Health

Surgeons in Baltimore have transplanted the heart of a genetically altered pig into a man with terminal heart disease who had no other hope for treatment, the University of Maryland Medical Center announced on Friday.It is the second such procedure performed by the surgeons. The first patient, David Bennett, 57, died two months after his transplant, but the pig heart functioned well and there were no signs of acute organ rejection, a major risk in such procedures.The second patient, Lawrence Faucette, 58, a Navy veteran and married father of two in Frederick, Md., underwent the transplant surgery on Wednesday and is “recovering well and communicating with his loved ones,” the medical center said in a statement.Mr. Faucette, who had terminal heart disease and other complicated medical condi...

On a given work day, Misra Yusuf might vaccinate a child against polio, inject a woman with a long-acting contraceptive, screen a man for tuberculosis, hang a bed net to protect a family from malaria and help dig a pit latrine. Over the past few years, she has administered some 10,000 coronavirus vaccines in her community in eastern Ethiopia. She has also spotted and snuffed out a measles outbreak.She works far more than the 40 hours her contract requires of her each week. For her labor, the Ethiopian government pays her the equivalent of $90 a month.“The payment is discouraging,” she said. “But I keep going because I value the work.”Ms. Yusuf is one in a legion of more than three million community health workers globally and is one of a small minority that are actually paid anything at al...

Nearly 500,000 people, many of them children, will keep Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Program coverage after state officials discovered major errors in their procedures for reviewing eligibility for the programs, federal officials said on Thursday.After a pandemic-era policy that guaranteed Medicaid coverage lapsed in April, states began checking to see whether tens of millions of Americans covered by the programs still qualified, removing them from the rolls if their incomes had surpassed program limits, among other reasons.Many states conducted the checks with software that automatically verified whether people were still eligible, using government databases to verify income levels. But 30 states, federal officials confirmed on Thursday, had been vetting statuses incorrectly.A...

The prestigious Lasker Awards were given on Thursday to scientists making advances in the diagnosis of eye disease, the prediction of cellular protein structure and the intricacies of the immune system. The awards, closely watched by researchers in biomedical fields, often foreshadow Nobel Prizes.The Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award was given to a team of three scientists, led by James G. Fujimoto, a professor of electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who helped invent optical coherence tomography.The technology can detect conditions like macular degeneration and diabetic retinopathy earlier than previous methods, preventing blindness. O.C.T. now is commonly used in ophthalmology offices, where the patient simply rests a chin and forehead against...

A visiting researcher at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center was startled when he read the warning from the Food and Drug Administration about a product that had been used in spine surgeries at the esteemed Manhattan hospital.The fluid, derived from umbilical cord blood, was not approved for such procedures, the agency cautioned, and its Idaho manufacturer had been cited for possible contamination problems and inadequate screening of donors, making the product potentially unsafe.Yet before that advisory, about 40 patients at the hospital had received treatment with the fluid under the direction of Dr. Roger Härtl, a senior surgeon and professor at Weill Cornell, who is also a physician for the New York Giants. The surgeries were documented in a draft study that Dr. Härtl and ...

The Biden administration, looking ahead to a possible winter surge of Covid-19, announced on Wednesday that it was reviving its program of offering Americans free coronavirus tests through the mail and would spend $600 million to buy tests from a dozen domestic manufacturers.The website for the program, covidtests.gov, will begin accepting orders on Monday, and households will receive four tests. Dawn O’Connell, the assistant secretary for preparedness and response at the Department of Health and Human Services, said the money would fund the purchase of 200 million tests to replenish the nation’s stockpile as tests are sent out.But a byproduct of the program, Ms. O’Connell said, is that it will shore up domestic manufacturing capacity in the event of another serious coronavirus surge. And ...

As oceans warm, pathogenic bacteria are turning up more frequently in northern regions, scientists say.

For $2,499, Prenuvo will try to predict your future. The company offers a roughly hourlong session of magnetic resonance imaging, or M.R.I., that scans your entire body, searching for early signs of cancer, aneurysms, liver diseases and even multiple sclerosis.In recent months, images of celebrities and influencers posing in branded scrubs in front of a glossy, cylindrical M.R.I. machine have begun to pop up on social media with notable frequency. Kim Kardashian wore slippers in the post she shared with her 364 million followers last month, writing in the caption that Prenuvo “has really saved some of my friends lives.” In May, the television host Maria Menounos said that a Prenuvo scan had alerted her to a mass that turned out to be Stage 2 pancreatic cancer.Prenuvo does not pay anyone to...

Jill Biden, the first lady, tested positive for Covid-19 on Monday. Governor Kathy Hochul of New York has announced that the state will send high-quality masks and rapid tests to school districts that request them. Already, schools in Kentucky and Texas have closed, citing widespread respiratory illness among students and staff.The coronavirus is in the air again. Literally.A steady uptick in cases since July and reports of worrisome new variants have fueled concern that the virus is poised to make a comeback this fall and winter. But in interviews, experts offered reassurances that the country will not see a return to the nightmarish scenarios of previous years.There is no evidence that any of the variants in circulation cause more severe disease or evade immunity adroitly enough to rende...

Philips Respironics has agreed to a $479 million partial settlement on claims over flaws in the company’s breathing machines that spewed gases and flecks of foam into the airways of consumers and that spawned recalls involving millions of the devices, lawyers for plaintiffs in the lawsuit announced on Thursday.As one segment of continuing class-action lawsuits over the devices, the agreement covers only monetary reimbursements to users of the devices and vendors who might have financed replacements for consumers, according to the lawyers. The economic claims amount is uncapped, which will permit other device users to apply for compensation.This tentative settlement, which is subject to federal court approval, does not address other significant claims in the plaintiffs’ cases involving pers...