What happened

U.S. health officials have linked an ongoing cyclosporiasis outbreak to iceberg lettuce from Mexico that was sent to Taco Bell locations across five states. The supplier has not been officially named, but “two individuals familiar with the inquiry” told The Washington Post the company is Taylor Farms. At least 1,645 cases of the parasitic infection, which can cause explosive diarrhea, have been confirmed as of Friday, most of them in Michigan.

Who said what

“Do not eat shredded iceberg lettuce from Taco Bell locations in Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio and West Virginia,” the CDC said in a statement. Taco Bell itself has “taken immediate action” to “indefinitely” remove the lettuce from its nationwide supply chain, the company said in a press release.

What next?

The FDA said it had “increased screening at the border” for the “implicated” products and is working with the supplier to figure out if any contaminated lettuce remains on the market. Taylor Farms is “one of the largest producers of fresh lettuce and vegetables in the country,” serving many leading restaurant chains, The New York Times said. “Additional implicated brands, restaurants, retailers, or distribution channels” may yet emerge, the FDA warned.

What happened

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Wednesday that the Pentagon will introduce testosterone screenings for soldiers over the age of 30. The screenings will be available to troops under 30 by request, and any soldier found to have lower testosterone levels will have the option to undergo hormone treatment. The new policy is designed so soldiers “have the right testosterone levels to operate at” their “absolute best,” Hegseth said in a video on X captioned “The High-T Department of War.”

Who said what

The secretary’s messaging “blends known science” on testosterone with “broader and less substantiated claims,” The Associated Press said. The new policy shows the secretary “takes direction from the far corners of the manosphere,” Rep. Chrissy Houlahan (D-Pa.), an Air Force veteran, told the AP. Hegseth “did not address” whether the “thousands” of women who “serve in frontline combat roles” would also be “subjected to hormone testing,” Politico said.

What next?

The screenings will be “conducted annually as part of service members’ periodic health assessments,” said Task & Purpose. But Hegseth has not disclosed when the screenings will begin.

What happened

Health officials are investigating whether restaurant chain Taco Bell “played a role” in the ongoing multistate outbreak of cyclosporiasis, The Washington Post said Tuesday. The foodborne parasitic infection can cause explosive diarrhea and is suspected to have sickened nearly 7,000 people across at least 34 states.

Who said what

Salad greens could be a “potential source for this outbreak,” Michigan’s health department said in a statement. But no “specific food item” has yet been confirmed as the culprit, said the U.S. Centers for Disease Control. The public is “largely flying blind” about what foods to avoid, CBS News said. Taco Bell said it has started “voluntarily and temporarily” removing some ingredients from select restaurants “as a precautionary measure.”

What next?

Taco Bell said it will continue to “closely monitor the situation and follow the guidance of public health authorities.” The CDC is analyzing lab data “to find a signal connecting the cases,” said Gwen Biggerstaff, deputy director of the CDC’s division of foodborne, waterborne and environmental diseases. Reports of new cyclosporiasis infections will likely continue through August, she added.

Data from more than 747,000 participants has been made available to scientists and doctors, creating an unparalleled genomic and electronic health record database “powering next-generation discoveries” in so-called “precision medicine”, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the US medical research agency, has announced.

What is it?

Precision medicine, as defined by the NIH’s National Human Genome Research Institute, is an “innovative approach that uses information about an individual’s genomic, environmental and lifestyle information to guide decisions related to their medical management”.

Generally considered analogous to “personalised medicine” or “individualised medicine”, its goal is “to provide a more precise approach for the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of disease”.

What are the obstacles?

In theory, “therapies targeted to a person’s genetic make-up should be more effective and have fewer side effects”, said the BBC’s David Cox. But in practice, personalised medicine has in the past proved “erratic and expensive”. Another problem has long been that it “requires people to trust governments and companies with their genomic data, while the regulatory environment around medicines is ill-equipped to cope with therapies that are designed for just one person”.

That is the “paradox at the heart of precision medicine,” said NIH director Jay Bhattacharya. “To tailor treatments to individuals, you actually need very large populations to uncover the patterns that connect genetics, lifestyle, and the environment to health outcomes.”

What conditions could benefit from it?

NIH’s All of Us data has already fuelled more than 1,400 peer-reviewed publications across the US and around the world. Recent related breakthroughs range from a first-of-its-kind clinical genetic test predicting inherited risk of heart disease to the development of a low-cost prostate cancer risk model.

In a small-scale trial in California, people with early-stage dementia were given bespoke treatment plans targeting their personal nutritional deficiencies, ongoing infections and environmental exposures, which saw their symptoms improve.

A new “groundbreaking” genomic test could see millions of women with breast cancer spared debilitating chemotherapy, following the results of a trial that could “transform healthcare guidelines worldwide”, said The Guardian.

And in April, The New York Times reported on the story of KJ Muldoon, born in 2024 with an incredibly rare enzyme deficiency. In the space of just six months, a team at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and Penn Medicine designed a personalised therapy that was able to correct the single misspelled letter in his DNA using gene-editing technology. It was perhaps the “most important medical story of the decade”, said the paper.

AI modelling has also made analysis of huge datasets cheaper and more efficient. A recent study in the Annals of Medicine and Surgery suggests this is already having an impact on a range of critical specialities, including cardiology, infectious diseases, and oncology where machine learning models are able to analyse new sets of biomarkers so enabling “ultra-targeted therapies that strike tumour-specific mutations with remarkable precision”.

Even in psychiatry, AI is increasingly being used to predict treatment resistance for antidepressants well in advance. “This is the future of tailored, bespoke medicine,” said Forbes.

What happened

Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) revealed Sunday that a fall at his Washington home last month led to a hospital stay. His announcement ends a “weekslong silence” that had “spurred speculation about his condition,” The Wall Street Journal said.

The 84-year-old senator said he briefly lost consciousness after the incident but did not break any bones or suffer a concussion, stroke, heart attack or other serious injury. He was later diagnosed with a mild case of pneumonia.

Who said what

McConnell acknowledged the delay in explaining his condition, saying in a statement that “folks of my generation often hesitate to share the vulnerability that comes with growing older.” McConnell’s injuries were “minor” and he “responded rapidly” to pneumonia treatment, his attending physician said. The Kentucky senator “has faced a string of health concerns in recent years that have caused some to question his ability to serve in the legislature,” The Hill said.

What next?

McConnell said he remains focused on completing his Senate work before retiring when his current term ends in January.

The series of heatwaves “afflicting” Europe this summer have been the “worst ever”, said The Guardian. Cities have become practically “unliveable” and higher temperatures are “further exacerbating” socioeconomic and economic divisions.

The unfortunate consequences of the current heat for many in the UK are “disturbed sleep and sticky days in the home office”. But around the world, high temperatures often exacerbate gender inequality, and women, particularly in low-income families, are “at the sharp end”.

Why are women more affected?

Women are more at risk of health complications during a heatwave for two main reasons, Dr Nighat Arif, an NHS GP who specialises in women’s health, told the BBC. First, women respond differently to men in the heat – they sweat less and start sweating at a higher temperature. These thresholds make it harder to “quickly shed heat” and fewer visible indications mean women can find it hard to judge how much their “bodies are under burden”.

The second reason is hormone regulation. Levels of oestrogen and progesterone shift “most substantially” during the menstrual cycle, perimenopause, menopause, pregnancy and while breastfeeding. This can knock the brain’s temperature regulation systems “out of kilter”, said Dr Arif.

Periods may feel more uncomfortable, while hot flushes and night sweats are more likely for perimenopausal and menopausal women. A recent study published by The Lancet suggested that heat stress may “increase the likelihood of adverse outcomes for the mother and child, particularly in higher-risk pregnancies”, said the BBC.

How does this present itself socially?

“How people experience heat is often gendered” and “socially and culturally determined”, said researchers Febe De Geest and Sergio Jarillo on The Conversation. In domestic settings, particularly across Africa, Asia and Oceania, women are forced to spend more time indoors in “poorly ventilated homes”, acting as primary caregivers. In Bangladesh, Cambodia and Nepal, heatwaves have also been linked to increases in child marriages: “struggling families force unions on their daughters to ease financial stress and reduce household costs”.

In workplace settings, research shows that women are sometimes required to wear more clothing for religious reasons and tend to receive “inadequate sanitation”. So they are likely to drink less to “avoid using unhygienic toilet facilities, leading to dehydration and further health problems”. These factors are not “trivial inconveniences; they compound heat exposure in ways that shape how women experience hot weather”.

Even in countries typically associated with better provisions for the heat, there is a “seasonal upswing in violence associated with hot weather”, said The Guardian. This could be due to the “temperature-aggression theory”, where hot weather increases “discomfort, frustration, impulsivity, and aggression, all of which make violence more likely”, or could be linked to greater alcohol consumption, which in turn “increases the opportunities for interpersonal conflicts and subsequent violence”.

Depressingly, it only takes “fairly small shifts” in temperature to increase the likelihood of domestic violence, particularly for the most vulnerable, said the European University Institute. A 1C rise in daily temperature is associated with “approximately a 2.7% increase in domestic violence reports”.

And in disadvantaged areas the effect is “much more intense”, due to more crowded living arrangements, lower cooling capacity and lower access to outdoor spaces. “Each degree of additional temperature is associated with up to a 50% larger relative increase in domestic violence incidents compared to richer areas.”

What can be done?

In practical terms, during periods of extreme heat it is important that women drink “least six to eight cups of non-alcoholic, non-caffeinated, transparent-liquid drinks” to help with temperature regulation, Dr Anisha Patel told ITV. Above all, women should continue to take prescribed medication as normal, including HRT or other drugs designed to help with the menopause.

Across the world, women are “already adapting creatively, and often without institutional support” to improve their situation, said De Geest and Jarillo on The Conversation. In Ahmedabad, India, women have painted their roofs white and used “coconut husks and paper waste” to make the structures cooler, and in Jakarta women have “established shaded communal areas that function as informal cooling centres”.

Policymakers need to realise that women suffer on many fronts, not just in biology but across “culture, power and intersections of class, caste and migratory status”. Their suffering is “largely invisible” to those heading climate responses.

Making sure women can cope with the heat is “not a woman’s problem”, Dr Arif told the BBC. “This is a societal problem. If we get it right for women, we get it right for everyone.”

All over the world, a growing number of late-in-life mothers are facing overlapping symptoms as they deal with postpartum challenges while also entering the perimenopause period. With so little research available on either condition, women are turning to each other to parse their experiences.

Fighting two battles at once

Last year in the United States, the number of births among women ages 35 to 39 was up by 90% since 1990, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In 2023, births among women ages 40 and older exceeded teen births for the first time in the country’s history. As these numbers increase, more women are confronting the “bewildering convergence of two mind- and body-altering hormonal events,” The Washington Post said: the postpartum period and the transitional years of perimenopause marked by “hormonal instability” that can “wreak havoc for up to a decade before menopause occurs.”

There are specific struggles as more women experience postpartum and perimenopause simultaneously, Jessica Shepherd, an OB-GYN and the chief medical officer at the telehealth platform Hers, said to Self. Postpartum symptoms “can take upward of a year to resolve” following pregnancy. Meanwhile, perimenopause can arrive as early as your late 30s. With women waiting to have kids later in life because of “changing cultural norms and a boom of fertility medicine,” it is “no wonder even first-time moms” are becoming “more likely to hit perimenopause while postpartum.”

The symptoms can overlap because post-childbirth, estrogen and progesterone drop to their pre-pregnancy levels. In perimenopause, those same two hormones “tumble downward, often on a zigzagging path,” which can trigger “similar mental symptoms, like anxiety or a short fuse,” said Self. The picture “gets fuzzier in moms over 35,” who are both “more likely to be heading toward menopause” and may be at greater risk for postpartum depression.

Breastfeeding, which can cause prolactin and oxytocin levels to soar, also complicates the issue. When women are nursing, it can “create this pseudomenopausal state” due to low estrogen, which may cause “symptoms like vaginal dryness, low libido, hot flashes and night sweats,” OB-GYN Stacey Silverman Fine said to Self.

Women owed the ‘respect of more research’

In the medical community, there is a “dearth of knowledge” about the intersection of the postpartum and perimenopausal stages, Suzanne Fenske, an OB-GYN who specializes in perimenopause and menopause, said to the Post. This is only made worse by the fact that the United States “offers minimal postpartum care,” the outlet said. Women’s health concerns are often “systemically dismissed,” and “women have been socialized to downplay their experiences.” Thankfully, that is shifting, in part because physicians are more outspoken on social media and awareness is spreading to “mainstream pop culture.” Every time you turn around, there’s a “book that’s out about perimenopause or menopause” or a “popular TV show alluding to these changes,” said Fenske.

Within the “maelstrom of hormonal chaos,” many women point to one “meaningful bright spot,” the Post said. Postpartum and perimenopausal mothers are “finding one another” and “building a sense of connection around their shared experience.” Online forums and group chats can be a “lifeline for postpartum and perimenopausal moms” who might “otherwise feel alienated in spaces dominated by younger parents.”

With so much gray area in our knowledge of the overlap, it is of paramount importance to listen to and believe patients, OB-GYN Talat Uppal told the Australian Financial Review. Before we can help patients navigate these intersecting life stages, we have to listen to their concerns. With more women birthing after 40, “we need to really give them the respect of more research.”

A parasite capable of causing extreme diarrhea has been found in 18 states, with a particularly large outbreak in Michigan. Though the source of the infections has yet to be identified, experts recommend taking precautions with fresh produce and practicing good hygiene to reduce the risk of contracting the disease.

What is cyclosporiasis?

Cyclosporiasis is a form of food poisoning that comes from the parasite Cyclospora cayetanensis. It can cause “watery, and sometimes explosive, diarrhea and other stomach problems,” as well as a low-grade fever in some cases, said the Cleveland Clinic. Symptoms can start any time between two and 14 days after consuming contaminated food or water. The parasite is more common in tropical countries, but in mid-June, 145 cases were reported in the U.S.

“People became sick after eating food in the United States and did not report any travel during the 14 days before they got sick,” said the CDC. Those infected ranged from ages 5 to 86 years old, and though there have been hospitalizations, there have yet to be any deaths from the condition.

There has been growing concern about cyclosporiasis because Michigan, “which typically identifies about 50 cases of cyclosporiasis in a year, has reported at least 170 cases” in under two weeks, said CNN. There is “currently no evidence of a single, multistate Cyclospora outbreak linking all cases,” said the CDC. Instead, researchers are “working to identify various potential clusters and sources of illness in multiple states.” Though Michigan has had the most cases, Alaska, Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia and Wisconsin have also had reported infections.

Investigators have yet to pinpoint the cause of the current outbreak, but the most likely culprits are “cilantro, basil, plants that grow and that you might put in a salad or use as a garnish,” or “strawberries, blueberries, melons, things that grow in fields,” David Freeman, a professor emeritus of infectious diseases at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, said to CNN.

What can be done?

Taking precautions is key to preventing illness. Cooked food is safer than fresh produce, as heat can kill the parasite. Washing produce can also help reduce the chance of ingesting the parasite. “Thoroughly washing hands and kitchen counters, as well as cutting surfaces, is important too,” but “bleach doesn’t kill the parasite,” said CNN. “Handwashing with soap and water and a follow-up with an alcohol-based hand sanitizer are safer bets.”

