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The mucus and hairs in your nose can trap larger particles, and the mucus and cilia in your upper airway can catch some as well, said Luke Montrose, an environmental toxicologist at Colorado State University. But some PM2.5 or smaller particles can bypass these defenses and penetrate the deepest parts of your lungs. Dr. Montrose […] More
The fever had dissipated but the six patients were having respiratory issues that were resistant to treatment and the next few hours were going to be precarious. Half the group had already crossed the line between serious and critical condition, as two of them were on oxygen and one was on life support.Meanwhile, as investigators examined the body of evidence in the case, their nexus of activity focused on the farm on Lakewood Road, where they would soon find a beautiful poison toadstool that someone had seamlessly blended in with the straw mushrooms for sale.The fever had dissipated but the six patients were having respiratory issues that were resistant to treatment and the next few hours were going to be precarious. Half the group had already crossed the line between serious and critical condition, as two of them were on oxygen and one was on life support.Meanwhile, as investigators examined the body of evidence in the case, their nexus of activity focused on the farm on Lakewood Road, where they would soon find a beautiful poison toadstool that someone had seamlessly blended in with the straw mushrooms for sale.The fever had dissipated but the six patients were having respiratory issues that were resistant to treatment and the next few hours were going to be precarious. Half the group had already crossed the line between serious and critical condition, as two of them were on oxygen and one was on life support.Meanwhile, as investigators examined the body of evidence in the case, their nexus of activity focused on the farm on Lakewood Road, where they would soon find a beautiful poison toadstool that someone had seamlessly blended in with the straw mushrooms for sale. More
The gift, made by Michael R. Bloomberg’s philanthropic organization, will also cover living expenses for some Johns Hopkins University students.A $1 billion gift from Michael Bloomberg to Johns Hopkins University, announced on Monday, will allow most students at the university’s medical school to attend free of cost and will also increase financial aid for other students in the university’s schools of nursing and public health and other graduate programs.Bloomberg Philanthropies, which oversees Mr. Bloomberg’s charitable efforts, said in a statement that the gift would ensure that “the most talented aspiring doctors representing the broadest range of socio-economic backgrounds will have the opportunity to graduate debt-free” from the university.Starting with the fall semester, Johns Hopkins will offer free tuition for medical students from families that earn less than $300,000 annually, Bloomberg Philanthropies said. The university will also pay for living expenses and other fees for students from families earning up to $175,000.Mr. Bloomberg, a former mayor of New York City and a graduate of Johns Hopkins, said in a statement that the high cost of medical school and graduate school “too often bars students from enrolling” at a crucial time when the United States faces a shortage of medical professionals.“By reducing the financial barriers to these essential fields, we can free more students to pursue careers they’re passionate about and enable them to serve more of the families and communities who need them the most,” Mr. Bloomberg said.Other universities have also been able to waive tuition for medical students in recent years. Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx did so after Ruth Gottesman, a longtime professor there, made a $1 billion donation earlier this year. In 2023, Kenneth G. Langone, a billionaire financier and a founder of Home Depot, and his wife, Elaine Langone, made a $200 million donation to the N.Y.U. Long Island School of Medicine, making tuition free for medical students.This is not the first large contribution to Johns Hopkins from Mr. Bloomberg, who routinely makes donations toward the arts, education, the environment and public health. Bloomberg Philanthropies made a $1.8 billion donation to the university in 2018 as part of an effort to ensure that undergraduate students would be accepted by the university regardless of their family’s income.Ron Daniels, the president of Johns Hopkins University, said in a statement on Monday that “removing financial barriers to individual opportunity fuels excellence, innovation and discoveries that redound to the benefit of society.”The new gift from Mr. Bloomberg will mean that nearly two-thirds of medical students who currently attend Johns Hopkins or who will enter programs at the university soon will be eligible for free tuition or both free tuition and living expenses, according to the university. Those who are eligible will soon receive updated financial aid packages.José Luis Castro, the president and chief executive of Vital Strategies, a nonprofit public health organization, said on social media that the gift to Johns Hopkins was “transformational and inspiring” and that it would “help meet the growing need for doctors and public health professionals.” More
