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      Ann Lurie, Nurse Who Became a Prominent Philanthropist, Is Dead at 79

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      A former hippie who chafed at wealth, she married a Chicago real estate titan and, after his death, donated hundreds of millions in her adopted city and beyond.Ann Lurie, a self-described hippie who went on to become one of Chicago’s most celebrated philanthropists, in one instance giving more than $100 million to a hospital where she had once worked as a pediatric nurse, died on Monday. She was 79.Her death was announced in a statement by Northwestern University, to which Ms. Lurie, a trustee, had donated more than $60 million. The statement did not say where she died or specify a cause.An only child raised in Miami by a single mother, Ms. Lurie protested the Vietnam War while in college and planned to join the Peace Corps after she graduated. In interviews, she said she chafed at the trappings of wealth even after marrying Robert H. Lurie.Mr. Lurie had built a real estate and investment empire as a partner in Equity Group Investments, teaming up with a former fraternity brother from the University of Michigan, Sam Zell, whose portfolio came to include The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Cubs. Mr. Lurie held stakes in the Chicago Bulls and the Chicago White Sox.He died of colon cancer in 1990 at 48, leaving an estate worth $425 million. By 2007, Ms. Lurie had donated $277 million, according to The Chicago Sun-Times.In recognition of the care Mr. Lurie received at Northwestern University’s cancer center, the couple endowed the Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center of Northwestern University to expand its treatment and research capabilities.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. More

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      The Aftermath of a U.K. Cyberattack: Blood Shortages and Delayed Operations

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      Several London hospitals, still reeling from a cyberattack last week, have made an urgent plea to medical students to help stem the disruption.Several London hospitals, still under significant strain more than a week after a cyberattack crippled services, have asked medical students to volunteer to help minimize disruption, as thousands of blood samples have had to be discarded and operations postponed.The ransomware attack on Synnovis, a private firm that analyzes blood tests, has crippled services at two major National Health Service hospital trusts, Guy’s and St. Thomas’ and King’s College, which described the situation as “critical.”According to a memo leaked in recent days, several London hospitals asked medical students to volunteer for 10- to 12-hour shifts. “We urgently need volunteers to step forward and support our pathology services,” said the message, which was reported earlier by the BBC. “The ripple effect of this extremely serious incident is felt across various hospital, community and mental health services in our region.”The attack also disrupted blood transfusions, and the N.H.S. appealed to the public this week for blood donors with O-negative blood types, which can be used in transfusions for any blood type, and O-positive blood types, which is the most frequently occurring blood type, saying it could not match patients’ blood at the same frequency as usual.While the N.H.S. has declined to comment on which group was suspected of carrying out the attack, Ciaran Martin, a former head of British cybersecurity, told the BBC last week that a Russian cybercriminal group known as Qilin was most likely the perpetrator. Synnovis said last week in a statement that it was working with the British government’s National Cyber Security Center to understand what had happened.Synnovis, in an email sent Monday to primary health providers, said that thousands of blood test samples would probably have to be destroyed because of the lack of connectivity to electronic health records. In a statement on Wednesday, Synnovis said that the I.T. system had been down for too long for samples taken last week to be processed.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. More

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      How to Care for Yourself as a Caregiver

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      Forget yoga or weekend escapes. There are more realistic tools to put in place, experts say.Once a quarter, Bich Le, 52, travels from her home outside of Minneapolis to St. Augustine, Fla., where she moves into her father’s guest room for three weeks.The health care executive is one of five siblings who take turns caring for their widowed 90-year-old father, who has lung cancer and requires constant assistance. While she’s in Florida this month, she will miss her daughter’s final high school prom; she missed it last year, too, due to her caregiving duties.The drugs Ms. Le’s father takes to manage pain can “negatively impact how he treats people,” she said. When he becomes volatile, Ms. Le said, she mostly tries to ignore it and “not add to the stress of the situation.” She tells herself to “just care for him and just let it go.” But sometimes, when she’s exhausted, his temper grates.“What runs through my brain is: ‘A simple thank you would really go a long way,’” she said. “‘You have me, or you have a nursing home.’”Caregiving can be fraught for the estimated 53 million Americans who assist family members and friends. And factors like financial strain and isolation can add to psychological distress. In a 2017 survey of 1,081 caregivers conducted by AARP, 51 percent of respondents reported feeling worried or stressed. But there was a surprising upside: The majority — 91 percent — also reported feeling pleased that they were able to help.How can caregivers hold on to that feeling amid the stress, fatigue and resentment that also come with the role? There are strategies for feeling “less burdened or stressed by the daily problems” they encounter, said William Haley, a professor of aging studies at the University of South Florida.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. More