If you contract cyclosporiasis, antibiotics can help clear the infection. If not treated, “symptoms may last for a month or longer” and increase the “risk of severe dehydration and other complications,” said the Cleveland Clinic. “With proper diagnosis and treatment, most people feel better after a week or two,” but you “may still have occasional bouts of diarrhea for up to a month.”

The Trump administration has officially brought the Presidential Fitness Test back from the dead after it was discontinued in 2013, and Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is lauding it as a major step forward for children’s health. But some health experts aren’t so sure that the revitalized test will improve youngsters’ lives in a meaningful way.

‘Not much has changed’

The test, which was sunsetted during the Obama administration in favor of a different regimen called the Presidential Youth Fitness Program, is now back by executive order from President Donald Trump. But “compared to previous iterations of the test, not much has changed: It includes a timed run, an upper-body strength test and a core test, with benchmarks set by a child’s age and gender,” said Chelsea Cirruzzo at Stat News. Health experts worry that such a stringent “focus on specific physical activity benchmarks could turn some kids off exercise.”

The “worst experiences that people tend to report” from childhood fitness tests are “something having to do with embarrassment,” Matthew Ladwig, an assistant professor of integrative human health at Purdue University Northwest, told Stat News. Negative memories of exercise as a child are “associated with adult sedentary behavior” later in life, a 2018 study co-authored by Ladwig found. Embarrassment is a “leading indicator. A lot of people felt that with the old test, which, unfortunately, shares a lot of similarities with the new one.”

Others question “whether a fitness test alone will be enough to move the needle on physical activity and exercise,” said Mary Kekatos at ABC News. “When you think about a math test and English test, it’s private failure. If you don’t do very well on a test, the teacher knows and you know, but the rest of your classmates don’t know,” Jackie Goodway, a kinesiology professor at Michigan State University, told ABC. “But if you come in last in the mile run and everybody’s laughing at you, it’s public humiliation.”

‘A healthy nation can only exist if its citizens are fit’

Others believe that the physical promises of the Presidential Fitness Test outweigh any negatives. A “healthy nation can only exist if its citizens are fit,” and “policymakers are finally recognizing the problem,” said K. John Lee at The Oklahoman. The reimplementation of the exam comes at a time when many children cannot “pass a military physical fitness test,” and “whether or not a student ever serves in uniform,” that “should concern us.”

“Too many young people are spending less time moving and building healthy habits,” said Rep. Jeff Van Drew (R-N.J.) in a statement. Reviving the test will “give students a positive goal to work toward and make physical activity a bigger part of their everyday lives.” By “bringing back the Presidential Fitness Test,” said Kennedy in the same statement, America is “giving parents, schools and communities the tools to help children build healthy habits, strengthen their bodies and discover what they’re capable of achieving.”

On its own, a physical test would be more of a “performative gesture than a real public health campaign to tackle the childhood obesity epidemic,” The Washington Post editorial board said in an August 2025 op-ed, after Trump announced the test’s return. But a “focus on the health of America’s children is welcome, especially if it draws added attention to the need for more school time devoted to physical activity.”

New medicine can be found even in the iciest of locations. During an expedition to Antarctica, scientists discovered a species of sea squirt that may promise a new cancer treatment. The marine organism contains bacteria capable of producing a toxin that could eventually become a widely available drug. However, research still needs to be done on the species and bacteria before it can be tested on humans.

The dive

The cancer-fighting sea squirt, also called an ascidian, was first discovered 20 years ago and identified as a potential cancer therapy. The bacterium in the organism, Candidatus Synoicihabitans palmerolidicus, can “produce the metabolite palmerolide A, which kills melanoma cells without causing too much harm to healthy human cells,” said Discover.

Scientists have now conducted a second expedition to Antarctica to “better understand the compound and explore whether it could someday contribute to new therapies for patients battling melanoma,” said a news release by the University of South Florida. “Our expedition focused on determining where the ascidian’s melanoma-killing bacterium occurs and how widespread it is,” Sam Afoullouss, a postdoctoral researcher who participated in the dive, said in the release. “We also wanted to understand how it lives inside the organism and how that connects to the compounds linked to melanoma research.”

Sea squirts are “sac-like marine invertebrates that tend to live on sloped sea beds,” said the BBC. The ascidians found in Antarctica have “evolved over millions of years to cope with the harsh conditions there, producing chemical defenses that can deter predators and disease.” The discovered species was found at “depths between 60 and 80 feet, often along sloped or vertical seafloor surfaces where water currents are strong,” said the release. These “currents help deliver nutrients that sustain the organisms.” Such conditions allow for the organisms to be highly specialized.

The test

The researchers tested the sea squirt’s bacteria on melanoma cells in mice. “The good news is it didn’t kill the mice,” Bill Baker, a chemistry professor at the University of South Florida who led the first expedition and advised the second one, said to The Guardian. “It did kill their cancer, so we know it has the physiological properties to act like a drug.” The scientists are also analyzing the “quantity and distribution of palmerolide A, the bacterium, and the molecular target of palmerolide A,” Baker said to Discover. “These analyses will help us determine, for example, whether the ascidian and bacterium are working in concert, whether the bacterium is detrimental to the ascidian, or one of several other potential relationships between the two.”

Most FDA-approved drugs originated in nature, and Antarctica could be a rich source of new possibilities. While the sea squirt shows promise, the “pathway to producing a safe and effective anti-melanoma drug, with approval for use in humans, is long,” said The Guardian. It would “require a succession of strictly regulated and ever-expanding trials even after a drug was formulated.” Still, the knowledge gained from this expedition “could significantly advance the timeline.”

There may be a few sore heads and impeccably timed phone-calls to bosses in England this morning, after last night’s win over Mexico in the World Cup, but any football fans must be thankful they don’t live in Germany where workers will have to report to a doctor in person, to get a sick note on the first day they are ill, under sweeping new reforms.

The government is “tired of its workers calling in sick”, said the Deep Dive, but unions and family doctors are opposed to the new law.

What is Germany doing?

“The number of sick days is too high,” said Friedrich Merz, the German chancellor, announcing the plan. The government is “creating a set of tools that will enable those involved, both employees and companies, to correct this,” he added.

The “tough” new rules are “aimed at boosting Germany’s stagnating economy”, wrote Hans van Leeuwen, international economics editor of The Telegraph.

Although they will be “welcomed” by employers, they have “angered” the country’s “powerful trade unions”. The services sector union, Verdi, accused Merz of creating a “culture of distrust of employees”.

Doctors also have “opposed” the new system because they believe the new requirements will “swamp” GP surgeries with “unnecessary appointments”.

What are sickness policies like elsewhere?

In the Netherlands, employers are generally obliged to pay employees on sick leave 70% of their wages for up to two years. If that amount is less than minimum wage, then the employer must boost this to the minimum wage for the first year. Norway is even more generous: it provides up to a year of income replacement at 100% of salary (subject to an earnings cap).

Although the US is one of the richest countries in the world, there is no nationwide entitlement to paid sick leave in the US, so access depends largely on state laws, local ordinances and employer policies. This means coverage varies considerably. Only 14 of the 50 states have paid sick leave mandates in place, which means sick workers are often forced to rely on health insurance pay-outs to cover their wages.

In the UK employees who earn over £125 a week and are off sick for four or more days in a row, are entitled to £123.25 per week of statutory sick pay for up to 28 weeks. This equates to around 15% of the average UK weekly wage. Employees need to give their employer proof if they’re ill for more than seven days. Many employers have a sick pay policy which is more generous.

How many sick days do people take?

In 2025, 149 million working days were lost to sickness or injury in Britain – an average of more than four days per worker. On average, Americans take roughly one to three days of sick leave per year.

In Germany, workers take about three weeks, or 15 working days, of sick leave per year. This is lower than in France, but higher than Sweden, the Netherlands, Denmark, Poland and Italy.

Desperate to soothe symptoms caused by unbalanced hormones, women are turning to a TikTok trend that recommends combining allergy medication and antacids to treat conditions like PMS or menopause. Despite a lack of clinical evidence, experts say there may be a reason the cocktail is helping some people keep persistent symptoms at bay.

OTC relief

People who feel “extra rotten in the days leading up to their period” are finding relief from this TikTok-approved concoction, said NPR. The over-the-counter combo “helps to combat premenstrual blues,” leading participants to feel “less irritable and more energetic.” Others going through perimenopause and menopause reported that it “helps to lessen similar symptoms.” The drugs also went viral last year amid claims they helped manage symptoms of premenstrual dysphoric disorder (PMDD), where patients “experience depression and anxiety caused by premenstrual hormonal shifts.”

Some women struggling with “conditions marked by hormonal fluctuations” swear that the blend finally provides some relief, said People. It helps with “hot flashes, mood swings and sleeplessness often associated with these disorders.” The specific drugs most often “touted in this hormonal cocktail” are Allegra and Pepcid AC.

To date, there have not been any clinical trials testing the safety or efficacy of this trend. Those who are using the combo are operating in an “evidence-free zone,” Leigh Frame, the executive director of the Office of Integrative Medicine & Health at George Washington University, said to NPR. There is “no evidence that it does or doesn’t work."

However, experts agree there is a “plausible biological mechanism” for why some may be seeing benefits, said NPR. It has to do with histamine, a chemical released when you come into contact with an allergen, which triggers an inflammatory response. There is evidence that suggests “histamine also fluctuates with your menstrual cycle.” Estrogen, which stimulates the release of histamine, “ebbs and flows throughout the month,” while progesterone acts as a “sort of natural antihistamine.” But in the days leading up to your period, progesterone “takes a nosedive.” In perimenopause, too, the levels of both hormones “rise and fall rapidly, often erratically.”

Both allergy medication and antacids are histamine blockers that interact with different receptors throughout the body, said Mara Rivera, a psychiatrist who specializes in reproductive health challenges, to NPR. The theory is that this combination may help keep histamine in check, basically replacing the effect of progesterone. In some ways, the trend is a modern-day example of an old wives’ tale. Women have been “doing this forever, just talking to one another, and seeing what works,” Rivera said.

Feeling unheard

The popularity of the “DIY Allegra and Pepcid AC cocktail” stems in part from “women feeling like they are not being heard by their doctors,” said People. Women are “hungry to know more and to help themselves,” and they often “feel like they’re not being listened to,” Soma Mandal, the medical director of women’s health at Jersey Shore University Medical Center at Hackensack Meridian Health, said to People. It is important to “find someone who will listen,” who will “take complaints seriously” and who also understands that this is a “physiologic part of life and deserves the appropriate treatment.” If you are not getting that level of care with your current practitioner, “then it’s time to move on."

Experts are not against open discussion and the sharing of symptoms and potential remedies over social media. It is “great that we are asking these questions and bringing up these ideas,” because we “desperately need more research in midlife women’s health,” gynecologist Amy Voedisch said to Everyday Health.

‘The case against fireworks’

Char Miller at Time

“This year’s Fourth of July fireworks promise to be especially explosive,” but they have “negative consequences for our environment and our health,” says Char Miller. Climate change is “making landscapes more vulnerable to fire,” and fireworks also “pose other life-threatening challenges.” They “can degrade air quality for hours or even days.” For “people with asthma, cardiovascular disease, or other respiratory conditions, the toxic air presents genuine health risks.” Drone displays “are an innovative alternative with far fewer risks.”

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‘Assailed by right and left, the Peace Corps continues to make an apolitical difference’

Jonathan Zimmerman at The Philadelphia Inquirer

Republicans have “proposed to eliminate funding for the Peace Corps,” but the organization “has also been the target of left-wing attacks,” says Jonathan Zimmerman. Neither side “believes that Americans can be a force for good in the world,” and that is “why the Peace Corps matters.” It is “based on the simple proposition that bringing different people together can help them thrive. And it’s a standing rebuke to cynics on the right and the left.”

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‘Why the Arab League could not stop Israel’s genocide’

Rami G. Khouri at Al Jazeera

“Arabs are perplexed by why their governments and the Arab League have been so docile in the face of the Israeli genocide in Gaza,” says Rami G. Khouri. But Arab states “have never been able to harness their natural, human and geographic resources to become powerful, confident states that are not constantly manipulated.” They “rely heavily on non-Arab powers for financial, military, technological and other assistance that is vital for their survival; this deep dependence has diluted their sovereignty.”

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‘The obesity curve finally bent. Now comes the hard part.’

Ashish K. Jha at The Boston Globe

GLP-1s “appear to have done what no public health effort could” for obesity, but “having a treatment is not the same as getting it to the people who need it,” says Ashish K. Jha. Obesity drugs “should be covered by health insurance.” Coverage “should be broad and clinically grounded. It currently is not.” Insurance companies can “build in lower-cost maintenance once a patient stabilizes, so the choice is not a $1,000 injection forever or watching the weight return.”

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While postpartum depression is widely known as an issue that affects mothers, researchers are increasingly finding that it can be experienced by fathers too. Postpartum depression is often used as a shorthand for any perinatal mood disorder, which can include anxiety and OCD. Understanding how that manifests differently across genders could be key to getting men the help they need.

New parenting stress

Fathers are “at risk for the same things that mothers go through,” said Sheehan Fisher, a perinatal clinical psychologist, to The New York Times. About 10% of fathers develop symptoms like depression and anxiety during the perinatal period, which lasts from pregnancy through the first year after childbirth. That is about half the proportion of mothers who develop similar symptoms. Conditions in fathers could be more prevalent than assumed because “men may be less likely to seek help than women are and often have different symptoms,” said the Times.

Depressed dads are more prone to expressing aggravation, annoyance or even rage, Daniel Singley, a psychologist who founded a therapy center for men, said to the Times. Beneath those emotions, they are likely “feeling hurt, sad, afraid, ashamed, helpless, hopeless,” but “what we see externally is anger and irritability.” These feelings can also present with physical symptoms such as muscle tension or stomach pain.

Evidence suggests a relationship between “paternal employment, psychological status, history of maternal mental illness, first pregnancy, marital relationship” and paternal postpartum depression, researchers said in a 2021 study. Another major risk factor is a “prior history of depression in the man,” said Psychology Today. Men also “typically experience a decrease in testosterone levels during the woman’s pregnancy,” which can contribute to a higher risk of depression.

Postpartum depression in fathers is “real and affects a substantial number of fathers,” said Psychology Today. It can have “deleterious effects for the father, the mother and the baby.” Screening for PPD in men is “important and yet is underutilized.”

Seeking help

Men can go undiagnosed because they prioritize the mother’s concerns over their own symptoms, or because they have a “hesitancy to admit” that they are struggling, Fisher said to the Times. Nearly half of PPD cases in women start during pregnancy, with the first postpartum weeks considered a high-risk period. For men, the riskiest window is three to six months after babies are born, possibly related to the “infants’ growing needs and activity or to the mothers returning to work.”

The number one risk factor for paternal postpartum depression, though, is “maternal postpartum depression,” Singley said to the Times. There is “a lot of stress” because men “want to be supportive, want to be caregivers,” and the “system is set up, really, to support women,” Brett Biller, a psychologist, said to CBS News. As paternal PPD becomes more widely recognized, the availability of resources should increase as well. Whether it's “medication, talk therapy or both,” there is “nothing wrong with that,” Biller added. “Mental health difficulties are the same as physical difficulties, and there’s a correlation between the two.”

