内容摘要：People who haven’t experienced pet love may struggle to understand what it’s like to lose it. They may think they are being helpful by saying, “It was just an animal,” or “They were lucky to have such a loving owner.” But pat phrases, no matter how well-meaning, can make grieving owners clam up and feel alone.

People who haven’t experienced pet love may struggle to understand what it’s like to lose it. They may think they are being helpful by saying, “It was just an animal,” or “They were lucky to have such a loving owner.” But pat phrases, no matter how well-meaning, can make grieving owners clam up and feel alone.

This combination of photos provided by NYU Langone Health in November 2023 shows Aaron James before and after his high-voltage electricity accident and after a facial and eye transplant. The NYU team announced Thursday, Nov. 9, 2023, that so far, James is recovering well from the dual transplant in May and the donated eye looks remarkably healthy. (NYU Langone Health via AP)Last month, tingles heralded healing facial nerves. James can’t yet open the eyelid, and wears a patch to protect it. But as Rodriguez pushed on the closed eye, James felt sensation — although on his nose rather than his eyelid, presumably until slow-growing nerves get reoriented. The surgeon also detected subtle movements beginning in muscles around the eye.

Then came a closer look. NYU ophthalmologist Dr. Vaidehi Dedania ran a battery of tests. She found expected damage in the light-sensing retina in the back of the eye. But she said it appears to have enough special cells called photoreceptors to do the job of converting light to electrical signals, one step in creating vision.Normally, the optic nerve then would send those signals to the brain to be interpreted. James’ optic nerve clearly hasn’t healed. Yet when light was flashed into the donated eye during an MRI, the scan recorded some sort of brain signaling.That both excited and baffled researchers, although it wasn’t the right type for vision and may simply be a fluke, cautioned Dr. Steven Galetta, NYU’s neurology chair. Only time and more study may tell.

Still, the surgery marks “a technical tour de force,” said Dr. David Klassen, chief medical officer of the United Network for Organ Sharing, which runs the nation’s transplant system. “You can learn a tremendous amount from a single transplant” that could propel the field.As for James, “we’re just taking it one day at a time,” he said.

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

A company that makes baby food sold under a Target store brand is recalling more than 25,000 packages of a product because it may contain elevated levels of lead.U.S. infant deaths fell to about 19,900 last year, according to CDC data, compared with about 20,150 in 2023.

The U.S. infant mortality rate has been worse than other high-income countries, which experts have attributed to poverty, inadequate prenatal care and other things. Even so, the U.S. rate generally has improved over the decades because of medical advances and public health efforts.The 2022 and 2023 levels were up from 5.44 per 1,000 in 2021 — the first statistically significant jump in the rate in about two decades. Experts attributed those years to a rebound in RSV and flu infections after two years of pandemic precautions.

In 2023, U.S. health officials begantwo new measures to prevent the toll on infants — one was a lab-made antibody shot for infants that helps the immune system fight off the virus, and the other was giving an RSV vaccine to women between 32 weeks and 36 weeks of pregnancy.