“Forget jade rollers, LED masks and salmon sperm facials,” said Chloe Casey, a lecturer in nutrition and behaviour, on The Conversation. The “latest skincare trend” is… a blood test.

That’s the way to investigate “Ferritin face”, which is cropping up all over social media. Posters are claiming that iron deficiency can be seen on your face via symptoms such as dark under-eyes, pale and dry skin, and hair loss.

There is a “kernel” of truth in the observation, but self-diagnosis and self-medication could cause more harm than good.

What is ferritin?

Ferritin is a protein that plays a “significant role in the absorption, storage, and release of iron”, said the NHS. Roughly 25% of iron in the body is stored, and the majority of that is ferritin. It is found in many types of cells in the body, but especially in the “liver, spleen, bone marrow, and in reticuloendothelial cells”.

A blood test for ferritin allows you to “get a snapshot of the body’s iron reserves”, said The Guardian. Because iron levels naturally “fluctuate throughout the day”, testing ferritin levels is a “better indicator” of iron deficiency problems such as anaemia, said The Independent.

You are more likely to suffer from low ferritin and iron levels if you are pregnant or suffer heavy periods, though this can also occur as a result of gastrointestinal problems, poor absorption or dietary choices.

Is social media trend harmful?

It’s true that severe iron deficiency can “make someone look pale”, said Casey on The Conversation. But that doesn’t mean that low ferritin levels produce a “distinctive facial appearance. Hormones, bad sleep, stress, dehydration or not eating enough key nutrients can all leave you looking pale and tired.”

On social media, the “line between medical advice and marketing gets blurry fast”. A message warning of a medical condition is quickly linked to a supplement, “pill or powder” available for purchase. Fundamentally, a “mirror can’t tell you whether your ferritin is low – only a blood test can do that”.

What can you do about it?

A good way to improve iron levels is having a well-balanced diet. Red meat and shellfish contain iron that can be “more readily absorbed”, said Grazia. Beans, lentils, chickpeas, tofu, leafy green vegetables and nuts are also rich in iron.

Those at risk of low ferritin should ask for blood tests including a full blood count, a ferritin level check, and tests for levels of B12 and folate, Toby Richards, a surgeon and iron therapy specialist, told The Guardian.

“Taking iron supplements without a diagnosis can be harmful,” said the BBC, and it could “delay the investigation of an underlying problem”.

A new BBC documentary has reignited the outcry over the sodium valproate scandal – a catalogue of pregnancy harms that England’s Patient Safety Commissioner has called “bigger than thalidomide”.

The drug at the centre of the scandal was prescribed to pregnant women, despite its known risks to foetuses. Over the past 50 years, it is thought to have caused an estimated 20,000 babies in the UK to develop serious disabilities or autism in the womb. The documentary, narrated by two campaigning mothers from northwest England, tells “an appalling tale of regulatory failure”, said The Telegraph.

What is the scandal?

In 1962, sodium valproate was found to be an effective anti-seizure drug, as well as a treatment for bipolar disorder. The scientists who created it knew that it had caused foetal malformations when tested on pregnant rats. Yet in 1972, the drug, often distributed as Epilim, was licensed in the UK to treat epilepsy without official contra-indications for pregnant women. By the 1990s, it was one of the most widely prescribed treatments for epilepsy in the UK.

In the 1990s, Jill Clayton-Smith, a Manchester-based clinical geneticist, began to notice “a recurring cluster of features” among children of epileptic women, said The Guardian. She unearthed a 1984 US study describing “foetal valproate syndrome” and presented it, along with her own findings, at a conference. “The male-dominated audience essentially scoffed at her ‘anecdotal’ data and ignored it.”

She then began a formal study that eventually helped determine that babies exposed to sodium valproate in the womb have a 10% risk of developing physical malformations (way above the 2% norm), and a 30% to 40% risk of developing serious neurodevelopmental disorders. Yet warnings were not added to some packaging until as late as 2016.

Who are the mums?