Men are sometimes taught that “seeking support for their mental health is a sign of weakness,” psychologist Adam Borland said to the Cleveland Clinic. “But it’s not.” If you’re living with male postpartum depression, “it’s the best step you can take to best care for yourself and your family.” Adjusting to a baby can be trying, but if your depressive symptoms persist for weeks, don’t hesitate to reach out for guidance.

There is “nothing shameful or embarrassing” about the condition, Borland said. Fatherhood is a “huge new job, with long hours and no pay and you deserve support.” Asking for help means you are “doing what you need to do so you can be the best man — and best dad — you can be.”

Alzheimer’s disease, a progressive brain disorder that gradually degrades a person’s cognitive and memory functions, is the No. 1 cause of dementia. There’s currently no cure, but according to a study published in the journal ACS Chemical Neuroscience, a new copper-based treatment may be on the horizon.

Clearing out

Alzheimer’s is “driven by the buildup of toxic proteins called amyloid beta,” said a release about the study. These proteins are usually flushed into the bloodstream through the blood-brain barrier. However, in those with Alzheimer’s disease, the “pumps doing the heavy lifting, called P-glycoprotein (P-gp), weaken significantly, clogging the drain and trapping the toxic proteins in the brain.”

A buildup of these proteins in the brain leads to memory loss and cognitive decline. But the copper-based compound Cu(ATSM), which has “anti-inflammatory and neuroprotective properties,” can clear them from the brain, said senior study author Joseph Nicolazzo in the release. It does so by “increasing the number and activity” of the P-gp pumps, said Newsweek.

The study is the first to show that Cu(ATSM) can boost the amount of P-gp pumps “by 24.1%, effectively linking the repair of the blood-brain barrier to a reduction in toxic proteins and improved cognitive function,” said lead study author Jae Pyun in the release. “Over 56 days, the treatment reduced toxic amyloid-beta by 42% and improved spatial learning by nearly 44%.”

Not just yet

Alzheimer’s disease is the No. 1 cause of dementia, accounting for about 60% to 80% of cases, according to the Alzheimer’s Association. The condition also worsens over time. In its early stages, “memory loss is mild, but with late-stage Alzheimer’s, individuals lose the ability to carry on a conversation and respond to their environment,” said the association. “On average, a person with Alzheimer’s lives four to eight years after diagnosis but can live as long as 20 years, depending on other factors.”

Cu(ATSM) improved the long-term spatial memory of mice, showing promise for future human clinical trials. The compound has also “already progressed to clinical testing for conditions like Parkinson’s and ALS,” said Nicolazzo in the release. However, “despite its promising results in animals, a pilot comparative analysis found that Cu(ATSM) provided no significant benefit to humans with ALS,” said Science Alert.

More than 7 million Americans 65 and older are estimated to be living with Alzheimer’s. By 2050, that number is projected to rise to close to 13 million, according to the Alzheimer’s Association. A drug that could prolong cognition and lifespan would be a game changer for patients and their families.

The disease itself is still full of unknowns. Alzheimer’s “involves the biological environment of the aging brain, including membrane biology, inflammation, vascular function, lipid metabolism and cellular resilience,” said neuroscientist Dayan Goodenowe to Newsweek. “So any single mechanism still has to be validated before we know whether it produces meaningful clinical benefit.”

The Department of Health and Human Services is moving to make adjustments to testosterone-therapy labels, reversing changes made over a decade ago that restricted availability for some men. With hormone drugs being hailed as yet another wellness drug, experts worry the requested adjustments could trigger a testosterone free-for-all.

Why is the HHS asking for revisions?

The Food and Drug ​Administration as of 2015 required testosterone therapy labels to state that the “safety and effectiveness of the treatment had not been ​established” in men with symptoms associated with idiopathic hypogonadism, an age-related condition “involving low testosterone levels without a known underlying cause,” said Reuters. Now the HHS is requesting that labels be revised to remove that statement. The HHS also wants to update information related to prostate cancer risk and revise warnings regarding enlarged prostates after reviewing new data and evidence on the safety and benefits of hormone therapy.

These updates could “pave the way for easier access to testosterone replacement therapy” for a wider subset of men, said CNN. During Men’s Health Month, the HHS is “putting science back at the center of men’s healthcare,” said HHS Secretary of Health Robert F. Kennedy, Jr in a press release.

What are the risks of lessening the barrier to testosterone therapy?

No matter the outcome of the suggested revisions, experts warn that patients should still have “in-depth talks with their doctors about whether testosterone therapy could be helpful for them,” and doctors should “complete thorough evaluations,” said CNN. Besides, taking a warning off a label “isn’t the same as saying every man should be on the medication,” Jamin Brahmbhatt, a urologist and men’s health expert at Orlando Health, said in an email to the outlet.

For a man who genuinely has low testosterone, the “benefits are real: improved energy, sex drive, mood, muscle and bone strength,” Brahmbhatt said of testosterone therapy. However, for those with normal levels that are just “chasing an improvement in health motivated by online influencers,” the risks “may not outweigh the benefits.”

While experts insist that testosterone is not just a lifestyle drug that “men take to build muscle and feel good,” it is “increasingly being marketed that way,” said Nature. Influencers and “podcasters such as Joe Rogan and his guests” have “sung the hormone’s praises” and “scores of testosterone clinics are popping up” globally.

People have always “wanted a fountain of youth,” said Landon Trost, a urologist, to the Houston Chronicle. Hormones, “since really the 1970s or even earlier,” were considered the magical pills to achieve that goal. Today, the hormone is “widely prescribed in ways that aren’t covered by insurance” and that don’t “always align with mainstream medical guidance,” said the outlet.

Relaxed scientific protocols and standards within the Department of Health and Human Services have led to an increase in clinics offering experimental stem cell treatments to parents of children with severe autism. Despite being technically unapproved by the Food and Drug Administration, parents are shelling out tens of thousands for treatments that claim to improve language and social skills and reduce problem behaviors.

Operating ‘beyond the bounds of FDA approval’

Although there is a lack of FDA approval and little evidence of its efficacy, stem cell treatments for autism are being steadily provided across the country. Children with autism “as young as 18 months old” are getting “unapproved stem cell treatments” at clinics in Florida, Texas and elsewhere, “part of a growing market operating beyond the bounds of FDA approval,” said The Guardian.

The procedure involves sedating a child before administering intravenous doses of millions of stem cells, “commonly derived from human umbilical cords harvested at birth,” said The Guardian. Sometimes the doctors providing the treatment have “no scientific expertise in autism or child development.” Instead, they have “entered the booming stem cell sector,” billing the procedures as “regenerative medicine” for children, “some of whom have severe disabilities.”

As stem cell clinics “multiply across America,” they are “finding an influential ally in the U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.,” said The Guardian. Kennedy’s influence could lead to new policy, said Paul Knoepfler, a stem cell biologist and unofficial watchdog of stem cell clinics, to the outlet. The FDA has not taken action in the last 18 months. This could mean a “big change coming from the FDA very soon, backing off oversight of birth-related stem cells.”

Several clinics prominently cite an early Duke University study involving 25 autistic children that “suggested possible improvements following umbilical cord stem cell infusions,” said Trial Site News. But a “larger and more rigorous follow-up trial” involving 180 children failed to “demonstrate significant improvements in core autism symptoms compared with placebo controls.” Similar results emerged from a “placebo-controlled study conducted by Sutter Health.” This has led researchers to conclude that the “evidence does not currently support routine use of stem cell therapies for autism outside formal clinical research settings.”

Up until now, Americans seeking stem cell therapies for autism have looked abroad to places where they are approved and federally regulated or operating in grey areas. There is a flourishing multibillion-dollar industry of “stem cell tourism” in places such as “Mexico and Panama” and “as far afield as Abu Dhabi,” said The Guardian.

But most European countries limit the use of stem cell injections to clinical trials, and they are not an approved treatment for autism. In January, the Indian Supreme Court ruled that stem cell therapy cannot be used as a clinical treatment for autism spectrum disorder, making it clear it is “not only unethical but amounts to medical malpractice,” said Indian network NDTV.

When ‘hope outpaces evidence’

The biggest lesson from this story is “not political,” said Trial Site News. “It is human.” Parents seeking unsanctioned stem cell therapies are “not irrational.” Most are “navigating difficult realities” with “limited options and enormous responsibility.” The danger emerges when “hope outpaces evidence.” The appropriate response is “neither unquestioning enthusiasm nor reflexive dismissal” but rather “rigorous clinical research, transparent reporting, long-term safety monitoring and honest communication with families.”

After RFK promised to find a cure for autism last year, some people were “appalled and fearful,” clinical social worker Jennifer Cork said at Psychology Today. Plenty of families whose children require substantial support, however, were “relieved that someone in a position of power was finally talking about their struggles.” The issue is that these families “don’t need untried, expensive treatments.” They need “affordable therapies, respite care and adequate accommodations that they don’t have to fight for.” They also need Kennedy to “remember that autistic people are human beings, not lab rats.”

Infecting yourself with internal parasites doesn’t sound like the best way to feel better but scientists have “engineered” the genes of hookworms to deliver medicine – and “it’s just crazy enough to work”, said ZME Science.

US researchers have genetically modified hookworms to produce and secrete specific antibodies. This is a “first step” towards creating “living pharmaceutical factories” that can deliver therapeutic proteins “directly inside the host”, they said in their study, published in Nature Communications.

Internal leeches 

The hookworm has “spent millions of years perfecting how to assure long-term survival inside a human host, and how to get molecules out of its body and into ours”, said senior author Makedonka Mitreva, from Washington University in St Louis, on EurekAlert.

They are like an “internal leech”, infecting upwards of 400 million people globally, mostly in tropical regions, said LiveScience. As they latch on to the inner wall of the gut to feed on blood, they release “anti-inflammatory and immunosuppressant compounds to prevent the body from flushing them out”.

Scientists have already noted that this “cocktail of compounds” produced naturally by hookworms could help treat some metabolic disorders. But the new study takes things further – by engineering in an extra molecule for the worm to secrete.

Mitreva and her team used CRISPR gene-editing technology to insert into a hookworm egg genome “a gene coding for an antibody known to counteract” the pufferfish poison tetrodotoxin, a lethal, weaponisable neurotoxin with no known commercial antidote. They then infected hamsters with the modified parasites, and samples taken later showed the hamsters had antibodies to tetrodotoxin circulating in their blood.

“It was like the perfect moment,” Mitreva told R&D World. Now “we can start embarking on hookworms being a two-in-one platform” because we’ve shown they “can not only deliver a drug, but produce that drug and deliver it”.

‘Internal allies’ 

The goal now is to use this technology on humans. In the future, we “could see these worms engineered to produce a variety of other medications and excrete them inside the human body”, said LiveScience. They could potentially provide long-term treatments for chronic conditions such as inflammatory bowel disease, or even protective treatments for military personnel exposed to chemical or biological threats. Mitreva’s study was, in fact, funded by the US Department of Defense with a view to developing a treatment for tetrodotoxin poisoning.

This is an “exciting” approach that “paves the way for all sorts of injection-free biologic drug delivery”, said ZME Science. It’s “tantalising” to think that “engineered hookworms could one day” be our “internal allies, providing continuous therapeutic benefits while living safely within a human host”.

The upcoming release of the UK’s first weight-loss pill, Wegovy, has been described as “game-changing” by a leading pharmacy provider.

“We’ve already seen record demand ahead of the expected launch”, said James O’Loan, chief executive of Chemist4U. With the majority of people expressing interest in the new obesity treatment not being previous users of weight-loss injections, this indicated that the new pill “could widen access to millions of people across the country”.

How does it work?

Made by Danish pharmaceutical giant Novo Nordisk, the pill is an oral version of weight-loss medicine Wegovy, containing the same active ingredient, semaglutide.

Where GLP-1 injections “pass directly into the bloodstream, the pill has to first be absorbed through the stomach”. This is possible through “scientific innovation, creating a way of encapsulating semaglutide and shielding it from stomach acid”, said The Telegraph’s health and medical journalist David Cox.

As with injections, the Wegovy pill “mimics the effects of a gut hormone called GLP-1, released after eating, which regulates appetite and signals a feeling of fullness”.

The pill is taken daily, compared to the weekly injection, and comes in different doses which can be steadily increased each month.

How effective is it?

Early tests suggest it has a similar effect to injectable Wegovy. After 64 weeks, adults taking the pill lost an average of 14% to 17% of body weight, with about one in three people losing 20% or more.

Regulatory guidelines from the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency state that only people classified as clinically obese, with a Body Mass Index (BMI) of more than 30, or those who are overweight (BMI of 27-30) with at least one weight-related health condition such as high blood pressure or type 2 diabetes, will be eligible to receive the drug.

How much will it cost?

To start with, it will be available in the UK only on prescription privately and not free on the NHS. While exact prices are yet to be set, Robert Bradshaw, a superintendent pharmacist at Oxford Online Pharmacy, told The Telegraph he expects the Wegovy pill to “come in roughly at the same price as the injections”.

“I suspect the pill will be priced somewhere around about £80 to start with, progressing to £130 [for the intermediate dose], and maybe £160 for the top dose.”

With other drug companies developing their own weight-loss pills, however, “competition could also drive down the costs of treatment, as first-generation drugs, or those that offer slightly poorer top-line results, command lower prices”, said The Economist. Some government-funded health systems are likely to make “population-scale deals in the coming years, which could broaden access” further.

Are there any side-effects?

“These are similar whatever the version and related to levels of the drugs in the blood rather than how they are administered,” said Dr Mark Porter in The Times. Common side effects include “nausea and vomiting (slightly more common with the pill version), diarrhoea and/or constipation and abdominal discomfort, but these generally settle once people get used to the medicine”.

The much rarer but more serious side-effects “such as gallbladder problems (stones), inflammation of the pancreas (pancreatitis) and visual problems (optic neuropathy) probably remain the same as with injectables”.

But with the latest NHS statistics suggesting 66% of all people over 16 in England are overweight, and with obesity rates “continuing to spiral”, doctors are “optimistic that the emergence of GLP-1 tablets can serve as a major boost to public health”, said The Telegraph.

And globally, if generic semaglutide were made available to everyone with obesity and diabetes, it could save between 2.1 million and 3.1 million lives a year, according to one model, said The Economist.

If you have ever felt like you couldn’t stop eating your favorite sweet treats and savory snacks, that’s by design. The tobacco industry had a heavy hand in the growth of ultraprocessed food in the U.S. And despite no longer being involved, its marketing tricks remain.

A new addiction

Big Tobacco employed its tactics in marketing cigarettes to also market ultraprocessed food, according to a series of papers published in the American Journal of Public Health (AJPH). In the 1980s, U.S. tobacco giants Philip Morris and R.J. Reynolds made a “major entrance into the food industry” when they had “strong cash flows yet experienced growing scrutiny regarding their tobacco products,” said one of the AJPH papers. Investing in food and beverages was an attempt to improve their corporate image, so the team acquired several major brands, including Del Monte Foods, General Foods, Kraft, Nabisco and 7UP.

Tobacco companies “spent decades amassing research on how to make cigarettes more pleasurable and addictive with chemical additives” and “deliberately applied this knowledge to food manufacturing,” according to “internal company records,” said NPR. Thus came the rise of added sugars and artificial flavorings in food and beverages. These additives are known to be “hyperpalatable,” activating the same part of the brain as cigarettes or other drugs.