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      Patient Dies Weeks After Kidney Transplant From Genetically Modified Pig

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      Richard Slayman received the historic procedure in March. The hospital said it had “no indication” his death was related to the transplant.Richard “Rick” Slayman, who made history at age 62 as the first person to receive a kidney from a genetically modified pig, has died about two months after the procedure.Massachusetts General Hospital, where Mr. Slayman had the operation, said in a statement on Saturday that its transplant team was “deeply saddened” at his death. The hospital said it had “no indication that it was the result of his recent transplant.”Mr. Slayman, who was Black, had end-stage kidney disease, a condition that affects more than 800,000 people in the United States, according to the federal government, with disproportionately higher rates among Black people.Surgeons performing the world’s first kidney transplant from a genetically modified pig into a living human in March.Michelle Rose/Massachusetts General Hospital, via Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThere are far too few kidneys available for donation. Nearly 90,000 people are on the national waiting list for a kidney.Mr. Slayman, a supervisor for the state transportation department from Weymouth, Mass., had received a human kidney in 2018. When it began to fail in 2023 and he developed congestive heart failure, his doctors suggested he try one from a modified pig.“I saw it not only as a way to help me, but a way to provide hope for the thousands of people who need a transplant to survive,” he said in a hospital news release in March.His surgery, which lasted four hours, was a medical milestone. For decades, proponents of so-called xenotransplantation have proposed replacing ailing human organs with those from animals. The main problem with the approach is the human immune system, which rejects animal tissue as foreign, often leading to serious complications.Recent advances in genetic engineering have allowed researchers to tweak the genes of the animal organs to make them more compatible with their recipients.The pig kidney that was transplanted into Mr. Slayman was engineered by eGenesis, a biotech company based in Cambridge, Mass. Scientists there removed three genes and added seven others to improve compatibility. The company also inactivated retroviruses that pigs carry and could be harmful to humans.“Mr. Slayman was a true pioneer,” eGenesis said in a statement on social media on Saturday. “His courage has helped to forge a path forward for current and future patients suffering from kidney failure.”Mr. Slayman was discharged from the hospital two weeks after his surgery, with “one of the cleanest bills of health I’ve had in a long time,” he said at the time.In a statement published by the hospital, Mr. Slayman’s family said he was kind, quick-witted and “fiercely dedicated to his family, friends and co-workers.” They said they had taken great comfort in knowing that his case had inspired so many people.“Millions of people worldwide have come to know Rick’s story,” they said in the statement. “We felt — and still feel — comforted by the optimism he provided patients desperately waiting for a transplant.” More

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      Witnesses Describe Fear and Deprivation at Besieged Hospital in Gaza

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      More than a dozen patients have died as a result of the prolonged Israeli military assault against the Al-Shifa hospital complex, the Gazan authorities say.Seven days after Israel’s military began a raid on the Gaza Strip’s largest hospital, Al-Shifa, a picture of the sustained assault on the complex and its surrounding neighborhood emerges in fragments.Residents nearby described a relentless daily soundtrack of gunshots, airstrikes and explosions. A surgeon spoke of doctors and patients corralled in the emergency ward while Israeli forces took control of the complex outside. A Palestinian teenager who spent four days sheltering in the hospital described the bodies she saw piled up outside the entrance.“They had put the bodies on the side and thrown blankets over them,” said Alaa Abu Al-Kaaf, 18, who said she and her family were at Al-Shifa for days before leaving on Thursday. It was not immediately clear when or how the bodies were brought there.Interviews with other witnesses in the hospital, residents in or near the facility and the Gazan authorities in recent days, as well as with others who have left the complex over the past week, described a situation of fear and deprivation, interrogations and detentions of Palestinian men by Israeli forces, and a persistent lack of food and water.The assault on Al-Shifa, one of Israel’s longest hospital raids of the war in Gaza, began on Monday with tanks, bulldozers and airstrikes. The military said it was aimed at senior officials of Hamas, the armed group that led an attack into southern Israel on Oct. 7. Israel began a war on Gaza in response to that assault, with intense aerial bombardments and a ground offensive.A woman in the Gaza Strip on Thursday after fleeing the Al-Shifa medical complex.Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesWe 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. More

