Health

Associated media - Linked media When she focused on the bequest, she realized immediately what she wanted to do, she recalled. “I wanted to fund students at Einstein so that they would receive free tuition,” she said. There was enough money to do that in perpetuity, she said. Over the years, she had interviewed dozens of prospective Einstein medical students. Tuition is more than $59,000 a year, and many graduated with crushing medical school debt. According to the school, nearly 50 percent of its students owed more than $200,000 after graduating. At most other New York City medical schools, less than 25 percent of new doctors owed that much. Almost half of Einstein’s first-year medical students are New Yorkers, and nearly 60 percent are women. About 48 percent of current medical stu...

Connected media - Linked media “What we really need is an evolving, specialized recycling infrastructure alongside the big five — paper, glass, plastic, metal and cardboard,” said Mitch Ratcliffe, publisher of the website Earth911. “That conversation is really picking up steam in some particular categories, but not in medical equipment at all.” A few designers and companies are exploring alternatives that are more reusable or safer for the environment. Inhalers The inhalers that many people use for treatment of asthma or other respiratory ailments contain potentially recyclable materials. But those with leftover medication or propellants may also be hazardous if incinerated or compacted. The steel or aluminum canisters containing the medication should generally be returned to a pharm...

Linked media - Connected media Gay and bisexual men are using condoms less than ever, and the decline has been particularly steep among those who are young or Hispanic, according to a new study. The worrisome trend points to an urgent need for better prevention strategies as the nation struggles to beat the H.I.V. epidemic, researchers said. Over the past decade, prevention medication known as PrEP has helped fuel a moderate drop in H.I.V. rates. And yet, despite persistent public health campaigns promoting the drugs, they have not been adopted in substantial numbers by Black and Hispanic men who are gay or bisexual. The use of condoms, which prevent H.I.V. as well as other sexually transmitted infections, has been declining across the board in recent years, not just among ...

Related media - Linked media Updated on Feb. 27 to include new company statements. A cyberattack on a unit affiliated with UnitedHealthcare, the nation’s largest insurer, has disrupted drug prescription orders at thousands of pharmacies for about a week. The assault on the unit, Change Healthcare, a division of United’s Optum, was discovered last Wednesday. The attack appeared to be by a foreign country, according to two senior federal law enforcement officials, who expressed alarm at the extent of the disruption on Monday. UnitedHealth Group, the conglomerate, said in a federal filing that it had been forced to disconnect some of Change Healthcare’s vast digital network from its clients, and as of Tuesday, had not been able to restore all of those services. The company has not prov...

Linked media - Related media At the Kawasaki Disease Clinic at Rady Children’s Hospital-San Diego, led by Dr. Burns, caring for children affected by Kawasaki disease is always linked to the search for the cause. On a recent Wednesday morning, Dr. Kirsten Dummer, a pediatric cardiologist, was examining the heart scans of a 2-year-old who showed signs of a large aneurysm on the right side of the heart. “The biggest question from parents is: How did this happen? How did my child get this? In every patient room, that’s what they fundamentally want to know,” she said. “Year after year after year, they come back and ask us, ‘Do you guys know more yet?’” Dr. Burns, who has continued to see patients herself, said those inquiries motivated her. “If we were all Ph.D.s in the laborator...

Related media - Connected media “My account on Meta is forever banned from making any advertising after I posted once under our company’s page about our CBD products and it was flagged,” said Clarice Coppolino, head of branding and product development for Vital Leaf, which makes CBD chocolate, skin care and tinctures. The Covid-19 pandemic also took a toll on the industry. While sales in the early weeks and months of the pandemic soared as nervous consumers sought relief through CBD-infused products, the interest among large companies and investors fell off. “Covid clearly shifted consumer packaged goods companies away from the CBD space and what was possible there to focusing on simply meeting food demand,” said Carmen Brace, a consultant who worked with companies that sell consumer...

The drug company Atai Life Sciences is spending millions to research the compound, and congressional lawmakers from both parties have been pushing the government to promote ibogaine research for substance abuse, post-traumatic stress disorder and other mental health problems.For Dr. Deborah Mash, a professor of neurology at the University of Miami who began studying ibogaine in the early 1990s, the soaring interest is a vindication of her belief that the compound could help ameliorate the opioid crisis. “Ibogaine is not a silver bullet, and it won’t work for everybody, but it’s the most powerful addiction interrupter I’ve ever seen,” she said.Researchers have also been studying ibogaine’s ability to treat other difficult mental health problems. A small study published earlier this year in ...

As I.V.F. grew in popularity, so did the concerns of its opponents. Standard practice involves creating multiple embryos, which are screened for genetic abnormalities, and the ones that appear healthiest can be transferred. Extra embryos are often frozen; by one count, there are a million and a half frozen embryos in the United States. After a designated time period, they may be donated to science or destroyed, just as the Catholic Church feared.The anti-abortion movement won a partial victory for protecting life at conception in 2001, when President George W. Bush banned the use of federal funds for embryonic stem cell research, but President Barack Obama reversed the policy eight years later.Starting in the late 2000s, voters rejected ballot initiatives to enshrine fetal personhood in at...