Along with changing the composition of the products, aggressive marketing tactics became the norm. Big Tobacco “applied the same strategies to developing light and reduced food products with the express goal of retaining customers who might otherwise stop consuming some of their products,” said lead paper author Tera Fazzino, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Kansas, to NPR.

The companies “divested from the food system from 2000 to 2007,” said the papers. However, their impact has been long-lasting. Ultraprocessed foods “now account for 70% of packaged foods in the U.S. and 62% of the calories in children’s diets,” said Fast Company. These foods have been linked to a variety of health problems, including obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular disease.

“Children are really, really vulnerable to this kind of messaging,” said paper author Laura Schmidt, a professor at the University of California at San Francisco, to The Washington Post. “The goal is to hook the consumer at the youngest possible age because, as you grow up, they have instilled brand loyalty in you.”

Trying to quit

There have been growing calls for regulating the production and sale of ultraprocessed foods, notably as part of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Make America Healthy Again agenda. Last summer, for example, federal agencies “began a joint effort to define ultraprocessed food,” said Bloomberg. This definition could be “used on product labels in an effort to nudge consumers to reach for healthier items.” The ultimate goal is to implement labeling on the front of packaging that indicates what foods are ultraprocessed. But creating such a definition is not so simple, as it could “inadvertently ensnare some healthier items like yogurt.”

While Kennedy may be pushing back against ultraprocessed food, the Trump administration has made “policy changes that could exacerbate the problem,” said The Guardian. The administration also “failed to direct policy changes that could help, like redirecting government corn subsidies toward whole fruits and vegetables.”

But better monitoring could lead to needed changes. Countries might “consider establishing a baseline of ultraprocessed or hyperpalatable food availability in their food environments to monitor food system health,” said the papers. There may also be a “global need to consider regulation of multiple addictive products disseminated by tobacco companies.”

With many in the Trump administration pushing an anti-vaccine agenda, declining measles vaccination rates have forced scientists to reinvigorate the hunt for a drug that could fight the virus. While the FDA has not approved any measles drugs yet, researchers seem hopeful that a breakthrough is on the horizon.

Why are researchers revamping the measles drug search?

For a long time, the quest to create a measles drug was essentially dormant, as the virus “had been kept at bay in the United States for more than two decades thanks to a remarkably effective vaccine,” said The New York Times. But in 2025, amid anti-vaccine sentiment from the White House, a “series of outbreaks popped up in unvaccinated communities across the country,” marking the worst year for measles in the U.S. since 1991.

The outbreak led to a “‘very crowded’ hunt for new measles therapeutics that could prevent or treat infections,” said the Times. Currently, if an unvaccinated individual contracts the measles, doctors can “offer ways to manage symptoms, which often include fever, fatigue, cough and a hallmark blotchy rash,” said Science News. But they “can’t fight off the virus itself.”

How far away is an approved measles drug?

There have been several breakthroughs from various scientific groups, and many feel that FDA approval of a measles drug is imminent. At least one antiviral drug, GHP-88310, was recently shown to “help treat measles, croup and other related viral diseases that cause contagious and life-threatening respiratory infections,” said The Independent. The drug is the “most promising inhibitor” of this virus family that causes measles “we have encountered in years of research,” Carolin Lieber, a senior postdoctoral fellow at Georgia State University’s Center for Translational Antiviral Research, said in a statement.

GHP-88310, which is taken orally, could “offer a much-needed option to treat measles in the midst of increasing endemic transmission in the U.S. and throughout the world due to vaccine hesitancy,” said Drug Discovery News. The drug could provide an alternative to the typical measles defense mechanism, ring vaccination, in which “direct and social contacts around an infected person are vaccinated.” But with “increasing vaccine hesitancy in some population groups, ring vaccination is no longer a viable option in some communities.”

The success of the drug doesn’t necessarily mean it will become ubiquitous as a measles treatment, partially due to people’s feelings about the disease. “One of the biggest misunderstandings about measles is that it’s ‘not that bad,’” Kathryn Hastie, a structural virologist at San Diego’s La Jolla Institute for Immunology, said to Science News. The virus instead can “cause a range of complications that can severely impact people’s lives, including pneumonia and blindness.”

Another company, Saravir, is developing its own measles antibody treatment. The medication could be a “potential multi-billion dollar market opportunity,” Dr. Ronald Moss, Saravir’s CEO, told the Times. Moss estimates there are 44 million people in the U.S. and EU who are “uniquely vulnerable to measles,” and if even a small portion of that group is exposed, it’s a “pretty big population that we would want to protect.” Still, the antibody treatment and other measles drugs could be cost-prohibitive. If the “drug makes it through trials,” said the Times, Saravir “expects the infusions to cost roughly $2,500.”

The Food and Drug Administration has approved the use of bemotrizinol (BEMT) in sunscreens. The chemical has been used in European and Asian brands of sunblock for decades. BEMT can provide better sun protection and last longer while being less greasy on the skin.

New kid in the block

Sunscreens are supposed to protect against both ultraviolet A (UVA) and B rays (UVB). UVB is “high-energy radiation that is typically associated with sunburns and can cause genetic mutations that lead to skin cancer,” said Scientific American. UVA rays have also “increasingly become recognized as relevant for skin health,” and their “longer-wavelength radiation” can “penetrate deeper into the skin than UVB, breaking down the skin’s structure and creating harmful, skin‑aging molecules.” Unfortunately, while most U.S. sunscreens are effective against UVB radiation, they “provided significantly lower UVA protection with the average unweighted UVA protection factor just 24% of the labeled SPF,” said a 2021 study.

BEMT, though, is capable of ”protecting against both ultraviolet A and B rays while not leaving white streaks associated with mineral-based sunscreens,” said The Associated Press. The ingredient is “generally recognized as safe and effective for use in sunscreens by adults and children 6 months of age and older,” said the FDA. “For too long, American consumers have been applying sunscreen and believing they were fully protected, not knowing that their product was delivering far less UVA protection than the label implied,” Alexa Friedman, a senior scientist at the Environmental Working Group, said in a statement.

Screening issues

There have been many efforts to get the government to approve new sunscreen ingredients, but they were “bogged down for decades by the FDA’s bureaucratic system for updating its lists of safe nonprescription drug ingredients,” said the AP. Bemotrizinol’s approval marks the “first ingredient to go through a streamlined process authorized by Congress in 2020.”

Sunscreen is an important step in preventing skin cancer, but there has been a mounting anti-sunscreen movement “amid an increasing distrust of the medical establishment and a desire by some for natural alternatives,” said The Washington Post. Much of the concern has surrounded chemical sunscreens, which get absorbed into the skin. In 2019, scientists from the FDA found that these sunscreens’ ingredients can stay in the body at unsafe levels after just one day of use. Bemotrizinol is “broad-spectrum and far more stable, so it doesn’t break down in the sun,” said NBC News. It “also has low levels of absorption into the body.”

What the US is trying to do in Kenya reeks of “neo-colonialism”, said The Daily Nation (Nairobi). To protect Americans from the deadly Ebola outbreak that is thought to have already killed at least 91 people in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), the Trump administration has decreed that no one with the disease may enter its borders, even if they’re a US citizen. Any American unlucky enough to have contracted the virus in DRC should instead be sent for treatment hundreds of miles away to a specially commissioned Ebola health centre in Kenya.

Cue outrage in Nairobi. “Kenya is NOT America’s biohazard dumping ground,” fumed a spokesman for one of Kenya’s doctors’ unions, echoing widespread fury at the proposal to set up a 50-bed quarantine facility at Kenya’s Laikipia Air Base. And hundreds of protesters took to the streets of Nanyuki, the town closest to the air base, fearing the disease might spread to their community. They blocked roads and set fire to tyres, and police had to fire tear gas to disperse them.

According to some reports, two people were shot dead. Yet despite the uproar, and a temporary court order blocking the site’s construction, Kenya’s President William Ruto has vowed to press ahead with it.

Potentially ‘catastrophic’

The debacle in Kenya is far from the only mistake the US has made over the Ebola crisis, said The East African (Nairobi). “Epidemics are best fought collectively”, but under Trump the US has withdrawn from the World Health Organisation (WHO) and shut down USAID, scuppering the international response needed to stem the current outbreak, which has now spread to Uganda.

Trump’s decisions have been disastrous, said Craig Spencer in The New York Times. Over the past year, critical surveillance networks in DRC have been dismantled, with the result that US officials only learnt of the first Ebola death a month after it happened, making it inevitable that the outbreak would turn “catastrophic” in scale.

To put this in context, the world’s worst-ever Ebola outbreak, which broke out in Guinea in 2014, went on to kill 11,300 and infect 28,600 others. That outbreak was first detected when there were around 40 to 50 cases; for this one, that number was 400 to 500. And to make matters worse, rapid tests and vaccines do not exist for the Bundibugyo strain of Ebola that is behind this latest epidemic.

“We are not getting ahead of this virus. We are running after it,” said Denis Mukwege in Le Monde (Paris). It’s already the third-largest outbreak in history, and could well become the deadliest ever.

Deep mistrust

The challenges facing teams on the ground are immense. For a start, the epicentre of the outbreak is war-torn eastern DRC, where conditions make contact-tracing almost impossible. And as the US has cut aid to the DRC from $1.34 billion in 2024 to just $428 million in 2025, local responders have “far fewer resources” than in any comparable recent crisis.

To add to the crisis, front-line health workers are “deeply” mistrusted by the local population, said The Economist. Look what happened two weeks ago in the small town of Mongbwalu in northern DRC, where a group of young men made four different attacks on the local hospital in a bid to retrieve the body of an Ebola victim for burial. The day before that, townsfolk had torched an isolation unit.

The crucial requirement is for the response to be consolidated under a single actor, just as it was for the 2014 outbreak when the UN Mission for Ebola Emergency Response (UNMEER) took charge, said Anthony Banbury in The Washington Post. Congolese health workers and international NGOs have done an excellent job so far, but the lack of coordination has been a serious hindrance. “It is like going to war with scattered, independent military units, but no central headquarters directing the overall effort.”

In the absence of a body like UNMEER to devise and oversee a strategy for containing the outbreak, this epidemic could “spin out of control”. And then the world would be in real trouble.

The size of the global beauty and personal care market is astounding and is expected to approach $700 billion in 2026. From scented shampoos festooned with exotic oils to anti-aging creams and blemish-removers, those who can afford them seem to have a bottomless appetite for new products. Discerning consumers, however, may notice small but significant differences in ingredient lists depending on whether their purchases are made in the European Union or the United States.

These differences may look random but reflect longstanding differences in public health philosophies. “The EU tends to act on early signals, animal studies, preliminary lab findings, and the U.S. believes in waiting for real-world evidence before restricting anything,” said Ashley Fike at Vice. Still, the scope of the beauty market means that regulators need to stay vigilant even after bans are issued. Consumer Reports, for example, found methylene chloride in a number of hair dyes that the company tested in April 2026, despite the chemical being banned in the U.S. for cosmetics products since 1989.

Here are six prominent examples of beauty products and ingredients the EU has prohibited that remain legal in the U.S.

Coal Tar Dyes

Unlike many of the substances on this list, coal tar dyes are exactly what they sound like — or at least they were when they were invented. They are “mainly derived from petroleum nowadays, but they have retained their original name,” said Consumer Reports.

The FDA “must approve these color additives for use” in most beauty care products, although a loophole still exists for hair dyes, “which do not require FDA approval as long as the product includes a special cautionary statement and directions for a preliminary skin test,” said Consumer Reports. Hair dyes have been linked to increased risk of a number of different cancers, “including uterine and breast cancer, as well as the formation of ovarian tumors,” said the Environmental Working Group.

Formaldehyde and formaldehyde-releasing preservatives

Formaldehyde is a commonly used ingredient in nail polishes, hair straighteners and even some liquid baby soaps in the United States. In liquid baby soaps, consumers may find these formaldehyde releasers in ingredient lists: DMDM hydantoin, quaternium-15, diazolidinyl urea, imidazolidinyl urea, bronopol and sodium hydroxymethylglycinate.

Yet these ingredients are typically found only in trace amounts in baby soap products. “Maybe the greatest benefit of fearmongering about formaldehyde in shampoo is to make mommy breathless,” said Joe Schwarcz at McGill University. The chemicals, in the end, are found in higher concentrations in products like hair gels and dyes. Some states are running ahead of the federal government on this front, with Washington banning the use of formaldehyde-releasing chemicals in 2025.

Hydroquinone

Hydroquinone “works by decreasing the production and increasing the degradation of melanin pigments in the skin” and thereby “increasing the risk of skin cancer,” said the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics. In the U.S. it is mostly used in skin-lightening products purchased mostly by people of color, making its continued legality especially problematic.

The EU has banned all use of hydroquinone in cosmetics, while the U.S. has required a prescription to access such products since 2021. As with many other such ingredients, it is relatively easy to acquire them without a prescription if you know where to look. Regulators promised to “take action against those continuing to market these potentially harmful and illegal OTC products,” said the FDA.

Parabens

Parebens are “chemicals known for their preservative and antimicrobial properties” that “protect products from the things that shorten shelf life, such as yeast, bacteria and mold,” said the Cleveland Clinic. Just as the United States has more permissive rules governing these items’ use in food products, so too are parabens more likely to be found in beauty products in the U.S. versus the EU.

Parabens that are banned in the EU include isopropylparaben, isobutylparaben, phenylparaben, benzylparaben and pentylparaben, while others like propylparaben and butylparaben are allowed only under strict concentration limits. As for the U.S., we “do not have information showing that parabens as they are used in cosmetics have an effect on human health,” said the FDA.

Phthalates

Phthalates are “typically colorless liquids used to make plastics more flexible and resilient,” said the Centers for Disease Control. Some studies suggest that these chemicals can “disrupt hormones and damage the reproductive system,” said the Environmental Working Group.

The EU has banned the use of dibutyl phthalate (DBP) and diethylhexyl phthalate (DEHP) in cosmetics and personal care products. You can find phthalates in a number of products in the U.S., including nail polish removers and scented soaps. Critics charge that the U.S. has largely allowed the beauty and personal care industry to regulate itself. U.S. government regulators insist they don’t “have evidence that phthalates as used in cosmetics pose a safety risk,” said the FDA.

Triclosan

Triclosan is an “antimicrobial agent found in a wide variety of antibacterial soaps and detergents, as well as in many deodorants, toothpastes, cosmetics, fabrics and plastics,” said the Campaign For Safe Cosmetics. There is also evidence that it is an “endocrine disruptor and impacts thyroid function and thyroid homeostasis.”

The chemical remains an ingredient in countless products from whitening toothpastes to eyeshadows, although the FDA did ban its inclusion in household soap products in 2016. Companies can still include triclosan in over-the-counter antiseptic after going through a premarket review process with the FDA, and the chemical can be used without restriction in cosmetics and toothpastes. In the EU, triclosan is completely banned in cosmetics as of 2025, and products containing it “can no longer be made available on the European market,” said the Obelis Group.

For the people of Gaza, “fear is no longer linked only to what falls from the sky”, but also to “what crawls from below”, said Prospect.

Rats and other rodents have “taken over everything in a frenzy” and, with summer approaching, their numbers are expected to soar even higher.

Physical and psychological threats

A “plague” of rodents is “terrorising” the area, said the Financial Times, as rats and weasels “chew their way into tents, biting children and contaminating food”. A Unicef spokesperson who visited Gaza this month said rodents are becoming “a huge, huge problem because of accumulated rubble everywhere”.

