of children who were given so much vitamin A that they had signs of liver damage.Some of them had received unsafe doses of supplements for several weeks in an attempt to prevent a measles infection, said Dr. Summer Davies, who cares for acutely ill children at the hospital.“I had a patient that was only sick a couple of days, four or five days, but had been taking it for like three weeks,” Dr. Davies said.While doctors sometimes administer high doses of vitamin A in a hospital to manage severe measles, experts do not recommend taking it without physician supervision. Vitamin A is not an effective way to prevent measles; however, two doses of the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine are about 97 percent effective.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 religious organization recruited him to help open New York City’s first independent abortion clinic, though it was unaware that Louisiana had taken away his license.On July 1, 1970, one of the first independent abortion clinics in the country opened on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. New York State had just reformed its laws, allowing a woman to terminate her pregnancy in the first trimester — or at any point, if her life was at risk. All of a sudden, the state had the most liberal abortion laws in the country.Women’s Services, as the clinic was first known, was overseen by an unusual team: Horace Hale Harvey III, a medical doctor with a Ph.D. in philosophy who, unbeknown to the clinic, had been performing illegal abortions in New Orleans; Barbara Pyle, a 23-year-old doctoral student in philosophy, who had been researching sex education and abortion practices in Europe; and an organization known as Clergy Consultation Service on Abortion, a group of rabbis and Protestant ministers who believed that women deserved access to safe and affordable abortions, and who had created a referral service to find and vet those who would provide them.What distinguished Women’s Services — a nonprofit that first operated out of a series of offices on East 73rd Street and charged on a sliding scale, starting at $200 — was its counselors. They were not medical professionals, but regular women, many of whom had had abortions themselves. Their role was to shepherd patients through the abortion process, using a model of a pelvis to explain the procedure in detail, accompanying the women into the procedure room and sitting with them afterward. They also reported on the doctor’s performance. It was a model that other clinics would adopt in the months and years to come.The clinic’s humane approach was in stark contrast to the attitude of many hospital personnel at the time, Jane Brody of The New York Times wrote in 1970. “Don’t make it too easy for the patient,” one administrator put it, summing up the hospital’s philosophy. “If it’s too easy, she’ll be back here in three months for another abortion.”Women’s Services had some other unique features as well. The waiting areas were cheerfully decorated, with piped-in music, and the operating tables had stirrups cushioned with brightly colored pot holders, a flourish Dr. Harvey, who died on Feb. 14, had brought with him from his days working out of hotel rooms in New Orleans.Unlike many illegal abortion providers in those pre-Roe v. Wade days, who made the process as bare-bones and speedy as possible in anticipation of a police raid, Dr. Harvey had not only softened the atmosphere of his New Orleans procedure room to make it less terrifying; he had also offered the women cookies and Coca-Cola afterward, to help them recuperate.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 assisted dying law for England and Wales could take up to four years to fully implement due to additional safeguards being adopted as the bill goes through Parliament.

The care received by 800 patients at a world-renowned NHS hospital is to be reviewed by expert clinicians after a specialist surgeon was suspended.

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President Trump has selected Susan Monarez, the acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, to lead the agency permanently.The president withdrew his first nominee, Dr. Dave Weldon, just hours before his confirmation hearing. If confirmed by the Senate, Dr. Monarez, an infectious-disease researcher, will be the first nonphysician to lead the agency in more than 50 years.“Americans have lost confidence in the C.D.C. due to political bias and disastrous mismanagement,” the president wrote on TruthSocial, adding that Dr. Monarez would work with the health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., to address the chronic disease epidemic and restore the agency’s accountability.“As an incredible mother and dedicated public servant, Dr. Monarez understands the importance of protecting our children, our communities, and our future,” Mr. Trump wrote.Dr. Monarez assumed the acting director position a few days after Mr. Trump took office in January, leaving her perch as deputy director of a new federal biomedical research agency created during the Biden administration.Dr. Monarez was expected to serve until Mr. Trump’s first choice for the job, Dr. Weldon, could be confirmed. But after Mr. Trump decided to withdraw the nomination, Republican aides in the Senate said that Dr. Weldon had failed to impress them with a plan for the 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.

The F.D.A. approved an artificial vessel to restore blood flow in patients, despite its own scientists flagging questionable study results and potentially fatal ruptures of the product.When the biotech company Humacyte designed a study to see if its lab-grown blood vessel worked, it decided to measure whether blood was flowing freely through the high-tech tube 30 days after it was implanted in a person.As those days passed, some of the 54 patients in the study ran into trouble. Doctors lost track of one. Four died. Four more had a limb amputated, including one who developed a clot and infection in the artificial vessel, Food and Drug Administration records show.Humacyte, which is traded on the Nasdaq, counted all those patients as proof of success in talks with investors and in an article in JAMA Surgery.At the F.D.A., though, scientists counted the deaths, amputations and the lost case as failures, records show, noting a lack of information to determine if the vessels were clear.Still, the agency approved the vessels in December without a public review of the study. Top officials authorized it over the concerns of staff members who said in F.D.A. records that they found the study severely lacking or were alarmed by the dire consequences for patients when the vessels fell apart.Now the company is ramping up its marketing efforts to hospitals and for use on the battlefield.When a patient’s blood vessel is damaged, doctors typically find a blood vessel from another part of the body and graft it to repair blood flow. They turn to artificial vessels when patients are too badly injured to harvest a vein.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.

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