An injection given just twice a year could herald a breakthrough in protecting the population that has the highest infection rates.Researchers and activists in the trenches of the long fight against H.I.V. got a rare piece of exciting news this week: Results from a large clinical trial in Africa showed that a twice-yearly injection of a new antiviral drug gave young women total protection from the virus.“I got cold shivers,” said Dr. Linda-Gail Bekker, an investigator in the trial of the drug, lenacapavir, describing the startling sight of a line of zeros in the data column for new infections. “After all our years of sadness, particularly over vaccines, this truly is surreal.”Yvette Raphael, the leader of a group called Advocacy for Prevention of H.I.V. and AIDS in South Africa, said it was “the best news ever.”The randomized controlled trial, called Purpose 1, was conducted in Uganda and South Africa. It tested whether the every-six-months injection of lenacapavir, made by Gilead Sciences, would provide better protection against H.I.V. infection than two other drugs in wide use in high-income countries, both daily pills.The results were so convincing that the trial was halted early at the recommendation of the independent data review committee, which said all participants should be offered the injection because it clearly provided superior protection against the virus.None of the 2,134 women in the arm of the trial who received lenacapavir contracted H.I.V. By comparison, 16 of the 1,068 women (or 1.5 percent) who took Truvada, a daily pill that has been available for more than a decade, and 39 of 2,136 women (1.8 percent) who received a newer daily pill called Descovy were infected.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
A new study adds to a large body of evidence on the effectiveness of movement for treating and preventing pain.Doctors and physical therapists have long incorporated aerobic exercise into treatment programs for lower back pain. Movement can simultaneously ease lower back pain and also strengthen the muscles that support your back. Still, many people with back pain can be hesitant to exercise.A new study, published on Wednesday in The Lancet, offers more evidence on the power of movement. The study found that a regular walking routine can be very effective for preventing the recurrence of back pain. The study focused on adults with a history of low back pain; those who walked regularly went nearly twice as long without their back pain coming back compared to the control group.The new findings are in line with a large body of existing research that has established an association between physical activity and better outcomes for back pain. A 2019 systematic review found that physical activity lowered the prevalence of back pain. And a 2017 study found that yoga worked as well as physical therapy for relieving back pain.The new study builds on this research by following patients outside a tightly controlled clinical setting. Mark Hancock, a professor of physiotherapy at Macquarie University in Australia and a senior author of the study, sought to evaluate the effectiveness of a less expensive intervention that could be easier for many people to access than in-clinic treatment.Dr. Hancock and a team of researchers targeted a relatively sedentary sample group. The researchers collected data on 701 adults who had recently recovered from an episode of low back pain. They were randomly split in two groups: one group received an individualized walking and education program, facilitated by a physiotherapist over six sessions in a six-month period. The other group did not receive any intervention. The researchers followed both groups for the next one to three years.The goal for each person in the walking group was to walk five times per week for at least 30 minutes daily — but the program was highly personalized based on age, body mass index, current activity level, time constraints and personal goals.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
The Japanese biochemist found in the 1970s that cholesterol-lowering drugs lowered the LDL, or “bad” cholesterol, level in the blood.Akira Endo, a Japanese biochemist whose research on fungi helped to lay the groundwork for widely prescribed drugs that lower a type of cholesterol that contributes to heart disease, died on June 5. He was 90.Chiba Kazuhiro, the president of Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology, where Dr. Endo was a professor emeritus, confirmed the death in a statement. The statement did not give a cause or say where he died.Cholesterol, mostly made in the liver, has important functions in the body. It is also a major contributor to coronary artery disease, a leading cause of death in the United States, Japan and many other countries.In the early 1970s, Dr. Endo grew fungi in an effort to find a natural substance that could block a crucial enzyme that is part of the production of cholesterol. Some scientists worried that doing so might threaten cholesterol’s positive functions.But by 1980, Dr. Endo’s team had found that a cholesterol-lowering drug, or statin, lowered the LDL, or “bad” cholesterol level, in the blood. And by 1987, after other researchers in the field had published additional research on statins, Merck was manufacturing the first licensed statin.Such drugs have proven effective in reducing the risk for cardiovascular disease, and millions of people in the United States and beyond now take them for high levels of LDL.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