The threat they pose is more than psychological. Rats transmit diseases through urine and waste, causing fever and other illnesses. Diabetic patients are particularly vulnerable to rodent bites, as they may not feel it happening and serious complications can occur.

More than 72,000 Palestinians have been killed in Israel’s war in Gaza, and rats began “eating human bodies under the rubble”, Samah al-Dabla, who was displaced from Beit Lahiya in northern Gaza, told Al Jazeera.

Rats are now appearing in the tents where many Gazans live. Al-Dabla has tried to buy rat poison but the prices are too high and she already struggles to afford enough food for her family. Any food she manages to obtain tends only to attract more rats.

Mounting problem

Dr Ayman Abu Rahma, director of preventive medicine at Gaza’s Ministry of Health, told Al Jazeera that the problem has three main causes: damage to sewage systems, decomposing bodies under the rubble, and the amount of rubbish building up in the territory. Gaza City’s main landfill site is a “breeding ground for rodents in a densely populated area”, said Al Jazeera.

Local officials want to convert waste into organic fertiliser, but the war has destroyed much of the equipment needed for such a process.

The urgency is clear: rubbish dumps are located close to tents in displacement sites, creating serious “health hazards that will increase as summer temperatures rise”, humanitarian officials and residents told the Financial Times.

Cogat, the Israeli Ministry of Defence body that monitors aid access to Gaza, said that “nearly 170 tons of pesticides and thousands of traps for rats, mosquitoes, and other pests have been brought into the Gaza Strip in recent weeks”.

But Salim Oweis, the Unicef spokesperson who visited Gaza, said the amount allowed in is “barely enough for a few weeks” and “the whole of Gaza” is affected.

A needle-free universal vaccine may soon be on the horizon. Scientists have successfully run the first trial, which showed the vaccine can safely elicit an immune response to several viruses. But more research is needed before it’s approved for widespread use, so larger trials are now planned.

How was the vaccine developed?

This universal vaccine is the first human-tested inoculation to have its active component designed by computer simulations, according to a study published in the Journal of Infection. The vaccine has an AI-created “super-antigen,” a “protein that mimics shared features across multiple coronaviruses, rather than targeting a single specific strain, which can trigger the body’s immune system to fight a broad array of pathogens with those base characteristics,” said Euronews. Researchers “used all the available genetic sequence data for Sarbeco coronaviruses,” which are “zoonotic viruses that primarily circulate in bats and can jump to humans or other mammals.” They then “applied machine learning to create the super-antigen.”

“Viruses like influenza, coronaviruses and the Ebola group are evolving continuously, and by the time vaccines are rolled out, they may be poorly matched,” Saul Faust, a professor at the University of Southampton and the study’s chief investigator, said in a news release. But this “new class of universal vaccines are future-proofed,” as they “not only protect against many variants simultaneously but potentially against related viruses that haven’t yet emerged.” The universal vaccine can therefore curb outbreaks and even prevent future pandemics.

The vaccine is also needle-free. It’s administered through a microfluidic jet, which “uses a high-pressure, hair-thin stream of liquid to push vaccine blueprints directly into skin cells,” said Sky News. Without needles, it has greater “global applicability by reducing volume requirements, eliminating sharps waste and improving uptake in settings where needle-based administration is a barrier,” said Euronews. And it also doesn’t have to be kept as cold as traditional vaccines, making it “well-suited for use in low- and middle-income countries and in rapid-response scenarios.”

Is it effective on humans?

The vaccine has already shown promise in humans. The first clinical trial was conducted with 39 volunteers, and it was “well-tolerated at all four doses with no significant safety concerns elicited,” said the study. It also “triggered immune responses in the volunteers not only to SARS-CoV-2 and SARS but to related bat viruses that could potentially jump from animals to humans and cause future pandemics,” said the release.

However, the “magnitude of the response was limited and did not increase predictably with higher doses,” though this is likely influenced by prior Covid-19 exposure and vaccination history among participants, said the study. A larger Phase 2 trial will “next assess the vaccine’s ability to induce immune responses in a wider and more diverse population and confirm that it generates strong, broadly protective immune responses,” said the release.

The clinical trial proves the success of a whole new way to create vaccines. The use of AI “could protect against future emerging virus threats” and reduce the “need for frequent reformulation, which is a fundamental limitation of current vaccines,” said the release.

The old vaccine development system was like a “dog chasing its tail,” study lead Jonathan Heeney, a researcher from the University of Cambridge’s Lab of Viral Zoonotics, said in the release. “We can escape the constant cycle of chasing the virus variants circulating in humans and updating the vaccines to try to catch up.”

‘Flu vaccines should not be this hard’

Katherine J. Wu at The Atlantic

In a “typical year, the process of bringing a new seasonal flu shot to market is one of the United States’ most predictable vaccine routines,” but this is “not a typical year,” says Katherine J. Wu. The job would normally “fall to the CDC’s expert vaccine advisory panel, known as ACIP, which guides the agency’s recommendations,” but “currently, no functional ACIP exists to guide this autumn’s immunization campaigns.” This “could further undermine ACIP’s role as a key scientific check on government policy.”

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‘How women are shaping Minnesota’s cannabis industry’

Clemon Dabney at The Minnesota Star Tribune

Cannabis legalization “created a market in Minnesota. Women are helping create its culture,” says Clemon Dabney. While women are “still underrepresented in cannabis ownership,” the “women who are launching dispensaries across the state” are “doing far more than opening stores.” These women are “claiming space in an industry where they have too often been overlooked, underestimated or asked whether a man is really behind the business.” They “are setting the tone for what this market becomes.”

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‘Is Britain getting a new prime minister?’

Eliot Wilson at The Hill

In “America, changes of leaders are predictable,” but “in Britain, it is more nuanced,” says Eliot Wilson. It is “impossible to predict whether Sir Keir Starmer will still be prime minister at the end of this year, this month or perhaps even this week.” There is “no bar to a party in office changing its leader, who then becomes prime minister.” Will the United Kingdom “have a new prime minister by autumn? Yes. Or possibly no.”

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‘AI leaders are cosplaying James Bond villains’

Gautam Mukunda at Bloomberg

“Shark Tank impresario Kevin O’Leary wanted to build data centers on 40,000 acres in rural Box Elder County, Utah,” the “latest battle in the war that might determine the future of artificial intelligence,” says Gautum Mukunda. AI “might unleash miracles of productivity, cure cancer or make energy too cheap to meter,” but it “can’t do any of those things — or at least it can’t do them in the United States — if the public rejects the technology.”

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Spinal-cord injuries are “notoriously difficult to treat,” said Rhys Blakely, science editor of The Times. But Zurich-based researchers think a solution may be in sight: injectable microrobots.

When the spinal-cord is damaged, recovery is often limited: nerve-fibre regrowth can be hampered by scarring, and the nerve cells usually cannot regenerate on their own. But studies by a team at the Multi-Scale Robotics Lab at ETH Zurich suggest that microrobots, made from stem cells with magnetic nano-particles, could “coax” these nerve cells to repair and regenerate.

The studies were carried out in a lab on zebrafish and mice, so there is “still a long way to go” before the microrobots can be tested on humans. But the results are promising, and scientists the world over are intrigued by the idea of “microscopic repair crews, guided by magnets”.

‘Near-complete recovery’

The decision to build this “fleet of living machines” came after other experimental treatments had fallen short, said Blakely. Attempts to inject immature nerve cells into the injured area, then implant electrodes to stimulate them to develop, had failed.

So the Zurich robotics team engineered microscopic machines about six micrometers wide – smaller than a red blood cell. Each one combines a neural progenitor cell (a spinal stem cell) with a cluster of customised nanoparticles. These nanoparticles have two layers: one is sensitive to magnetic fields, so the microrobot can be guided by a magnet; the other turns magnetic signals into electrical pulses. This “lets scientists steer the cells and then coax them, electrically, into maturing into new nerve tissue”.

Millions of these microrobots were needed during the animal trials. First, they were injected into injured zebrafish larvae and, in three days, the larvae were exhibiting “near-complete recovery of swimming and exploratory behaviours”, according to the study published in Nature Materials. Then, when tested on mice with severed spinal cords, the microrobots “promoted neural differentiation, and resulted in substantial improvements in motor function within four weeks”.

‘Reproducible and scalable’

Further research is needed before these microrobots can be tested on humans but the Zurich team is already thinking about ways they can be used in other medical settings. “The reproducible and scalable production of microrobots using our lab-on-a-chip system demonstrates” that there is a great deal of “application potential”, said study leader Salvador Pané i Vidal. With adaptations, the microrobots could be used in wound healing, and to make cardiology and oncology treatments “safer, more controllable and more effective”.

Different microrobots have already been shown to be successful in other areas of medicine, said Healthcare in Europe. Formed in droplets, they are effective at “precision-targeted drug delivery”, outperforming IV-delivery on the amount of drug than reaches the target tissue.

‘India is losing its economic edge’

Sadanand Dhume at The Wall Street Journal

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi “faces a painful reality check: his promise to modernize India’s economy hasn’t panned out,” says Sadanand Dhume. The country “faces a rapidly weakening rupee, dwindling net foreign investment and worries that artificial intelligence will take a wrecking ball to the information technology industry.” Instead of “assuming that the world wants to beat a path to India, the government should emulate countries like Vietnam that ruthlessly focus on being more business-friendly.”

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‘We’ve come too far to let AIDS win’

Elton John and Bill Frist at USA Today

Thanks to “American leadership and extraordinary global cooperation, despair has given way to hope and action,” as “we are closer than ever to ending AIDS,” say Elton John and former Sen. Bill Frist (R-Tenn.). The “bipartisan President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) has saved more than 26 million lives,” but the U.S. State Department should “consider doubling their rollout plan so resources can reach more communities without delay and to reengage community health workers.”

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‘As we approach July 4, the capital is, fittingly, a mess’

Jackie Calmes at the Los Angeles Times

One month “out from America’s celebration of its 250th birthday, the national capital is a mess,” says Jackie Calmes. This includes “sites central to the pilgrimages that millions of Americans make each year to Washington.” It’s “all about Trump,” who “sees only a site for self-glorification.” This is “hardly the adulatory message appropriate to a people who, by the Declaration of Independence 250 years ago, renounced a king and went on to create a democratic republic.”

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‘To be a better negotiator, learn to live a little’

Attia Qureshi and John Richardson at Time

Negotiation is a “skill — one most of us haven’t learned or practiced. Most of us, most of the time, just aren’t very good at it,” say Attia Qureshi and John Richardson. There are a “lot of components that go into a successful negotiation. But before you can use most of those strategies, you need to get the other person’s attention.” Start by “pushing that reciprocity button and watching for any changes in the other person’s reactions.”

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What happened

New World screwworm, a deadly flesh-eating parasite, has been confirmed in a calf in south Texas, the U.S. Department of Agriculture said late Wednesday. It was the first case of the fly-borne parasite found in U.S. livestock since 1966.

Who said what

Screwworms are “parasitic flies whose females lay eggs in open wounds” on “any warm-blooded animal,” hatching hundreds of larvae that “use their sharp mouths to burrow through living flesh, eventually killing their host if left untreated,” Reuters said. Human cases are “rare,” and the fly “poses no food safety issues.”

The U.S. has been preparing for the parasite’s arrival, sealing the U.S. southern border to livestock since screwworms were found spreading north through Mexico in 2024. If “more screwworms are found” in the U.S. beyond this one case, it “could devastate the American cattle industry,” The New York Times said. The nation’s cattle herd is “already at its smallest since the 1950s,” The Wall Street Journal said.

What next?

The USDA is “taking immediate action” to “contain” and “eradicate this case,” said Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, including forming a 12.4-mile “infested zone” quarantine around the calf, increasing monitoring and releasing millions of sterile New World screwworm flies to shrink the population.

A class of synthetic drugs called orphines is throwing a new wrench into the ever-evolving opioid crisis in the United States. These drugs have tenfold the potency of fentanyl and have led to numerous overdose deaths in 2026. Experts say removing them from the streets, or even identifying them, could be extremely difficult.

What are orphines?

They are a “class of opioids that was created in the 1960s,” said The New York Times, as part of a project to find “rapid, safe pain relievers for surgery.” Orphines were developed by Paul Janssen, a Belgian doctor, the same man who originally synthesized fentanyl. It was soon discovered that “orphines had life-threatening side effects such as acute respiratory depression and were highly addictive,” which halted their development.

Orphines are generally considered to be at least “10 times more powerful than fentanyl, even in quantities no greater than a few sand-size grains,” said the Times. Like fentanyl, orphines can be “lethal with stunning speed, with victims slumping over abruptly, respiration shutting down, chest walls rigid.” Naloxone, a drug that reverses the effects of opioids, is effective against orphine, but “numerous doses may be required, many more than the one or two doses typically needed for fentanyl.”

Why are they prevalent now?

Orphines started to become ubiquitous among street drugs in the “wake of global crackdowns on fentanyl,” said the Times. The “emergence of orphines appears to follow regulatory actions targeting fentanyl analogues,” said the industry outlet Pharmacy Times, forcing dealers and users to pivot to new drugs. Most experts “believe the drug is produced at scale by international, multilevel drug distribution networks, likely originating from regions like South Asia or China,” and is then funneled to the U.S., said The Independent.

By the end of January 2026, orphine usage had been “detected in New York, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Illinois, Louisiana, Texas, Washington, Nevada and California,” said The Hill. Overdose deaths from the drug have been reported in nearly all these states. At least 41 deaths from an orphine called cychlorphine occurred in Tennessee alone between July 2025 and February 2026, according to the Knox County Regional Forensic Center.

What next?

Doctors and researchers are trying to find ways to stem the flow of orphines. Doing so is difficult because it is “not hard for labs to pump it out,” said The Hill. The drug isn’t simply coming from a bathroom brew made “from a couple of products or in the U.S.,” Timothy Wiegand of the American Society of Addiction Medicine told The Hill. It is coming from international “drug distribution networks, some of the cartels or other isolated networks.”

As orphines continue to plague U.S. cities, medical examiners have “become frontline drug detectives, pressing to identify the new substances causing deaths,” said the Times. Many are “coordinating with law enforcement and local health departments to swiftly warn communities about the latest killer in their midst,” though local medical examiners’ offices are often chronically underfunded.

These drugs represent a “dangerous shift in the opioid crisis,” Dr. Rachel Wirginis, an addiction medicine and family medicine physician at the Oklahoma State University Addiction Recovery Clinic, said in a press release. Physicians are “seeing increasingly powerful synthetic opioids that require rapid recognition and aggressive intervention to prevent fatal outcomes.”

What happened

A cancer drug decades in the making significantly extended and improved the life of patients whose metastatic pancreatic cancer had stopped responding to previous treatments, researchers reported Sunday in The New England Journal of Medicine and at an American Society for Clinical Oncology meeting in Chicago. In a study of 500 last-stage pancreatic patients, those assigned Revolution Medicine’s daraxonrasib pill lived an average of 13.2 months versus 6.7 months for those undergoing chemotherapy. They also experienced fewer side effects.

