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...

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...

After vowing to tackle consolidation in the health care industry, the Federal Trade Commission filed an antitrust lawsuit on Thursday that challenged the growing practice of private-equity firms backing companies that amass medical practices and dominate local markets.The suit targeted a large doctors’ group that operates anesthesia practices in several states, claiming the group and the private equity firm advising and financing it were consolidating doctors’ groups in Texas so they could raise prices and increase their profits.The agency brought the civil lawsuit in federal court against U.S. Anesthesia Partners and Welsh, Carson, Anderson & Stowe, a private-equity firm in New York.“These tactics enabled USAP and Welsh Carson to raise prices for anesthesia services — raking in tens o...

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...

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...

On the heels of an exceptionally fiery and smoky summer, two new reports released Wednesday confirmed what many Americans have been already seeing and breathing.Smoke from increasingly frequent and increasingly large fires has started to undo decades of hard-won gains in air quality, and the problem is expected to only get worse, not just in the United States but also around the world.More than two billion people were exposed to at least a day of fire-related air pollution each year between 2010 and 2019, a report from researchers in Australia found. And in the United States, wildfires have undone about 25 percent of past progress in cleaning up air pollution in states from coast to coast.“People have known that it’s becoming a bigger issue in the Western states,” said Marissa Childs, a fe...

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 more than $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 s...

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 ...

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...

At the age of 58, stuck in her house through the long nights of the coronavirus pandemic, Michelle Brennen started to spend more and more of her time thinking about the worst thing that had ever happened to her.She was 10, on summer vacation. She had been playing in the yard in Essex, Vt., and when she came inside, she found her mother standing in the archway between the kitchen and the living room, crying.“Daddy’s plane crashed,” said one of her five siblings — she has never known which one. The information did not register; she thought they meant one of her father’s model airplanes. No big deal, she thought. Just glue it back together.It was 1973, a time when adults didn’t talk to children about death. That afternoon, a neighbor took the children to the beach so they wouldn’t see news co...