Layoff notices began arriving early Tuesday for thousands of employees of the sprawling Department of Health and Human Services and its subsidiary agencies, with as many 10,000 workers potentially expected to be hit by the cuts, including some of the country’s top health officials.

The range of job losses across institutes and offices reflected the breadth of what HHS does and the role it plays in the U.S., in both the obvious ways and less appreciated ones. The cuts and reorganizations affected people who help approve new medicines, track emerging pathogens, and uncover the secrets held in our DNA. But they also reached those developing safer tobacco policies, trying to reduce injuries, and protecting people who rely on Medicare and Medicaid — as well as the staff who made the agencies operate day to day and aimed to communicate health updates, new recommendations, and policy shifts to the public. 

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Scientists have developed a device that can translate thoughts about speech into spoken words in real time.

Although it’s still experimental, they hope the brain-computer interface could someday help give voice to those unable to speak.

A new study described testing the device on a 47-year-old woman with quadriplegia who couldn’t speak for 18 years after a stroke. Doctors implanted it in her brain during surgery as part of a clinical trial.

It “converts her intent to speak into fluent sentences,” said Gopala Anumanchipalli, a co-author of the study published Monday in the journal Nature Neuroscience.

Other brain-computer interfaces, or BCIs, for speech typically have a slight delay between thoughts of sentences and computerized verbalization. Such delays can disrupt the natural flow of conversation, potentially leading to miscommunication and frustration, researchers said.

This is “a pretty big advance in our field,” said Jonathan Brumberg of the Speech and Applied Neuroscience Lab at the University of Kansas, who was not part of the study.

A team in California recorded the woman’s brain activity using electrodes while she spoke sentences silently in her brain. The scientists used a synthesizer they built using her voice before her injury to create a speech sound that she would have spoken. They trained an AI model that translates neural activity into units of sound.

It works similarly to existing systems used to transcribe meetings or phone calls in real time, said Anumanchipalli, of the University of California, Berkeley.

The implant itself sits on the speech center of the brain so that it’s listening in, and those signals are translated to pieces of speech that make up sentences. It’s a “streaming approach,” Anumanchipalli said, with each 80-millisecond chunk of speech – about half a syllable – sent into a recorder.

“It’s not waiting for a sentence to finish,” Anumanchipalli said. “It’s processing it on the fly.”

Decoding speech that quickly has the potential to keep up with the fast pace of natural speech, said Brumberg. The use of voice samples, he added, “would be a significant advance in the naturalness of speech.”

Though the work was partially funded by the National Institutes of Health, Anumanchipalli said it wasn’t affected by recent NIH research cuts. More research is needed before the technology is ready for wide use, but with “sustained investments,” it could be available to patients within a decade, he said.

SOURCE: AP

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PAHO issues new epidemiological alert amid rising yellow fever cases in the Americas

Cristina Mitchell

31 Mar 2025

He is currently serving as the Chairman of the Division of Plastic Surgery, Hand Surgery, Reconstructive Microsurgery, and Burns at Ganga Hospital and as the Director of Ganga Hospital, Coimbatore.

Dr. Sabapathy officially assumed the presidency on March 28 during the closing ceremony of the federation's triennial congress in Washington, D.C. He is the first Indian to lead IFSSH, a global federation established in 1966.

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Dr Sabapathy graduated
from Stanley Medical College, Madras, as the Best Outgoing Student, standing
first in the University in Medicine and Surgery. He holds an M.S. in General
Surgery from Madras Medical College and an M.Ch (Plastic Surgery) from Stanley
Medical College, Madras. He also pursued Dip NB (Plastic Surgery) and FRCS from the Royal College of Surgeons, Edinburgh, UK.

He completed a Fellowship in
Hand and Microsurgery from Christine M Kleinert Institute for Hand and
Microsurgery, Louisville, USA. He is also a FAMS from the National Academy
of Medical Sciences and Hon FRCS from Royal College of Surgeons and Physicians
of Glasgow. He got his D.Sc. Hon in 2019 from Dr MGR Educational and Research
Institute, Chennai, and Hon FACS in 2020 from the American College of Surgeons.

