Spanish doctors announce world first in fetal surgery

Spanish doctors said Tuesday they have carried out the world's first successful operation on a fetus to unclog a blocked bronchial tube.
Doctors from two Barcelona hospitals -- Clinic and Joan de Deu -- introduced an endoscopy through the mouth of the fetus to clear the right bronchi, the air tube leading from the trachea to the lungs, and reconnect it with the central airways.
"It is the first time in the world that this has been achieved. It is the first time that it has been tried and it turned out well," said the head of the maternal-fetal medicine department at Hospital Clinic, Eduard

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Vaginal birth after C-section carries more risks: study

Women who had a Cesarean section for their first child's birth face more health risks if they attempt a vaginal birth with their second, Australian researchers said Tuesday.
The study included more than 2,300 women at 14 hospitals in Australia who were preparing for their second child. About half signed up for a vaginal birth after C-section, or VBAC, and the other half chose to repeat the surgery.
Women who planned a repeat C-section had a significantly lower rate of complications than women who chose to deliver vaginally the second time -- 2.4 percent risk of death or serious complication

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With Small-Picture Approach, A.C.O.’s Gain in Health Care

Steve Kagan for The New York Times
CHICAGO Gwlie Lloyd, a nurse and care manager, and Dr. Steven Wolf at an Advocate Health clinic. Advocate is one of the nation’s first accountable care organizations.

CHICAGO — Even as she struggled to manage her Type 2 diabetes, Fannie Cline’s condition spiraled downward. It was not uncommon for Mrs. Cline, a 69-year-old retiree, to have dizzy spells, some so bad that they landed her in a hospital emergency room near her home here on the South Side.
But last May, she began to receive extra attention from Gwlie Lloyd, a registered nurse and care

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Books: ‘Blue Water, White Water’ Review - Sleepless and in Pain, a Patient Watched

Just when it seems long past time for the age of memoir to be over — just when it seems impossible that any ailing person with literary inclinations could find anything new to say about illness, and the list of not-to-be-missed “patients are people too” books should be closed and locked — yet another book comes along.

And despite all the above, no one with even a passing interest in the experience of illness should miss Robert C. Samuels’s “Blue Water, White Water,” a memoir drafted about 30 years ago and published without fanfare a few months ago; it stands head and shoulders

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The Mystery of 18 Twitching Teenagers in Le Roy

Gillian Laub for The New York Times
Lydia Parker, foreground, at home with her sister. She got one of the bruises on her face when an uncontrollable tic caused her to hit herself with her cellphone.

Before the media vans took over Main Street, before the environmental testers came to dig at the soil, before the doctor came to take blood, before strangers started knocking on doors and asking question after question, Katie Krautwurst, a high-school cheerleader from Le Roy, N.Y., woke up from a nap. Instantly, she knew something was wrong. Her chin was jutting forward uncontrollably and her

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America Is Stealing the World’s Doctors

It was not an unusual death. Kunj Desai, a young doctor in training at University Teaching Hospital in Lusaka, Zambia, had seen many that were not so different and were equally needless. Still, this was the one that altered all his plans. “A guy came in, and he had a stab wound,” Desai recalled, “and his intestines got injured.” The operation was delayed, and the wound became infected. “Whatever he was eating would come out of his belly,” Desai said. A carefully managed diet would have helped the man heal, but there were no dietitians at the hospital nor any IV drips of liquid

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The Bay Citizen: As Uninsured Go Without, California Health Districts Hold Reserves

Lianne Milton for The Bay Citizen
At San Mateo Medical Center, patients face a lengthy wait list in order to receive health care subsidized by the county.

When Roron Chen went to a public clinic to try to see a doctor, she was put on the waiting list at the San Mateo Medical Center. A California state law requires counties to provide health care to people like Ms. Chen who cannot afford health insurance and have no other alternatives.

Ms. Chen, a homemaker from San Mateo whose husband lost his job three years ago, had to wait nearly a year to see a doctor through the program. Like

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Your Money: Why the Web Lacks Authoritative Reviews of Doctors

For all the debate about which Web sites have the best model for reliable reviews — paid or unpaid, anonymous or real name, Angie’s List or Yelp or TripAdvisor — one thing is certain: a robust ecosystem exists online for restaurant and hotel reviews that has changed those industries for the better.