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      Gang Violence Pushes Haiti’s Health System to the Brink of Collapse

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      Many hospitals in Haiti’s capital have been looted by gangs or abandoned by their staffs amid the violence. Some are open, but too dangerous for people in need of care to reach.Taïna Cenatus, a 29-year-old culinary student in Haiti, lost her balance at school one day this month and toppled over, but it was not until she hit the ground that she realized she had been hit in the face by a stray bullet.It left a small hole in her cheek, just missing her jawbone and teeth.Unlike many Haitians wounded by gunfire in the middle of a vicious gang takeover of the capital, Port-au-Prince, Ms. Cenatus was actually lucky that day — she made it to a clinic. But she is still in pain, her wound swelling, and she cannot get any relief, with more and more hospitals and clinics abandoned by staff or looted by gangs.“My teeth hurt,” she said. “I can feel something is wrong.”A gang assault on Haiti’s capital has left an already weak health care system in tatters.More than half of the medical facilities in Port-au-Prince and a large rural region called Artibonite are closed or not operating at full capacity, experts said, because they are too dangerous to reach or their medicine and other supplies have been stolen.In a country where the United Nations estimates that up to one million people are facing the threat of famine, the unraveling of the medical infrastructure threatens to put thousands more lives at risk.Even in periods of less upheaval, the public health system was already in shambles, but now hospitals run by humanitarian groups and churches that many Haitians depend on are closing one by one.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. More

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      A UnitedHealthcare and Mount Sinai Dispute May Force Thousands to Switch Doctors

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      As Mount Sinai Hospital and UnitedHealthcare haggle over pay rates, patients may have to pay out-of-network prices if they want to keep their doctors.Stalled contract negotiations between UnitedHealthcare, the health insurance giant, and Mount Sinai Health System, a leading New York City hospital system, are forcing tens of thousands of New Yorkers to switch doctors or risk paying out-of-network prices.The impasse has dragged on for months. Mount Sinai has sought to raise prices significantly, but the insurance company has refused to agree to pay the new proposed rates. As a result, Mount Sinai’s hospitals are now out of network for patients insured by UnitedHealthcare or Oxford, which are subsidiaries of the same company. But the issue is about to become even more urgent for many patients because many Mount Sinai affiliated doctors — in addition to the hospitals themselves — are about to be removed from UnitedHealthcare’s network, starting March 22. That means patients with United who have employer-sponsored or individual plans will be billed out-of-network rates when they see a Mount Sinai affiliated doctor at a doctor’s office.The negotiations have sent many patients scrambling to find new doctors. UnitedHealthcare says about 80,000 Mount Sinai patients are affected.What Happened?The dispute between the insurance giant and the hospital system is a rare instance in which health care contract negotiations have spilled into public view.Mount Sinai sought to negotiate better rates with UnitedHealthcare, demanding that the insurance giant pay the hospital more for doctor visits and hospital stays. United claims Mount Sinai was asking for rates to go up some 58 percent over the next four years.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. More

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      Overwhelmed by War, Another Gazan Hospital Is Declared ‘Not Functional’

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      Conditions at Nasser Hospital in the southern Gaza Strip were described as desperate after Israeli forces raided it in search of Hamas militants.The largest medical facility still managing to function in wartime Gaza is now a hospital in little more than name only, the head of the World Health Organization said on Sunday.After a week of siege by the Israeli military, there are only about 20 critically ill patients left at Nasser Hospital — but even that is too many for it to handle, said Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the W.H.O. director general.“Nasser hospital in Gaza is not functional anymore,” Dr. Tedros said on social media.Dr. Tedros said on Sunday that some 200 patients remained at the hospital in Khan Younis, in the southern Gaza Strip, and that about 20 of them urgently needed to be transferred elsewhere. “The cost of delays will be paid by patients’ lives,” he said.Israel has justified its military actions at the hospital by saying that Hamas militants have been using it and other medical centers to conceal military activities, and on Sunday it said it had found both weapons and Hamas militants at the Nasser complex.Hamas has repeatedly denied using hospitals as cover.On Thursday, after days of repeated orders for the thousands of civilians taking shelter at the hospital to leave, Israeli forces began staging a raid.Asked about the W.H.O. statement, a spokesman for the Israeli military, Lt. Col. Richard Hecht, said in a briefing that “it’s in our best interest that the hospital keeps functioning.” He said that work was being done to fix a broken generator there and that a temporary generator was in use.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. More