He has been a part of a
number of reputed organizations. He is the immediate Past President of the Asian
Pacific Federation of Societies for Surgery of the Hand (APFSSH) and former Editor-in-Chief
of the Journal of Hand Surgery (Asia Pacific). He is the Vice-President of the Diabetic
Foot Society of India and President of the National Academy of Burns India. He also served as the president of the Association of Plastic Surgeons of India in
2011, the Indian Society for Surgery of the Hand, the Indian Society for Reconstructive
Microsurgery, International Trauma Care (Indian Section), and the Brachial Plexus
Surgery Group of India.

Also Read:Dr S Rajasekaran, Ganga Hospital Chairman ranked among top 1 percent world scientists list

Dr Sabapathy was awarded the
NH Antia Prize by the Association of Plastic Surgeons of India for the best
paper published from India in an international journal in 2006. He was honoured
with the Lifetime Achievement Award for exemplary contribution to the cause of
Medical Education and Healthcare Services by the Tamil Dr. M.G.R. Medical
University on 5th September, 2012. He also secured the Dr B C Roy National Award
– Fellowship for Postgraduate Studies of the Medical Council of India (1979 –
81). He has 118 honours to his credit, and he attended 347 invited lectures
and international meetings. Ganga Hospital has congratulated the doctor by
stating, “Wishing him continued success in advancing the field of hand surgery
worldwide!”

IFSSH (International
Federation of Societies for Surgery of the Hand) was formed in 1966 to
co-ordinate activities of the Hand Surgery Societies around the world, thereby
increasing and spreading knowledge of surgery of the hand. The IFSSH comprises
member societies for surgery of the hand from around the world.

An example of these cases is the people who, for different reasons, have to dedicate their lives to the care of others, eliminating the possibility of accessing academic training or acquiring a job.

The Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) conducted a study that identified 90% of the people who care for others in the Dominican Republic as women, who do so without receiving any type of economic remuneration.

According to the report “Car” givers of the elderly, overburdened and underpaid” used in June 2024 by the IDB, if the Dominican State develops better public policies to improve caregivers’ conditions, this could increase the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) by approximately 20%.

The World Bank identified this figure in 2020 in the report “Wom”n, Business and the Law,” which placed proportional labor inequality as the main challenge to achieving a higher GDP in the Latin American and Caribbean region.

The accumulated data comprising the 27,000 consultations carried out in more than 25 Latin American countries, including the Dominican Republic, show that 58% of the unpaid caregivers are “self-initiated.”

30.3% had no other option because they said they were the “only person who could,” and 2.8% accepted the request of “others.”

Employment and professional development
Conversely, 48% of unpaid caregivers report that they had to stop working because of their caregiving responsibilities.

Other consequences also include a reduction in work hours (reported by 20% of respondents), accepting a less satisfying job that is more compatible with caregiving responsibilities (17%), and fewer opportunities to advance and receive promotions (12%).

Eighty-two percent of family caregivers and 38% of unpaid home caregivers in Latin countries have no formal training. Unpaid caregiving has other negative effects, including a shortage of time and strain on family and social relationships.

Forty-eight % report that they are unable to receive the medical care they need because of their caregiving responsibilities. In addition, one in three unpaid caregivers report problems in their relationships with friends, family, or partners due to their caregiving responsibilities.

International program
The objective of the study conducted by the IDB is to build a program that will allow it to make funds available to try to mitigate this weakness in the financial improvement of member countries, including the Dominican Republic.

Through the “IDB Cares” initiative, Latin states can expand care services and infrastructure to improve the lives of children, the elderly, and people with disabilities and create more jobs.

” Strategic investments in care services and infrastructure are fundamental for sustainable economic growth, productivity, and the generation of opportunities for all in Latin America and the Caribbean,” said IDB President Ilan Goldfajn, who launched the initiative at the IDB Meetings held in Chile. The Minister of Finance, José Vicente, also participates in these working tables, and he handed over the presidency of the Assembly coordinating the annual work of the countries that comprise the financial body.

Although the international banking entity has not defined the money available for this project, the directors informed that the Dominican Republic could access it through loans and technical cooperation actions, which would not represent a subscription to a debt.