Who said what

The “hotly anticipated” findings suggest researchers have “cracked one of the most stubbornly lethal cancers” by blocking mutated KRAS genes responsible for most pancreatic tumors, The Washington Post said. Daraxonrasib “ticks all of the boxes,” Dr. Rachna Shroff of the University of Arizona Cancer Center, who wasn’t involved in the study, told The Associated Press. “Having treated pancreatic cancer for 16 years, I actually started crying” at the results.

What next?

“Dozens of experimental drugs” targeting cancer-causing gene mutations are in development, stoking “optimism that this may be a turning point in the quest” for new treatment options, the AP said. Revolution Medicine is now testing daraxonrasib in earlier-stage cancer and in combination with other treatments.

The Trump administration’s moves to cut foreign aid and end ties with the World Health Organization could be making it more difficult to halt the latest Ebola outbreak in Africa.

Public health experts believe White House policies are “weakening critical networks” that respond to outbreaks in a “densely populated, politically unstable part of the world,” said Axios. The dismantling of U.S. support has “left the region dangerously exposed,” leading to the likelihood that Ebola was spreading “for some time” before it was detected, International Rescue Committee’s Heather Reoch Kerr said in a statement, per the outlet.

The Trump administration is pushing back against the criticism. The U.S. is “working with international partners” and “supporting response efforts” in Uganda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Health and Human Services spokesperson Andrew Nixon said in a statement to Axios.

What did the commentators say?

“This is what happens when you defund Ebola prevention,” Sara Herschander said at Vox. There are “no vaccines or treatments” for the strain of virus at the heart of the current outbreak and the disease is spreading quickly “under the heavy shadow of U.S. foreign aid cuts” that “gutted” Ebola detection and response programs. Many of the experts and researchers who once would have guided the response are “simply not there anymore.” The U.S. has now pledged $23 million in emergency funding to Congo and Uganda, but “you can’t expect a bandaid to make up for the damage.”

The Ebola outbreak is a story of “institutional erosion,” Columbia University’s Thoai D. Ngo said at Newsweek. U.S. aid “helped build laboratory networks, train field epidemiologists, establish emergency operations centers” and other public health infrastructure that made it possible for epidemics to be “detected early and contained quietly.” That system is being “hollowed out,” which is short-sighted. “Global health security is domestic health security.”

The world “doesn’t have to fail” the test posed by Ebola, Michael T. Osterholm, the director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, said at The Washington Post. It is “not fair” to place blame for the outbreak at the “feet of the Trump administration.” This virus emerged in an “unstable area of Congo” and is able to avoid detection by Ebola tests designed to find more common strains. But the U.S. can choose to once again deploy its resources to help contain dangerous diseases, even when they emerge in foreign lands. That choice would protect Americans “at home and abroad from a highly lethal illness.”

What next?

American infectious disease experts “have been barred from speaking directly with the World Health Organization,” said CNN. The Trump administration-issued ban — which applies to officials at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases — was in place for the recent hantavirus outbreak aboard a cruise ship but was “relaxed slightly” for the Ebola outbreak.

These restrictions “hobble quick cooperation” in disease response, health officials said, per CNN. The United States has “written off most of the institutions with global health,” Jeremy Konyndyk, the president of Refugees International, told the outlet.

Vomiting, diarrhoea, sweating and a swollen face. Not the normal desired effects of a detox, but a kambo ceremony is not a normal detox.

Kambo is a poisonous secretion from an Amazonian tree frog, used by some indigenous people as traditional medicine. Its use as a wellness practice has spread to the US and Europe.

Last weekend it was reported that Kristian Trend, a 40-year-old wellness coach and cancer survivor from Leicester, had died after taking the frog poison. “He is believed to be the first British victim,” said The Times, but at least six deaths worldwide have been associated with kambo.

The substance is harvested from the defensive skin secretions of the Amazonian giant monkey tree frog. In the traditional medicine of some indigenous peoples of the Amazon, kambo “is applied to superficial burns on the skin of participants to produce an intense purging effect”, said Martin Williams, research fellow at Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, on The Conversation.

‘Uncontrolled increase in fatalities’

Self-styled “kambo practitioners” have touted a range of supposed benefits for the purge and detox, including reduced anxiety, boosted energy and relief from chronic pain. Despite the documented side-effects, “the great majority of users of kambo anecdotally report positive physical, emotional and spiritual after-effects”, said Williams. Several celebrities have reportedly tried kambo, including actor Orlando Bloom, who told GQ that he had tried the treatment several times and claimed it left him with a “feeling of being clearer and wide open”. “You have this sensation of death and you kind of purge your body. But it’s incredible.” He did add, however, that “it was pretty brutal in terms of what it does to the body in the moment”, describing it as “coming out both ends”.

Kambo can also have more severe health consequences, with a paper published last year in Cureus, the online journal, warning of potential long-term issues. According to the scientists, the psychiatric effects were induced by hyperthermia and hyponatraemia, which were “often misinterpreted by participants as ‘astral travel’, instead of being recognised as potentially fatal conditions”. They added: “The widespread availability of kambo on the internet poses another pressing concern, contributing to an uncontrolled increase in fatalities.”

‘Absolute Western arrogance’

Governments around the world have acted to ban the poison. In Brazil, it’s illegal to sell or market kambo. In Australia, where two deaths after kambo rituals have led to coroner’s inquests, it was listed by the Therapeutic Goods Administration in 2021 as a Schedule 10 poison: a “substance of such danger to health as to warrant prohibition of sale, supply and use”.

Trend’s mother Angie told The Telegraph that she wants the treatment to be banned in the UK following her son’s death: “He was going to cleanse himself, that’s what he said to me. He was very spiritual. He took a lot of vitamins.”

Despite the dangers, the adoption of wellness rituals involving kambo continues to grow worldwide. “A lot of these Western wellness practitioners are exploiting people’s gullibility and exploiting those who are sceptical about Western medicine,” Prof Roger Byard, a forensic pathologist at Adelaide University, told The Guardian.

“But the techniques of shamans and healers in Indigenous communities have been used for hundreds of years and they have been trained to safely use these substances for certain, specific situations. To think that we can go into a community or spend a bit of time in another country and then take one of their time-honoured, cultural practices and then just take it for our own use is absolute Western arrogance.”

‘Plant viruses could threaten your coffee, chocolate and wine’

Anna E. Whitfield, Julie K. Pfeiffer and Terence S. Dermody at The Hill

Coffee, chocolate and wine are “woven into daily life and global economies,” say Anna E. Whitfield, Julie K. Pfeiffer and Terence S. Dermody. But the “plants that make these pleasures possible are increasingly under threat from plant viruses.” The “same forces driving viral outbreaks in coffee, cacao and grapes also threaten staple crops that underpin global food security.” Coffee, chocolate and wine’s “vulnerability is a reminder that plant health underlies far more of daily life than we tend to notice.”

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‘RFK Jr.’s move on peptides ignores serious risks’

Eli Thompson at USA Today

RFK Jr. “announced that he would force the Food and Drug Administration to reconsider a ban on peptides,” but as he “pushes to make these unregulated drugs easier to access, the trend is already here,” says Eli Thompson. These “substances, which were once only used by serious bodybuilders or in medical settings, are now part of everyday conversation.” This “shift is happening quickly,” and Americans “need to find a way to make peptides less attractive to young men.”

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‘As 2028 approaches, America needs ranked choice voting more than ever’

Jamie Raskin at The Guardian

Democrats “must act shrewdly to advance party rules of our own that promote majority rule, interracial political solidarity and the power of the voters,” says Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.). The “best tool to empower voters to make constructive choices among exciting new voices in such a crowded field is the mechanism of ranked choice voting.” Allowing “greater use of ranked choice voting in states where Democratic Party organizations choose it should be a slam dunk for DNC decision-makers.”

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‘Tokens are not the new billable hour (and confusing the two will be costly)’

Ravi Kumar S at Newsweek

For “decades, IT services companies were built on the simple production function of human effort, delivered through billable hours and the pyramid structure,” says Ravi Kumar S. But as AI “model interactions become more embedded into workflows, tokens emerge as the new production input reshaping the foundation of the services model.” If “token consumption continues to be treated as the primary metric, costs will scale linearly with demand without a corresponding return in business outcomes.”

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What happened

President Donald Trump on Tuesday spent more than three hours at Walter Reed Medical Center for his fourth publicly disclosed medical exam since returning to office last year. The White House did not release any details of the exam, but “everything checked out PERFECTLY,” Trump, who turns 80 next month, said on social media.

Who said what

Trump’s unusually frequent exams have put his health “under renewed public scrutiny after he has worked to dismiss concerns over his age and stamina,” The Associated Press said. He “frequently casts himself as more energetic and fitter than Joe Biden,” who left office at age 82 after “facing questions about his fitness for the job,” Reuters said.

Trump’s “health and fitness have been central to his political identity,” but as an “aging president, he now receives some of the same questions that dogged Biden — namely, whether he is mentally and physically fit” enough, The Washington Post said. “Independent doctors” have called the White House’s explanations for Trump’s bruised hands, neck rash, swollen legs and “occasional sleepiness” at meetings “insufficient.”

What next?

It was “not immediately clear whether the White House would release details” from Trump’s clinical exam to “support his claim” of good health, The New York Times said.

Among the many crusades in his quest to “Make America Healthy Again,” one target of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is antidepressants. Kennedy has long said that psychiatric drugs like SSRIs (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors) are harmful, including claiming they cause mass shootings.

Kennedy recently announced at a MAHA Institute mental health summit an initiative to help wean Americans off antidepressants. The announcement sparked a debate among experts over the campaign’s pros and cons.

Stigmatization and lack of access

Kennedy’s perspective on deprescribing SSRIs “really is an oversimplification,” Theresa Miskimen Rivera, the president of the American Psychiatric Association, said to NPR. The health secretary’s view “ignores the larger reality,” which is that “too many patients really cannot access timely, comprehensive care.” Rivera and the American Psychiatric Association support “any plans to better train healthcare providers to safely prescribe and wean patients off antidepressants.”

The health secretary has “no real interest in fixing structural problems that leave people with no choice but to use SSRIs,” Amanda Marcotte said at Salon. On the contrary, Kennedy has a “long history of talking about people on SSRIs in dehumanizing, often racist language” that implies “their actual problem is they’re lazy and need to just work harder — or even work for free.” The problem isn’t “lack of will but lack of access.” The only purpose of Kennedy’s rhetoric is to make it “easier to justify taking away their healthcare.” It is the “same old Republican playbook, just dressed up in a phony mask of compassion.”

There is a “legitimate clinical problem” at the center of Kennedy’s initiative to help Americans stop taking antidepressants, Jonathan Slater, a clinical professor of psychiatry at Columbia University Irving Medical Center, said at Stat News. Deprescribing is indeed “understudied, undertaught and under-reimbursed.”

But the health secretary’s campaign “conflates that genuine clinical need with claims unsupported by evidence, and some that are actively dangerous,” said Slater. Redirecting patients away from medications is “only clinically responsible if the alternatives are accessible. They are not.” Patients on antidepressants deserve two things: an “honest conversation about whether they still need their medication” and a “system equipped to help them stop safely if they do not.” Right now, “we have neither the data nor the infrastructure to deliver that.”

Turning a blind eye to weaning difficulties

For decades, mainstream psychiatry “willfully blinded itself” to the “burden and severity of withdrawal and discontinuation-related difficulties” from antidepressants and other psychiatric drugs, Awais Aftab, a clinical associate professor of psychiatry, said to The New York Times. American Society for Clinical Pathology guidelines only “tinker” toward solutions and “generally recommend maintenance treatment for recurrent depression, bipolar I disorder and schizophrenia, ignoring controversies in these areas.” The guidelines assume that most people are “correctly diagnosed,” when in reality there is “widespread diagnostic chaos and decisions about maintenance are made under considerable uncertainty.”

Kennedy is correct that more “evidence-based care and therapies” should be available, Vera Feuer, a child and adolescent psychiatrist, said to NPR. Some of the health secretary’s recommendations are “completely reasonable.” Everybody should have access to a “detailed, careful assessment.” Prescribers should also not “feel pressured by parents and schools to instantly medicate behaviors that are due to other issues.”

In diagnosing “overmedicalization as a major problem,” the MAHA movement “gets something right,” Khameer Kidia, a physician and anthropologist at Harvard Medical School, said at The Boston Globe. However, the issue “doesn’t begin with physicians and our prescription pads.” As the opioid epidemic has shown, the “problem starts higher up.”

Drug companies have led the public to believe the “drugs corrected a chemical imbalance in the brain,” said Kidia. No such imbalance has been proven, and “many research studies show the drugs are only modestly better than placebos.” Now that so many patients are on SSRIs, “pharmaceutical companies have little incentive to get them to stop.” The problem with “MAHA’s approach to mental health” is the “overarching placement of responsibility with individuals” rather than the “exploitative systems that create poor mental health.” MAHA is “half right with the diagnosis,” but its “prescription conveniently ignores the root causes of the problems it has identified.”

Forty-two athletes, including swimmers, weightlifters and sprinters, will compete in Las Vegas on Sunday in the first Enhanced Games.

Little in sport has “caused as much controversy – nor provoked as many questions – as the Enhanced Games”, said BBC sports editor Dan Roan. “Those behind it claim it is here to stay, and could soon expand to more events and other disciplines.”

But there is another side to the spectacle of juiced-up competitors trying to beat the world record in their discipline. Earlier this year, the company behind the event, Enhanced, launched a range of personalised performance and longevity medicines to sell to the public.

What did the commentators say?

Proponents of the games say the aim is “to challenge sporting norms by allowing athletes to push their potential with legal drugs under strict medical oversight”, said Chris Kenning in USA Today. “The approach is, let’s not be naive and pretend it’s not happening,” said Enhanced CEO Max Martin. “Let’s just take what’s happening in the shadows, put it out in the open.”

But that’s not sensible, say some sports medicine experts. “It’s akin to me saying I’m going to make smoking safe by supervising you while you’re smoking,” Aaron Baggish, professor of medicine at the University of Lausanne, told Yahoo Sports.

Most critics though “overlook the fact that the Enhanced Games is making obvious what society has always quietly accepted”, said Byron Hyde, philosopher of science and public policy at Bristol University, on The Conversation – namely “that most people are willing to watch athletes risk harm when the entertainment is good enough”. Brain trauma is the “potential price of boxing entertainment”, so “why the outrage about pharmaceutical enhancement risks?”

For Baggish, the “primary concern” is the message the event sends to the public that using these substances when taking part in sports “is in any way, shape or form OK. That’s the really scary thing.”

That appears to be one of the goals of the organisers. Aron D’Souza, founder of the Enhanced Games, told The Independent in 2024: “This is the route towards eternal life.” The games will “bring about performance-medicine technologies that then create a feedback cycle of good technologies, selling to the world, more revenue, more R&D, to develop better and better technologies”. Ultimately, “it’s about being a better, stronger, faster, younger athlete for longer. And who doesn’t want to be younger for longer?”

But, said The Economist, “the real purpose of the games is to push the limits of what the public sees as the acceptable use of performance-enhancing drugs”. The event is taking place “at a time when concerns are being raised over the medicalisation of Western society”, said Roan. Social media and ‘looksmaxxing’ are being “blamed for fuelling demand for weight-loss injections, cosmetic treatments and performance substances”.

What next?

The Enhanced Games “speak to a vision of the future in which medicines, rather than being simply used to treat disease, can extend human longevity and enhance well-being”, said The Economist.