So it is puzzling that there is no such authoritative collection of reviews for physicians, the highest-stakes choice of service provider that most people make.
Sure, various Web sites like HealthGrades and RateMDs have taken their shots, and Yelp and Angie’s List have made a go of it,

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The Texas Tribune: Texas Limits Are Squeezing the Elderly Poor and Their Doctors

Reynaldo Leal for The Texas Tribune
Texas has cut its share of co-payments for such patients, and Dr. Javier Saenz's practice is suffering.

After Dr. Javier Saenz completed his family-medicine residency in 1985, he returned home to the Rio Grande Valley to open a practice in the impoverished town of La Joya.



Expanded coverage of Texas is produced by The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit news organization. To join the conversation about this article, go to texastribune.org.








Reynaldo Leal for The Texas Tribune
Half of the patients seen by Dr. Saenz, right, qualify for Medicare and

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Texas Women’s Clinics Retreat as Finances Are Cut

Eddie Seal for The New York Times
Rosario Espriella and her children at Planned Parenthood in Edinburg, Tex. The agency has closed four clinics in the county.

Leticia Parra, a mother of five scraping by on income from her husband’s sporadic construction jobs, relied on the Planned Parenthood clinic in San Carlos, an impoverished town in South Texas, for breast cancer screenings, free birth control pills and pap smears for cervical cancer.

But the clinic closed in October, along with more than a dozen others in the state, after financing for women’s health was slashed by

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Retirees Are Using Education to Exercise an Aging Brain

Ed Smith
ACTIVE A Learning in Retirement flower class.

MORE and more retired people are heading back to the nearest classroom — as students and, in some cases, teachers — and they are finding out that school can be lovelier the second time around. Some may be thinking of second careers, but most just want to keep their minds stimulated, learn something new or catch up with a subject they were always curious about but never had time for.

For many, at least part of the motivation is based on widespread reports that exercising the brain may preserve it, forestalling mental decline and

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Melanoma Leads Idaho to Consider Limit on Tanning Salons

Jim Wilson/The New York Times
Shenandoah Hinton, 15, pitched in last week at Sage Springs Ranch in Guffey, Idaho, where Jan Gerdes, right, raises sheep and designs sun-shielding hats.

GUFFEY, Idaho — There is no tanning salon in this brittle bend of the Snake River, no unlimited monthly Titanium package for $39.99, no interest in getting any more ultraviolet light than necessary during a day spent working the dry canyon lands beneath the big, bright sun.

“We’re not really into that,” said Shenandoah Hinton, 15, on her way to rake stalls on the Sage Springs Ranch, where she will

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Christopher Lyles, Got Synthetic Trachea, Dies at 30

Christopher Lyles, whose cancerous windpipe was swapped in November for a synthetic one seeded with his own cells in only the second operation of its kind, died on Monday in a Baltimore hospital. He was 30 and lived in Abingdon, Md.

His death was announced by his family on the Web site of HelpHopeLive, an organization that helps patients and families facing transplantation or dealing with catastrophic injury. The family did not disclose the cause of death.
Dr. Paolo Macchiarini, a surgeon and a leader in the field of tissue engineering who performed the windpipe surgery on Mr. Lyles in

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Mice study reveals Alzheimer's antibodies

British scientists have discovered a type of antibody in mice that blocks a hallmark of Alzheimer's disease, offering a potential new route to treatment, according to research published on Tuesday.
The antibodies shut down a protein called Dkk1 that in turn stops the formation of amyloid plaque in the brain, a key factor in the progression of Alzheimer's, said the findings in the Journal of Neuroscience.
When this plaque builds up, it leads to a loss of connection between neurons, known as synapses, in the part of the brain known as the hippocampus which handles learning and memory.
"These

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Boss of French implant firm jailed after failing to pay bail

The founder of the French breast implant company at the heart of a global health scare was jailed on Tuesday after failing to pay his bail, a source said.
Jean-Claude Mas, 72, was jailed at Marseille's Baumette prison, the source said requesting anonymity.
In January he was charged with causing "involuntary injuries" but released on a 100,000-euro (131,000-dollar) bail.
Mas is the founder of Poly Implant Prothese (PIP), which shut down in 2010 after it was revealed to have been using substandard, industrial-grade silicone gel. More than 400,000 women around the world are believed to have

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Amateur Biologists Are New Fear in Making a Mutant Flu Virus

Na Son Nguyen/Associated Press
WORRY An outbreak of the H5N1 bird flu virus was reported in Vietnam in February.

