Health

Linked media - Related media How do I know if my children have high blood-lead levels? Lead exposure can go unnoticed until levels accumulate, doctors say. High levels of lead can result in stomach pain, vomiting, fatigue, learning difficulties, developmental delays and even seizures. Pediatricians recommend blood tests for infants and toddlers who live in homes built before 1978 or have other risk factors. Medicaid programs and some states require screening, but it is not typically advised for children older than 3. While officials have said there is no safe level of lead, parents do not automatically need to worry if traces of lead show up in a child’s blood test. The average blood-lead level among young U.S. children is under 1 microgram per deciliter of blood. “I don’t think they...

Associated media - Connected 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 no...

Connected media - Associated 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 lab...

Associated media - Related 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 consume...

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...