But on Sunday, the athletes involved will effectively be the guinea pigs for this idea, albeit ones who have “burned bridges, risked their future livelihoods or their health”. And with the launch of Enhanced’s consumer business, “more and more people may soon be wagering their bodies on a chance to roll back the clock”.

Two things are true: Cruise ships can be breeding grounds for disease. Americans love cruises anyway.

Expedition cruise lines “haven’t experienced any slowdown in bookings” following the deadly hantavirus outbreak on the MV Hondius, said The Wall Street Journal. Oceangoing travelers “generally understand the realities” of long boat journeys, Expedition Cruise Network CEO Akvile Marozaite said to the newspaper. Despite the scary headlines, industry experts “expect a record number of people” to take cruises this year, said The Associated Press. The sector “seems to be somewhat Teflon” to the bad publicity, Cornell University’s Robert Kwortnik said to the outlet.

What did the commentators say?

“Why would anyone go on a cruise?” Dave Schilling said at The Guardian. The Hondius drew worldwide attention, but a separate ship that was briefly quarantined with a rash of stomach flu cases was largely overlooked by the media. The stories are “piling up” about cruise ships being ocean-bound “fetid petri dishes.” There is not “one thing” a cruise offers “that isn’t available in the safe bosom of dry land.” Cruises will remain popular anyway. If Covid-19 “didn’t kill” enthusiasm for the excursions, “I think the industry is safe.”

People who criticize cruises are “wrong about nearly everything,” Nicole Russell said at USA Today. The hantavirus outbreak “won’t dampen my desire to go on a cruise.” There may be many stories of “terrible things happening on cruise ships,” but they are “worth the risk” because they can provide an “affordable, joy-filled family vacation.” Cruises, like life, are a “trade-off.” And life is “meant to be lived.“

“Do I think cruises are worth it, health-wise?” epidemiologist Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz said at Slate. The answer is a “bit complicated.” Cruises are “absolutely great places for illnesses to thrive,” but there is not a “great deal of evidence showing that infections are more likely” than on land. It is possible that people “just generally come into contact with lots of others on vacation.” Meyerowitz-Katz is considering taking his own family on a cruise. After weighing both the risks and benefits, “it doesn’t seem like the worst idea in the world.“

What next?

People planning to take a cruise should “practice great hand hygiene,” said CNBC. They should also “get up-to-date on your vaccines” before departing. And they should “keep a safe social distance” if illness rears its head. Best to stay clear of anyone who is coughing, “has difficulty breathing or is exhibiting fever,” Wellness Equity Alliance’s Dr. Tyler B. Evans said to the outlet.

The Hondius’ next voyage is already planned, said Forbes. After arriving in the Netherlands, the ship is to be “disinfected using chlorine and peroxide,” and the crew quarantined. Two scheduled voyages for the Hondius were canceled, but the plan “pending successful cleaning” is to sail in June from the Svalbard islands to the North Pole.

The MAHA movement, led by HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has been pushing for healthier food for schoolchildren, but the Trump administration’s budget cuts might make this difficult. Combined with a series of changing MAHA-adjacent nutritional guidelines, some schools are reportedly finding it hard to fund kids’ lunches.

Why are schools having trouble providing lunches?

A large part of the issue lies with the new MAHA health guidelines, which encourages people to “avoid highly processed foods and prioritize ‘high-quality, nutrient-dense’ protein at every meal,” said NPR. These guidelines form the “basis of federal nutrition standards that schools participating in federal meal programs must follow.” But many school districts “rely on processed, premade foods to feed their students, and protein is already the most expensive ingredient on the cafeteria plate.”

Currently, the government’s federal reimbursement rate for a free school lunch is about $4.70, which “must cover the food and the supplies, our labor and our equipment, deliveries and utilities, and the list goes on,” Stephanie Dillard, the president of the nonprofit School Nutrition Association (SNA), said in a congressional hearing. Many have “lauded the push toward scratch-made meals and more whole food options,” said Fortune. But these healthier foods are typically more expensive, and experts worry that trying to fit them into just $4.70 will “further strain schools already concerned with the future of their school lunch programs.”

The push for healthier meals is being juxtaposed with the White House’s decision to “cut funding programs that allowed schools to buy local food from farmers,” said NPR. The USDA has reportedly ended the “Local Food for Schools Cooperative Agreement Program, erasing an estimated $660 million in funding” that was used to buy “unprocessed or minimally processed foods” for schools. The cuts come as nearly seven in 10 school administrators, 69.6%, don’t think the $4.70 reimbursement rate is “sufficient to cover the costs” of school lunches, according to an SNA survey.

Is there a solution?

Many experts are pushing for increased funding for school lunches, which could help offset the cost of their increasing expense. The “issue here is the operational reality of getting there with the current level of funding,” David Ortega, a professor of food economics and policy at Michigan State University, said to Fortune. “Not having enough staff, culinary training that comes with trying to do a lot of that more whole-food scratch cooking, the need for equipment and infrastructure — these are really operational issues that have to be addressed from a funding perspective.”

Enabling school districts to serve healthier foods is “what we’re trying to do,” Mara Fleishman, the CEO of the Chef Ann Foundation, a school-food-reform organization, told The Christian Science Monitor. But doing so “requires support. It requires the right equipment. It requires funding.” Districts should be “shown how to create varied menus, identify where they can spend more on higher-quality ingredients, reassess labor costs and acquire the proper equipment.”

Government officials deny that budget cuts are hurting school lunch programs. “Out of a multitrillion-dollar government budget, it’s not surprising the media can find examples of cuts instead of ignoring the larger issue that the Trump administration is fighting for farmers and real food more than any administration in history,” senior White House adviser Calley Means told Bloomberg. The USDA has announced a $20 million farm-to-table program grant for schools, describing it as “record-breaking,” Bloomberg said, even though this still leaves a “$640 million gap compared to what was cut last year.”

Rising Ebola cases in the Democratic Republic of the Congo are ringing alarm bells across a region still scarred by previous outbreaks of the highly contagious viral disease. The World Health Organization has declared a “public health emergency of international concern”.

At least 540 suspected cases and 131 suspected deaths have been reported by DR Congo’s health minister, and two cases have been confirmed in neighbouring Uganda. But the WHO’s initial sampling suggests the outbreak is potentially much more widespread.

And what makes this outbreak “extraordinary”, said the WHO, is that it’s caused by the rare Bundibugyo strain of the Ebola virus. This has a lower fatality rate (about 35%) than the more common Zaire or Sudan strains (up to 90% and 50% respectively) but there is no licensed Bundibugyo-specific vaccine or treatment – and the tests for it do not appear to work very well.

What did the commentators say?

Experts are alarmed that this outbreak “has been able to spread for weeks undetected across a densely populated ​area”, said Reuters. It took weeks to identify it as the Bundibugyo strain and then pinpointing cases was “slowed by limited diagnostic capacity”, with only six tests possible per hour.

The lack of a vaccine is why I am in “panic mode”, Jean Kaseya, the director-general of Africa-Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, told Sky News. And ongoing attacks by Islamic State-backed militants in Ituri, the province at the centre of the outbreak, are “restricting surveillance and rapid response operations”.

Ituri is “rebel-held territory”, close to “porous borders” with Uganda and South Sudan that communities cross constantly, said The Times. That’s certainly one factor that’s “making containment so difficult”. Bundibugyo is also “among the least studied of the Ebola strains”: this is only the third outbreak on record.

We reached a “critical moment”, said the BBC’s health correspondent James Gallagher. Most Ebola outbreaks are small but specialists are still “haunted” by the largest, which started in 2014 and killed more than 11,000 people in West Africa. This time, there is a “significant threat” not only to DR Congo and Uganda but also South Sudan and Rwanda. But that doesn’t mean we’re “in the early stages of a Covid-style pandemic”. The risk to the rest of the world “remains tiny”.

DR Congo has “extensive experience in dealing with Ebola outbreaks”, and its response is “significantly stronger today than it was a decade ago”, Daniela Manno, of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, told the BBC’s Gallagher. But recent US-led foreign-aid cuts have taken their toll. Containing the 2014 outbreak “relied on US leadership from USAID”, said Devi Sridharm, chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh, in The Guardian. But “the USAID team dedicated to Ebola-like diseases was cut by Elon Musk”. Since Donald Trump withdrew the US from the WHO, the organisation’s emergency-response budget has shrunk by 37%. UK foreign-aid funding has also “fallen to its lowest level in two decades”.

The worry “is less about this becoming a global pandemic” (unlikely, as Ebola only spreads through contact with infected body fluids), and more about “the devastation it can cause” to the region and its “already fragile” healthcare systems. But this is an “interconnected world”: “if your neighbour’s house is on fire, you don’t wait and watch; you help to put it out before the fire spreads to yours.”

What next?

The WHO is sending a team of experts to Congo and, on Friday, will host an emergency scientific consultation of researchers, clinicians, public health bodies and funders. “The cash-strapped organisation has already released almost $4 million (£3 million) to combat the outbreak,” said the BBC, “but much more may be needed.” Public health officials are also considering using a combination of the existing approved vaccines for the Zaire and Sudan strains.

But communities in the region “have little trust in government or external aid agencies”, said Sridhar. If Ebola spreads to a major urban hub, it will be “much more difficult to stop”.

“I don’t think that, in two months, we will be done with this outbreak”, Anne Ancia, the WHO’s representative for the DRC, told reporters in Geneva at the World Health Assembly. The 2014 Ebola outbreak took two years to end.

Are synthetic drugs new?

Lab-made or “designer” drugs have been around for decades. LSD is synthetic, and so is methamphetamine. But what’s new is the dizzying scale and variety of synthetic intoxicants and their increasing dominance of the drug market.

Traditionally, most illicit drugs have come from plants that are cultivated on a large scale, such as marijuana, opium and heroin from poppies, and cocaine from coca leaves. But those plant-based drugs are being supplanted—or adulterated—by synthetic stimulants, opioids, and cannabinoids made in clandestine labs that are far cheaper and easier for traffickers to produce and transport. They’re also far deadlier. Some 80,400 Americans died of drug overdoses in 2024, nearly 70% more than a decade earlier; synthetic opioids, mainly fentanyl, accounted for nearly 68% of those deaths. Fentanyl, which is 50 to 100 times more potent than heroin, is now giving way to even deadlier compounds such as the 10-times more powerful cychlorphine. In Knoxville, Tenn., a national cychlorphine hot spot, at least 50 overdoses involving the drug have been confirmed in the past six months. “This is the modern drug epidemic,” said Bob DuPont, U.S. drug czar under presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. “It’s like nothing that’s happened in the world before—anywhere.”

How many synthetic drugs are there?

More than 1,460 new psychoactive substances have been recorded by the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime since 2013, tripling in just over a decade. And new compounds are popping up with staggering speed, leaving law enforcement scrambling to keep up. “Once a month or every other month, we’re encountering something that we’ve never seen before,” said Ed Sisco, a research chemist who tracks street drugs for the federal government. One reason traffickers keep inventing new drugs is to stay ahead of the law: the moment a compound is identified and made illegal, narcochemists—sometimes aided by artificial intelligence—tweak its molecular structure to get around the law. “Each time we get rid of one substance,” said forensic scientist Alex Krotulski, “they come up with something more potent.”

What are these new drugs?

They run the gamut. There are sedatives such as xylazine, street-named Tranq, an animal tranquilizer that can cause fleshrotting skin lesions and is frequently mixed with fentanyl. Last month, the CDC warned about the rise of medetomidine, or “Rhino tranq,” which is up to 200 times more potent and doesn’t respond to conventional overdose-reversal treatments like naloxone. There are hundreds of synthetic cannabinoids, such as K2 and Spice, sold at smoke shops and convenience stores across the U.S.; they can yield a weed-like high and can also cause agitation, delusions, seizures, kidney damage, and, in extreme cases, death. There are cathinones, stimulants modeled on MDMA that “hijack the dopamine system in the brain” and thus are “extremely addictive,” said Michael Baumann of the National Institute on Drug Abuse. “There’s a reason why chemists would design these.” Nitazenes are an even bigger category.

What are nitazenes?

Developed as painkillers in the 1950s, this family of synthetic opioids was never approved for clinical use because of its staggering potency. Some nitazenes are so powerful that under 2 milligrams—the equivalent of a few grains of sand—can kill a person by shutting down breathing. Since they surfaced in the U.S. in 2019, the drugs have caused at least 2,000 overdose deaths. The newest worry is a different class of synthetic opioids called orphines, which include cychlorphine. Joe Guy, sheriff in McMinn County, Tennessee, an hour south of Knoxville, notes one issue common among synthetic drugs: wildly varying potency that makes ingestion a crapshoot. “One pill, one hit, can literally end your life,” said Guy. And because traffickers often use cheap new synthetics to boost narcotics such as fentanyl and heroin, or even substitute them for various pills, drug consumers very often don’t even know what they are taking. Authorities in Arkansas last week confirmed the state’s first known cychlorphine death: an unidentified man who took what he thought was an oxycodone pill, which was actually laced with the more powerful orphine. “This is mass-produced deception,” said Ted Brown, head of the Arkansas Crime Laboratory.

Where are these drugs coming from?

The federal government pegs the primary source as Mexican cartels using chemicals sourced from China. Other synthetic drugs come directly from China and sometimes India, and are cut and sold by small domestic operators. Efforts have been made to stem the flow of raw materials, but with unintended consequences. When China tightened controls on chemicals used in fentanyl in 2019, narcochemists researched alternatives and revived production of nitazenes. Last summer, China banned nitazenes—which may have led to the sudden rise of cychlorphine.

Is there a better way to respond?

On the street level, there are calls for wider distribution of naloxone, and for educating young people about the dangers that may lurk inside a pain pill or a bag of synthetic cannabinoids. On the enforcement front, there are moves to increase global cooperation to disrupt supply chains, stem trafficking, and identify emerging threats. To that end, the Biden administration in July 2023 launched the 160-nation Global Coalition to Address Synthetic Drug Threats; China has not yet joined the group. But some experts emphasize that the era of synthetic drugs underlines the need to address the root factors that make users seek out drugs, given the futility of targeting a supply that’s constantly expanding and shifting. “Today is the most dangerous time in the history of the world to be using drugs,” said Andrew Monte, who runs the Rocky Mountain Poison Center. “That’s until tomorrow, when there’s a new drug.”

No one should panic, but this is “certainly a worrying chain of events,” said Tara C. Smith in MS.now. Two weeks ago, news broke that three people aboard the Dutch cruise ship MV Hondius had died of suspected hantavirus, a respiratory disease with no cure or vaccine. The Hondius was eventually allowed to dock in Tenerife, Spain. But before the pathogen was identified, some 30 passengers had disembarked and flown home to 12 countries, potentially seeding the planet with a virus that kills 38% of its victims. A six-week incubation period means we don’t yet know the extent of the outbreak. But at least eight other Hondius-linked infections have been confirmed, and 18 Americans are being monitored, two at containment facilities in Atlanta—one of those passengers is symptomatic—and 16 in Nebraska.

“I hope it’s fine,” said President Trump. But Trump also hoped it would be fine in February 2020, when passengers on another ship, the Diamond Princess, started dying from Covid-19. And back then, we were still part of the World Health Organization—Trump ordered the U.S. out last year—and conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wasn’t our health secretary. “We are in the hands of the madmen now,” said Charles P. Pierce in Esquire. “An outbreak of any disease more serious than Covid, and this country is in a world of hurt.”

