Health

Most older Americans want to live at home as long as they can, but finding and affording the help they need often isn’t easy. There are severe shortages of home health aides in many parts of the country. Hiring them is costly. And most middle-class people will have to pay for home care themselves if they will need it for the long haul. Here’s a guide to locating home care for an older person.What kind of home care do you need?After a fall or surgery, some older people will need short-term care at home from a nurse or therapist to help them recover. Medicare, the federal insurance program for those 65 and over, typically pays for this kind of home health care. A nurse can make sure a wound is healing properly, for example, while a physical therapist can help a person get back on their feet ...

Five years ago, the National Institutes of Health abruptly pulled the plug on an ambitious study about the health effects of moderate drinking. The reason: The trial’s principal scientist and officials from the federal agency’s own alcohol division had solicited $60 million for the research from alcohol manufacturers, a conflict of interest and a violation of federal policy.Recently, that scientist and another colleague from the aborted study with alcohol industry ties were named to a committee preparing a report on alcohol and health that will be used to update the federal government’s guidelines on alcohol consumption.The appointments of the two men, Dr. Kenneth Mukamal and Dr. Eric Rimm, both of Harvard, have not been finalized yet, Megan Lowry, a spokeswoman for the National Academies ...

A small group of Republican senators on Friday called on President Biden to ban travel from China to protect against an outbreak of respiratory illnesses in children there, even as scientists and global and American health officials said there were no signs of a threatening new pathogen.Instead, those experts said, the evidence so far pointed to a surge of age-old infectious agents such as influenza, driven by the colder weather and China’s emergence from stringent Covid lockdowns. The World Health Organization said last week that China had shared data about its outbreak, including laboratory results from infected children, that did not show any unusual pathogens.Dr. Mandy Cohen, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, echoed that assessment on Friday. She said Amer...

There were an estimated 249 million cases of malaria around the globe last year, the World Health Organization said on Thursday, significantly more than before the Covid-19 pandemic and an increase of five million over 2021. Malaria remains a top killer of children.Those new cases were concentrated in just five countries: Pakistan, Nigeria, Uganda, Ethiopia and Papua-New Guinea. Climate change was a direct contributor in three of them, said Dr. Daniel Ngamije, who directs the W.H.O. malaria program.In July 2022, massive flooding left more than a third of Pakistan underwater and displaced 33 million people. An explosion of mosquitoes soon followed. The country reported 3.1 million confirmed cases of malaria that year, compared with 275,000 the year before, with a fivefold increase in the ra...

The rate of suicides involving guns in the United States has reached the highest level since officials began tracking it more than 50 years ago, according to a new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.The rate increased by more than 10 percent in 2022 compared with 2019, and in some racial and ethnic groups, the rise was significantly steeper, especially among Native Americans. Overall, about 27,000 of 50,000 suicides were carried out by gun in 2022.Federal researchers involved in the analysis suggested that the coronavirus pandemic might have exacerbated many of the known risk factors for suicide generally, which include social isolation, strained relationships, and drug and alcohol disorders. At the same time, outside experts noted, the increased rates also correlat...

Dr. Abraham B. Bergman, a pediatrician who was instrumental in passing a federal law to combat sudden infant death syndrome, a once misunderstood loss that caused not just parental heartbreak but guilt and blame, and who put his stamp on other enduring public health laws, died on Nov. 10 in Seattle. He was 91.The cause of his death, on a family member’s boat, was amyloid heart disease, his son Ben Bergman said.In the 1960s and early ’70s, Dr. Bergman was president of the National Foundation for Sudden Infant Death, a grass-roots group that supported parents who had lost children to what once was commonly called crib death. Although SIDS, as the syndrome became known, was the leading killer of infants less than a year old, its cause was unknown. Parents often blamed themselves, marriages br...

Ideally, such treatments can help transform the traumatic memory into one that more closely resembles ordinary sad memories. “It’s like having a block in the right place,” he said. “If I can access a memory, I know it’s a memory. I know it’s not happening to me now.”Dr. Ruth Lanius, the director of PTSD research at the University of Western Ontario who was not involved in the study, described its findings as “seminal,” both because it establishes that traumatic memories have distinct pathways and because it indicates that key mechanisms for traumatic memory may involve less-examined areas of the brain. Much research into PTSD has focused on the amygdala, the stress detection center of the brain, and the hippocampus, she said. The posterior cingulate cortex is “really involved in the relivi...

Life expectancy in the United States has begun to climb again as the threat of Covid-19 has receded, increasing by more than a year from 2021 to 2022, according to data released on Wednesday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.The rise represents a slow and partial recovery for the country, which tallied more than 1.1 million Covid deaths and lost 2.4 years in life expectancy from 2019 to 2021.But an array of other conditions continued to pose grave risks to Americans’ health. Deaths from flu, pneumonia, fetal and infant conditions and kidney disease all rose in 2022, the agency reported, partially offsetting the fall in Covid deaths.“We’re halfway back to what we lost,” said Eileen Crimmins, an expert on gerontology and demography at the University of Southern California. “B...

A Number That Sums It Up: Thousands of lives have been saved with CAR-T.CAR-T involves removing a type of white blood cell — T cells — from a patient’s blood, then genetically engineering to make proteins — chimeric antigen receptors (CAR) — which allow the T cells to attach to cancer cells and kill them. The engineered cells are then infused back into the patient’s blood.The F.D.A. has approved six commercial CAR-T products. Cancer specialists said the treatments have saved the lives of thousands of patients with blood cancers. Even if there is a causal link between the treatments and a small risk of a new blood cancer, the regulators said on Tuesday, the benefits of the treatment outweigh the risks. That sentiment was echoed by doctors involved in cancer treatment.While the hypothetical ...

France will ban smoking on beaches, near public buildings like schools and in public parks and forests next year, the French government said on Tuesday, as it unveiled plans to curb the habit by making it slightly more expensive and far less attractive, especially to younger people.“We have won battles,” Aurélien Rousseau, France’s health minister, said at a news conference in Paris. Noting that the smoking rate for 17-year-olds had already dropped to 16 percent in 2022 — down from 25 percent in 2017 — he added that “tobacco remains a major public health scourge.”The government’s plan is part of an ambitious effort to produce the first “no-tobacco generation” by 2032.While anti-smoking campaigners welcomed some of the measures announced by Mr. Rousseau, they said that lofty objective would...