Health

Sam and Olga had concluded that only involuntary treatment could break the cycle for Andrey — something open-ended, combining long-term injectable medications with intensive therapy and counseling.They are part of a much larger ideological shift taking place, as communities grope for ways to manage ballooning homeless populations. California, one of the first states to turn away from involuntary treatment, has passed new laws expanding it. New York has made a billion-dollar investment in residential housing, psychiatric beds and wraparound services.Sam had staked his hopes on Washington’s new involuntary treatment law, and found it maddening that this fall, when Andrey was released, the new system was not yet active. His frustration was often directed toward civil rights advocates who oppo...

Cellphones can track what we say and write, where we go, what we buy and what we search on the internet. But they still aren’t being used to track one of the biggest public health threats: crashes caused by drivers distracted by the phones.More than a decade after federal and state governments seized on the dangers that cellphone use while driving posed and began enacting laws to stop it, there remains no definitive database of the number of crashes or fatalities caused by cellphone distraction. Safety experts say that current estimates most likely understate a worsening problem.The absence of clear data comes as collisions are rising. Car crashes recorded by the police rose 16 percent from 2020 to 2021, to 16,700 a day from 14,400 a day, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Ad...

The planned execution of a death row inmate by the state of Alabama on Thursday evening will be carried out by a procedure that has never been used for capital punishment in the United States. The inmate, Kenneth Smith, who was convicted in a 1988 stabbing murder, will be put to death by inhaling nitrogen gas, a method known as nitrogen hypoxia.Supporters of the method say it is fast and painless. But earlier this month, the United Nations Human Rights Office urged Alabama to stop the execution, saying it could amount to torture and be in violation of human rights treaties that the United States has agreed to.Alabama would be the first state to use nitrogen hypoxia, but other states are interested in employing the method.What is nitrogen hypoxia?Hypoxia is a medical term for a state of ins...

The Food and Drug Administration is requiring companies that make specialized cancer therapies known as CAR-T to add a boxed warning that the treatments themselves may cause cancers.The agency noted that the benefits still outweighed the risks of the therapy, which involves removing a type of white blood cells — T cells — and then genetically engineering them to create proteins called chimeric antigen receptors (CAR). Infused back into a patient’s blood, the engineered cells allow the T cells to attach to cancer cells and kill them.But the therapies, which mostly treat blood cancers, including multiple myeloma, had already carried a warning for dangerous immune responses and for neurological risks. And the new warning follows reports of about 25 cases of secondary cancers that federal heal...

“Were you burned out,” I asked.Her face was flat. “I still am,” she said. “Yeah. Yes, and I still am.” Worcester is famous for the snow dumps it receives in the winter. It has something to do with where the city is in relation to the Appalachian Mountains. The clouds bear down when the temperature drops, and then the snow is relentless and the weather is brutal. All winter, it’s brutal, brutal, brutal, and then somehow, slowly, it’s not anymore. That’s kind of how the end of W.P.I.’s crisis arrived. No one I spoke to could quite explain how they knew that the emergency had subsided; the most they could be sure of was that, one moment in the spring of 2022, they felt intuitively that the last death was behind them. Between the summer 2021 and winter 2022, the faculty existed in a state of s...

Last Thanksgiving, Cynthia Mosson had been on her feet all day in her kitchen in Frankfort, Ind., preparing dinner for nine. She was nearly finished — the ham in the oven, the dressing made — when she suddenly felt the need to sit down.“I started hurting in my left shoulder,” said Ms. Mosson, 61. “It got really intense, and it started to go down my left arm.” She grew sweaty and pale and told her family, “I think I’m having a heart attack.”An ambulance sped her to a hospital where doctors confirmed that she had suffered a mild heart attack. They said testing revealed serious blockages in all her coronary arteries and told her, “You’re going to need open-heart surgery,” Ms. Mosson recalled.When such patients head into an operating room, what happens next has a lot to do with their sex, a re...

For decades, Uganda’s campaign against H.I.V. was exemplary, slashing the country’s death rate by nearly 90 percent from 1990 to 2019. Now a sweeping law enacted last year, the Anti-Homosexuality Act, threatens to renew the epidemic as L.G.B.T.Q. citizens are denied, or are too afraid to seek out, necessary medical care.The law criminalizes consensual sex between same-sex adults. It also requires all citizens to report anyone suspected of such activity, a mandate that makes no exceptions for health care providers tending to patients.Under the law, merely having same-sex relationships while living with H.I.V. can incur a charge of “aggravated homosexuality,” which is punishable by death.Anyone who “knowingly promotes homosexuality” — by hiring or housing an L.G.B.T.Q. person, or by not repo...

Florida’s plan to save money by importing medications from Canada, authorized this month by the Food and Drug Administration, has renewed attention on the cost of prescription drugs in the United States.Research has consistently found that drug prices in America are significantly higher than those in other wealthy countries. In 2018, they were nearly double those in France and Britain, even when accounting for the discounts that can substantially reduce how much American health plans and employers pay.“The U.S. market is the bank for pharmaceutical companies,” said Ameet Sarpatwari, an expert in pharmaceutical policy at Harvard Medical School. “There’s a keen sense that the best place to try to extract profits is the U.S. because of its existing system and its dysfunction.”Here are six rea...

There is a problem with the recently approved Alzheimer’s drug, Aduhelm. It can remove some of the amyloid that forms brain plaques that are hallmarks of the disease. But most of the drug is wasted because it hits an obstacle, the blood-brain barrier, that protects the brain from toxins and infections but also prevents many drugs from entering.Researchers wondered if they could improve that grim result by trying something different: they would open the blood-brain barrier for a short time while they delivered the drug. Their experimental method was to use highly focused pulses of ultrasound along with tiny gas bubbles to pry the barrier open without destroying it.The investigators, at the Rockefeller Neuroscience Institute at West Virginia University, reported their results last week in Th...

The Quaker Oats Company added more products this week to a recall that started last month over possible salmonella contamination, raising the total number of products to more than 60.Quaker Oats, which is owned by PepsiCo, initially recalled 43 products, including granola bars, cereals and various snack foods. On Thursday, the company added 24 products to the list.The newly recalled items include Quaker Chewy Granola Bars, Gatorade protein bars, Cap’n Crunch bars, Quaker Simply Granola Cereals, Gamesa Marias Cereal and other cereals.“To date, Quaker has received no confirmed reports of illness related to the products covered by this recall,” the U.S. Food and Drug Administration said in December. It is unclear if any illnesses have been reported since then.It was not immediately clear how ...