This story is certainly “tragic,” said Lisa Jarvis in Bloomberg. The first two fatalities, a Dutch couple, were probably infected through exposure to rat droppings while bird-watching in Argentina. But “this likely isn’t the opening scene for a bigger, scarier movie.” The human-transmissible strain of hantavirus is not very infectious, requiring prolonged contact with someone already suffering symptoms. Standard public health measures have contained previous outbreaks, the worst being a 2018 outbreak in Epuyén, Argentina, in which 11 died. Experts say there’s little reason to fear the new cluster will “turn into anything bigger.”

Which experts? asked Zeynep Tufekci in The New York Times. Microbiologist Gustavo Palacios, who studied the Epuyén outbreak, is “baffled” by these reassurances. In Epuyén, a single guest at a birthday party infected five others in 90 minutes, and the widow of one victim infected 10 more people at his wake. These “super-spreader” events suggest the virus could spark a pandemic. We may have been spared in 2018 because Epuyén is an “isolated rural village in Patagonia.” The 2026 Hondius outbreak, by contrast, has already gone global and, as with the early days of Covid, global health leaders are erring on the side of reassurance rather than sharing, “accurately and loudly,” what little we know about this terrifying virus.

In the U.S., the response has been “sluggish,” said Apoorva Mandavilli, also in the Times. It took a week after WHO formally confirmed the hantavirus infections for the administration to hold its first briefing, and a month after the first death to set up a CDC task force. Hollowed out by Trump and Kennedy, our health agencies aren’t remotely ready for another pandemic, said Katrine Wallace in StatNews. Not so our post-Covid infrastructure of misinformation, that “network of influencers, conspiracy accounts, and partisan personalities.” They’re already spinning this outbreak as further proof that “scientists are corrupt, vaccines are the real threat” and hawking ivermectin from “the link in their bio.” It’s this new infrastructure, along with Trump’s vandalism of the old one, that will hurt us the most should another pandemic arrive. “And one will.”

What happened

The World Health Organization Sunday declared an Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo a “public health emergency of international concern.” More than 300 suspected cases and 88 deaths have been reported, with at least one confirmed case in the rebel-held city of Goma and two others in neighboring Uganda.

There have been more than 20 Ebola outbreaks in the region since the deadly virus was discovered in 1976, but this is only the third caused by the Bundibugyo strain, for which there are no approved vaccines or treatments.

Who said what

This is not yet a “pandemic emergency,” the WHO said, but all indications “point toward a potentially much larger outbreak than what is currently being detected,” with “significant local and regional risk of spread.” The emergency declaration “indicates that the outbreak requires coordination among countries, given its risk of international spread,” Politico said.

What next?

A “handful of Americans” in the DRC “may have been exposed to suspected cases of Ebola,” and one or more with symptoms “may need to be medically evacuated,” The Washington Post said. “The risk to Americans is low,” said Satish Pillai at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

As the Iran war continues, food and vital medicines in the country are becoming increasingly scarce, said The Australian. The costs of some medicines “have risen by 400%”, and antidepressants and sleeping pills are reportedly being “dispensed without prescriptions”.

This is not unique to the Middle East, as other countries around the world face the threat of conflict, or suffer under pressures of economic and political repression. As mental health crises and resources continue to stretch, many fear the consequences could echo the fallout from the Covid pandemic.

A ‘kind of coma’

Some pharmacists in Iran have called the boom in antidepressants a form of “mass sedation”, said The Australian. These healthcare professionals believe that relaxing the strictness of distribution policy keeps the public in a “state of artificial calm” designed to “delay any popular uprising while the war continues”.

Access to the country’s black market has also been damaged since the start of the war. Built on sanctions, import shortages and “hoarding” by middlemen, the black market is “not new”. But with the joint threat of war and internet shutdown, the “shadow supply chain” has been significantly “disrupted”. As the war continues, Iran is stuck in a “kind of coma, caught between economic collapse and the dream of a better future”.

The rise in antidepressant use is part of a broader system to “doctrinise control of Iranians’ minds and bodies”, said Atlantic Council. Observers from abroad have “overlooked the concerted regime strategy to deliberately engineer this state of depression as a suppression mechanism”. By outlawing cultural events such as Valentine’s Day, “Chaharshanbe Suri (the festival of fire)” and “Shabeh Yalda (winter solstice)”, the regime has arguably “promoted gloom and hopelessness to the extent that citizens become paralysed and incapable of challenging the political status quo”.

Like Iran, Lebanon has been struck by the ongoing conflict, and has appeared to follow a similar pattern of “pushing anxious residents toward sedatives and sleeping pills”, said Y Net News. Though no official data has been released, news outlet Al-Akhbar, which has ties to Hezbollah, claimed that the “demand for sedatives had jumped by 300% since the fighting began”, said Y Net. This figure, though unverified, “points to a population under mounting psychological strain”.

Global impact

And in Cuba, economic and political crises present an “outlook that feels bleaker than the collapse of the Soviet Union”, said The Guardian. As a growing mental health crisis “envelops the island”, many citizens are “turning to prescription drugs” to cope with the US-imposed oil blockade, and still reeling from years of economic decline.

Cuba is stuck in a vicious cycle, as the economy shrinks – GDP has “contracted by 17% since 2019” – it means state pharmacies lie “empty”, while demand for their services increases. People are “leaving in large numbers”, which exacerbates the cycle further. In the last five years, “up to 20% of the population” has emigrated, which has in turn added to the “psychological load on those who chose (or were forced) to remain”.

In its ongoing campaign against Ukraine, Russia is experiencing a “spiral” of antidepressant use, said El País. The country has registered “record sales” of the medications every year since 2020. Last year’s total “nearly tripled pharmaceutical consumption” from 2019. In the same year, figures from Russian consultancy DSM show that after peace negotiations were “unsuccessfully reinitiated” in 2024, sales of antidepressants grew 36%. It appears the war, with its subsequent health crises, has had a “larger emotional impact on its population” than the Covid pandemic.

In the early 1950s, thousands of UN troops in Korea fell ill with a mysterious fever, said Chris Smith in The Spectator. Doctors suspected that a virus might be to blame – but it wasn’t until 1978 that a Korean scientist isolated the culprit in a mouse, and named it after a nearby river, the Hantan.

He also showed that hantaviruses, which are carried by rodents, can be inhaled by humans in dust contaminated by droppings or urine. The troops had likely kicked the virus up as they dug foxholes.

Old vs. New World

Since then, numerous strains that can be transmitted to humans have been identified. They divide into two groups: Old World hantaviruses, in Europe and Asia, cause kidney dysfunction and have a mortality rate of 1% to 15%; New World ones, in the Americas, lead to severe lung infections and are fatal in around 40% of cases. It was the latter group that caused the outbreak on the cruise ship MV Hondius, and specifically the Andes strain, the only hantavirus that – in very rare cases – can pass from human to human.

It is not yet clear how this outbreak started, said Esther Addley in The Guardian, but it is thought that one, or possibly two, passengers were carrying the virus, which has an incubation period of up to 42 days, when they boarded the ship in Argentina on 1 April. A Dutch ornithologist who fell ill on 6 April and died five days later has been identified as “patient zero”. He had spent months travelling in South America with his wife – who died on 26 April. A German woman then died on 2 May. By 10 May, seven others had fallen ill.

No pandemic

This week, 20 British nationals on board flew home to the UK, and were bussed to an isolation facility on the Wirral, said Sarah Knapton in The Daily Telegraph. Described as healthy, they were assessed for 72 hours and then asked to self-isolate at home for 42 days.

Health officials have stressed that we are not facing a pandemic. The Andes strain does not spread easily: it requires intimate or very close contact. And though many passengers left the ship weeks ago, there have so far been no “third-generation” cases – among people who were not on board. Given the virus’s incubation period, clinicians say that 21 June is the date to watch: if there have been no third-generation cases by then, it means the outbreak has run its course.

What happened

The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday preserved access to mifepristone, a common mail-order abortion drug. The decision, which extends a pause on a lower court’s ruling while a Louisiana lawsuit on the issue plays out, means women can continue to order the pills through telehealth communications without seeing a doctor in person. Conservative Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito dissented.

Who said what

This decision is “remarkable” because easy access to abortion pills is a “scheme to undermine” the court’s 2022 decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, Alito wrote in his dissent. Mifepristone manufacturer Danco Laboratories said the ruling meant a “safe and effective drug Americans depend on will continue to be available.” The court “has thrown abortion providers and patients a lifeline — albeit a temporary one,” said Politico.

What next?

The Court of Appeals is not expected to rule on the Louisiana suit until after the November midterms, and the issue “could ultimately return to the justices on their normal docket,” said The Hill. In the meantime, the Federal Drug Administration is conducting a safety review of mifepristone.

After years of combined effort, an international coalition has come up with a new proposed name for one of the reproductive disorders affecting millions worldwide. Women’s reproductive health has long been a blind spot in the medical industry, but the group hopes that renaming polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) to polyendocrine metabolic ovarian syndrome (PMOS) will help illuminate a better path forward in treating it.

Why the push to change the name PCOS?

For decades, millions of patients with symptoms like “irregular periods, pelvic pain, excess body hair and acne” have been diagnosed with PCOS, said The New York Times. Getting a diagnosis can be difficult, and those who do encounter stigma and imperfect treatment options along the way. An international consortium of doctors and researchers concluded that the condition’s name was part of the problem. Many PCOS patients “don’t have ovarian cysts at all,” but they often have “widespread hormonal and metabolic dysfunction.”

After more than a decade of “vigorous debate” over the need for a different name that more precisely describes the syndrome, a gathering of 56 organizations debuted the result: polyendocrine metabolic ovarian syndrome, or PMOS, said Stat News. It was introduced in a policy paper published in The Lancet and presented at the European Congress of Endocrinology in Prague.

Since the previous name of the illness didn’t accurately describe the condition, it contributed to “delayed diagnosis, fragmented care and stigma, while curtailing research and policy framing,” the consortium members said in the paper. The change was based on input from dozens of organizations and experts, as well as feedback from more than 14,000 patients.

The new name “moves away from the incorrect focus on cysts” to recognizing this as a “much broader condition,” said lead study author Helena Teede, the director of Melbourne’s Monash Center for Health Research and Implementation, to The Guardian. The effects of PMOS on the body are “virtually all endocrine — hormonal.” Patients instigated a name change because they knew “how much they have suffered because of the name, and they were really passionate.” The efforts were “unprecedented,” and nobody has “put this much effort into a name change ever.”

In the policy paper, the authors lay out a plan for the World Health Organization and the International Classification of Diseases to adopt the new name over the next three years, potentially making it the international standard by 2028.

How will the name change affect treatment?

The researchers hope the name change will “transform how patients understand the condition” and “how doctors treat it,” said the Times. When a condition affects one organ, everything from research funding to education to clinical guidelines is “all in that box,” Teede said to the outlet. “And in this condition, it was in the wrong box.”

The change could also have “immediate implications for some patients,” prompting doctors to “recommend more screening for metabolic and cardiovascular problems,” said the Times. Renaming it should “redirect” professionals “into thinking about this as a long-term chronic condition and not just a period problem,” Basma Faris, an assistant professor of obstetrics, gynecology and reproductive science at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, said to the outlet.

Funding for studying the disorder and treatments will no longer be limited to sources focused on ovarian health, Teede said to Time. Despite affecting “170 million reproductive-age women” and creating a “health and economic burden” that is “huge,” the illness hasn’t had much investment in research. Getting it categorized differently means “we get more evidence on how to treat it.”

Women’s health is “notoriously underfunded,” Christina Boots, an associate professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Northwestern’s Feinberg School of Medicine, said to CNN. Recognizing that it “spans not just reproductive issues, but mental health and metabolic health as well,” may help “enhance the number of dollars and the number of studies that are to understand it and treat it.”

About 5 million to 6 million American women have PMOS, according to the Endocrine Society and the CDC. It affects up to 12% of American women of reproductive age. Despite how common it is, the condition “remains misunderstood and underresearched,” said The Cut, and the World Health Organization estimates that nearly 70% of women who suffer from it have never been diagnosed. Even though the “diagnostic criteria have not changed,” experts hope that a new, more accurate name will “help more people get a diagnosis sooner.”

‘11 hantavirus deaths in Argentina were a warning’

Abraar Karan at The Washington Post

The “recent Andes hantavirus outbreak on the Hondius cruise ship has seized international attention after three passengers died” and the incident is a “warning sign of where the world’s pandemic prevention system still has weaknesses,” says Abraar Karan. While “there is no way to avoid outbreaks, proactive approaches could reduce risk.” More “detailed predeparture screening could help shipboard doctors diagnose sick patients better,” although “this approach is only as foolproof as the people who are reporting their exposures.”

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‘The crisis in Sudan is much worse than what is acknowledged’

Zia Salik at Al Jazeera

In the “streets of Sudan’s capital, the destruction was apocalyptic,” says Zia Salik. The “difficulty in accessing many areas, and the sense that this is a complicated war in a faraway place, means the crisis has not received anywhere near the international attention it needs.” For “many people, the greatest fear now is that the unending war in the west of the country will result in Sudan, one of the largest countries in Africa, splitting in two.”

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‘What leaders get wrong about the ROI of AI’

Katy George at Time

“If you ask most executives about AI right now, the conversation quickly turns to one question: where is the return?” says Katy George. That is “not because AI isn’t delivering value. It’s because many organizations are still looking for value in the wrong places.” AI’s impact “shows up in greater insight, more predictive power, in-task skill building and the ability to evaluate more scenarios before acting.” But “those gains don’t fit neatly into traditional metrics.”

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‘States need to come clean on SNAP fraud’

Gov. Larry Rhoden at Newsweek

One “practical example of a resource that should be managed with care is the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP),” says Gov. Larry Rhoden (R-S.D.). Americans “should take great pride that such a program exists, but that should inspire diligence in its oversight.” States with “higher error rates — in the double digits in many cases — warrant attention and accountability to ensure program integrity is upheld nationwide.” The “solution starts with bringing greater transparency to the issue.”

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What happened

Engaging in the arts, whether directly or by going to museums or concerts, helps people age more slowly, British researchers reported Monday in the journal Innovation in Aging. The benefits were found to be comparable to physical exercise and quitting smoking. They were most pronounced for people over 40 and those who engage in a wider range of artistic endeavors.

Who said what

The University College London researchers looked at how often 3,556 adults in the U.K. engaged in some artistic pursuit — singing, painting, dancing, crafting, photography — or visited an exhibition or heritage site. Those who did so weekly aged 4% slower in blood tests of their “epigenetic clock,” or biological aging. “People were around a year younger biologically if they’re regularly engaged in the arts,” researcher Daisy Fancourt, the study’s lead author, told NPR. Monthly arts engagement slowed aging by 3%.

Slower biological aging “does not necessarily mean someone will live longer,” The Guardian said, but “previous studies have suggested a link between arts engagement and longer lifespan.”

What next?

The research “builds on a growing body of evidence” that arts activities “reduce stress, lower inflammation and improve cardiovascular disease risk,” study senior author Feifei Bu told The Guardian. Regular creative engagement should be treated not “as a luxury” but “an essential,” Fancourt told The Art Newspaper, “just like we promote 10,000 steps a day or five-a-day of fruits and vegetables.”