Just how easy is it to make a deadly virus?

This disturbing question has been on the minds of many scientists recently, thanks to a pair of controversial experiments in which the H5N1 bird flu virus was transformed into mutant forms that spread among mammals.
After months of intense worldwide debate, a panel of scientists brought together by the World Health Organization recommended last week in favor of publishing the results. There is no word on exactly when those papers —

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Essay: For Doctors, Luck Can Explain What They Themselves Cannot

The hospital I work at has no 13th floor.
The absence can be a bit awkward to explain to people. I mean, here sits a building at the center of the modern evidence-based scientific empire. Yet as soon as we set foot in the elevator, it is clear that we have decided to hedge our bets a little, and play the dark side too.
This odd coupling of bullet-train rationality and primal superstition actually is quite common in science. I once worked for an investigator, the most methodical, robotic person I ever have known, who insisted on pointing all of the lab’s workbenches toward the sun for good

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Sitaras Fitness, Where Business Titans Work Out

Michael Falco for The New York Times
John Sitaras, third from left, runs a Manhattan gym that attracts top executives. Members include, from left, James D. Robinson III, Sandra Navidi, George Soros, Fred Adler and Larry Neubauer.

THERE’S a place on East 58th Street in Manhattan, with no outdoor sign, where George Soros, David Geffen, Paul Volcker, Jules Kroll and other big names in the business and financial world are regulars.

And it’s not some exclusive private dining room or mahogany-lined boardroom. It’s Sitaras Fitness, which has quietly attracted the upper echelons of Wall

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In New Jersey, a Battle Over Fluoridation, and the Facts

For all its renown as an engine of pharmaceutical and biotechnology progress, New Jersey has long lagged in what public health officials call one of the 10 biggest health advances of the last century: fluoridating its water.

While 72 percent of Americans get their water from public systems that add fluoride, just 14 percent of New Jersey residents do, placing the state next to last, ahead of only Hawaii, and far behind nearby New York (72 percent), Pennsylvania (54 percent) and Connecticut (90 percent).
A bill in the Legislature would change that, requiring all public water systems in New

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Birth Control Coverage Measure Defeated in Senate

WASHINGTON — The Senate on Thursday killed a Republican effort to let employers and health insurance companies deny coverage for contraceptives and other services to which they have religious or moral objections.

The vote was 51 to 48. In effect, the Senate upheld President Obama’s birth control policy. The policy guarantees that women have access to insurance coverage for contraceptives at no charge, through an employer’s health plan or directly from an insurance company.
The vote followed four days of impassioned debate in which senators from both parties weighed the competing

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Asian New Yorkers Resist Anti-Smoking Efforts

On a cool, damp afternoon in Flushing, Queens, Seung Jun stood outside on Main Street on Thursday, a smoker among his peers. He unsheathed a Parliament and took a long drag, as though he were taking in a breath of relief.

All around him, other Asian men engaged in the same ritual, on the sidewalks, in doorways and on bicycles. Here, in the heart of the city’s largest Asian community, smoking is still a way of life.
The city’s Asian population has been stubbornly resistant to the otherwise successful efforts by the Bloomberg administration to curb smoking among New Yorkers. Smoking rates

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Senate Kills G.O.P. Bill Opposing Contraception Policy

WASHINGTON — The Senate on Thursday killed a Republican effort to let employers and health insurance companies deny coverage for contraceptives and other services to which they have religious or moral objections.

The vote was 51 to 48. In effect, the Senate upheld President Obama’s birth control policy. The policy guarantees that women have access to insurance coverage for contraceptives at no charge, through an employer’s health plan or directly from an insurance company.
The vote followed four days of impassioned debate in which senators from both parties weighed the competing

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New York Welcomes Yoga Asana Championships

Piotr Redlinski for The New York Times
On Friday, yogis from the New York area will compete for spots in the national yoga finals. Kyoko Katsura adjusted a student's pose while leading an advanced preparation class for the competition.

For Kelsea Bangora, New York’s 2011 yoga asana champion, the conversation usually goes like this:

“Yoga champion? How does that work?”
“Well, it’s like a dance performance, sort of, or a gymnastics routine, but not really.”
“So, can you touch your head with your feet?”
“Well, of course”
Typically, she does not demonstrate.
“I don’t

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