Big chunks of the history of the Covid pandemic were rewritten over the last month or so in a way that will have terrible consequences for many years to come.Under questioning by a congressional subcommittee, top officials from the National Institutes of Health, along with Dr. Anthony Fauci, acknowledged that some key parts of the public health guidance their agencies promoted during the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic were not backed up by solid science. What’s more, inconvenient information was kept from the public — suppressed, denied or disparaged as crackpot nonsense.Remember the rule that we should all stay at least six feet apart? “It sort of just appeared,” Fauci said during a preliminary interview for the subcommittee hearing, adding that he “was not aware of any studies” that supported it. Remember the insistence that the virus was primarily spread by droplets that quickly fell to the floor? During his recent public hearing, he acknowledged that to the contrary, the virus is airborne.As for the repeated assertion that Covid originated in a “wet market” in Wuhan, China, not in an infectious diseases laboratory there, N.I.H. officials were privately expressing alarm over that lab’s lax biosafety practices and risky research. In his public testimony, Fauci conceded that even now there “has not been definitive proof one way or the other” of Covid-19’s origins.Officials didn’t just spread these dubious ideas, they also demeaned anyone who dared to question them. “Dr. Fauci Throws Cold Water on Conspiracy Theory That Coronavirus Was Created in a Chinese Lab” was one typical headline. At the hearings, it emerged that Dr. David Morens, a senior N.I.H. figure, was deleting emails that discussed pandemic origins and using his personal account so as to avoid public oversight. “We’re all smart enough to know to never have smoking guns, and if we did we wouldn’t put them in emails and if we found them we’d delete them,” he wrote to the head of a nonprofit involved in research at the Wuhan lab.I wish I could say these were all just examples of the science evolving in real time, but they actually demonstrate obstinacy, arrogance and cowardice. Instead of circling the wagons, these officials should have been responsibly and transparently informing the public to the best of their knowledge and abilities.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
The National Academies said the condition could involve up to 200 symptoms, make it difficult for people to work and last for months or years.One of the nation’s premier medical advisory organizations has weighed in on long Covid with a 265-page report that recognizes the seriousness and persistence of the condition for millions of Americans.More than four years since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, long Covid continues to damage many people’s ability to function, according to the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, a nongovernmental institution that advises federal agencies on science and medicine.“Long Covid can impact people across the life span, from children to older adults, as well as across sex, gender, racial, ethnic and other demographic groups,” it said, concluding that “long Covid is associated with a wide range of new or worsening health conditions and encompasses more than 200 symptoms involving nearly every organ system.”Here are some of the National Academies’ findings, drafted by a committee of 14 doctors and researchers:How many people have long Covid?The report cited data from 2022 suggesting that nearly 18 million adults and nearly a million children in the United States have had long Covid at some point. At the time of that survey, about 8.9 million adults and 362,000 children had the condition.Surveys showed that the prevalence of long Covid decreased in 2023 but, for unclear reasons, has risen this year. As of January, data showed nearly 7 percent of adults in the United States had long Covid.Diagnosis and consequencesThere is still no standardized way to diagnose the condition and no definitive treatments to cure it. “There is no one-size-fits-all approach to rehabilitation, and each individual will need a program tailored to their complex needs,” the National Academies said, advising that doctors should not require patients to have a positive coronavirus test to be diagnosed with long Covid.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
