President Trump has selected Susan Monarez, the acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, to lead the agency permanently. The president withdrew his first nominee, Dr. Dave Weldon, just hours before his confirmation hearing. If confirmed by the Senate, Dr. Monarez, an infectious-disease researcher, will be the first nonphysician to lead the…
When the biotech company Humacyte designed a study to see if its lab-grown blood vessel worked, it decided to measure whether blood was flowing freely through the high-tech tube 30 days after it was implanted in a person. As those days passed, some of the 54 patients in the study ran into trouble. Doctors lost…
A week after Donald J. Trump was inaugurated, a senior scientist at the National Institutes of Health was preparing to give an invited talk at a scientific meeting when an urgent call came in from an administrative assistant. There is a total communications ban, the scientist was told, and you cannot give the speech. As…
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nation’s health secretary, on Saturday instructed leaders of the nonprofit he founded to take down a web page that mimicked the design of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s site but laid out a case that vaccines cause autism. The page had been published on a site apparently registered…
Late in February, as the Trump administration ramped up its quest to transform the federal government, a psychiatrist who treats veterans was directed to her new workstation — and was incredulous. She was required, under a new return-to-office policy, to conduct virtual psychotherapy with her patients from one of 13 cubicles in a large open…
Kitty Dukakis, an activist first lady of Massachusetts and humanitarian who overcame alcoholism and depression with the help of electroconvulsive therapy, then became a proponent of the treatment with her husband, Michael S. Dukakis, the former Massachusetts governor and the 1988 Democratic presidential nominee, died on Friday night at her home in Brookline, Mass. She…
Joan Presky worries about dementia. Her mother lived with Alzheimer’s disease for 14 years, the last seven in a memory-care residence, and her maternal grandfather developed dementia, too. “I’m 100 percent convinced that this is in my future,” said Ms. Presky, 70, a retired attorney in Thornton, Colo. Last year, she spent almost a full…
The Food and Drug Administration said on Thursday that it would delay by 30 months a requirement that food companies and grocers rapidly trace contaminated food through the supply chain and pull it off the shelves. Intended to “limit food-borne illness and death,” the rule required companies and individuals to maintain better records to identify…
Dr. Joe Whittington, 47, has been an emergency room physician for two decades, but he can still find it tough to quiet his mind after leaving the hospital. As he tried to doze off after one particularly chaotic shift, he kept thinking about a victim of a motorcycle crash whose vital signs had tanked, a…
During his first term, President Donald J. Trump unveiled a bold initiative to end the H.I.V. epidemic in the United States by 2030 by focusing on 57 jurisdictions with the most urgent needs. The plan, which Mr. Trump announced in 2019 at a State of the Union address, surprised advocacy groups. But it was widely…