WASHINGTON — A federal judge on Monday blocked an effort by the Trump administration to erase protections for transgender patients against discrimination by doctors, hospitals and health insurance companies, dealing a blow to the broader legal reasoning it has used to try to roll back transgender rights across the government. Judge Frederic Block of the…
Here’s what you need to know: ImageAn elementary school classroom in Royal City, Wash., last week. Officials around the world are facing the challenges of educating during the pandemic.Credit…Ruth Fremson/The New York Times Around the world, education officials move on with plans despite fears and outbreaks. As teachers and students look ahead to the start…
We’ve known from the beginning how the end will arrive. Eventually, the coronavirus will be unable to find enough susceptible hosts to survive, fading out wherever it briefly emerges. To achieve so-called herd immunity — the point at which the virus can no longer spread widely because there are not enough vulnerable humans — scientists…
Wearing bifocal contact lenses may slow the progression of nearsightedness in children, a new study in JAMA suggests. Researchers randomly assigned 294 myopic children, average age 10, to one of three groups: the first wore high-power bifocal contact lenses, the second medium-power bifocal lenses and the third regular single-vision contacts. The researchers gave them eye…
An emergency room doctor in Illinois was accused in April of profiting from naming coronavirus as the cause of a patient’s death, a rumor spreading online. An internist in New York treated a vomiting patient in May who drank a bleach mixture as part of a fake virus cure found on YouTube. And in June…
The shutdowns and fears provoked by the Covid-19 pandemic threw a monkey wrench into many aspects of routine medical care, especially for older people justifiably wary about being exposed to the virus in a medical setting. While many facilities have now created “safe spaces” to resume in-person exams, some of the resulting postponements of routine…
So how are you sleeping these days? Some children — and adolescents — may actually be getting more sleep, or better sleep, while others are struggling with disrupted routines, anxiety and electronics, sometimes all at the same time. And even for those who have settled into new schedules that leave them reasonably well rested, back-to-school…
Opioid use, particularly in high doses, can cause deafness, according to Rutgers researchers. The study, published in The Journal of Medical Toxicology, reviewed records from the New Jersey Poison Control Center, based at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School, from 1999 to 2018 to determine the association between opioid use and degrees of hearing loss. Researchers…
Mild cases of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) can trigger robust memory T cell responses, even in the absence of detectable virus-specific antibody responses, researchers report August 14 in the journal Cell. The authors say that memory T cell responses generated by natural exposure to or infection with severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2)–the virus…
Researchers at Harvard Medical School, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Northwestern University have identified a subtype of autism arising from a cluster of genes that regulate cholesterol metabolism and brain development. The researchers say their findings, published Aug. 10 in Nature Medicine, can inform both the design of precision-targeted therapies for this specific form of…