Janet Williams gave birth to two sons with developmental delays in the 1990s but was told for years that nothing was wrong. Then, in 2009, a specialist mentioned that their condition had probably been caused by her epilepsy medication, Epilim. She started telling her story to families in and around her home town of Pilling, Lancashire, and asking other potentially affected parents to get in touch. One of those was Emma Murphy from nearby Bury. Five of Emma’s six children had similar developmental difficulties and she, too, had taken Epilim during pregnancy. Together, they “doggedly pursued answers” in the face of “institutional resistance and, in some cases, patronising dismissal”, said The Times.

By 2013, they had begun investigating why UK regulators had allowed the drug to be prescribed without warnings, despite knowing the risks. In 2015, they found “the smoking gun”, said The Guardian, in meeting notes from the Committee on Safety of Medicines: putting warnings on packaging about drug manufacturer Sanofi Aventis’ statement that sodium valproate was harmful to foetuses “could give rise to fruitless anxiety”.

What has the government done?

In 2018, then health secretary Jeremy Hunt announced an independent review into sodium valproate. The resulting report, published in 2020, highlighted affected families’ “struggle to be believed” and recommended financial redress for the “life-changing consequences” they had suffered. In 2024, England’s Patient Safety Commissioner set out options for a compensation scheme.

The government has still not responded to that, although, in October, health minister Diana Johnson spoke of a commitment to “making meaningful progress” by the end of this Parliament. Affected families have yet to receive any payouts.

A virulent avian flu strain has made its way to a Utah mink farm, which could potentially open the door for the virus to spread to — and between — humans. Many are concerned about the federal government’s lack of action in preventing the spread.

Bird to mink to human

This strain of bird flu is “so virulent that if a single chicken tests positive, the U.S. government requires farmers to kill the whole flock to protect other farms as well as public health,” said ProPublica. The virus, though, has spread uncontrolled through the mink farm for more than two months, and there are “no federal rules for how to deal with sick mink.” In “other countries where such outbreaks have occurred, the government has ordered farms to kill their mink,” said The Guardian. No similar plans exist in Utah for now.

The outbreak is particularly concerning as “mink have lungs and airways that on a cellular level are remarkably similar to those of people,” said ProPublica. In the past, the animals have contracted Covid-19 and spread it to humans. Bird flu could emulate the same trajectory.

Fuzzy instructions

Despite the risk of a major public health issue, “there’s just not a lot of options out there other than kind of sitting and waiting and seeing what happens,” Utah’s State Veterinarian Amanda Price said to ProPublica. Mink are “bred in captivity and raised on farms, occupying a regulatory gray area between wildlife and agriculture,” said The Salt Lake Tribune. One bird flu vaccine is approved for mammals, but “only USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins can authorize its use.” Because bird flu in mink is new in the U.S., “there’s little research to guide the dosage or determine how well it would work.”

The good news: A pandemic threat is not present just yet. “The risk is greatest among people who have exposure to sick animals,” Brown University epidemiology professor Jennifer Nuzzo said to The Guardian. “If that is not you, I think you can take this off your worry list.” But it still “does not abdicate the government of its responsibility to try to prevent a pandemic.”

The government is preparing to extend Palantir’s controversial NHS contract despite growing concerns over its software’s performance and widespread reluctance across hospitals to use it.

MPs, medics and campaigners have urged Health Secretary Yvette Cooper to trigger an early “break clause” in February, said the Financial Times. But ministers reviewing the £330 million deal to deploy the US tech giant’s flagship AI system have concluded that removing Palantir would be “too disruptive”.

What is Palantir’s contract with the NHS?

In 2023, NHS England awarded a Palantir-led consortium a contract to link datasets across hospitals and trusts. The result, the Federated Data Platform (FDP), is powered by Palantir’s Foundry software and loaned out to NHS teams to build applications, coordinate patient records, schedule procedures and reduce waiting lists.

The deal was controversial from the off due to Palantir’s work with US immigration enforcement and the Israeli military. Officials privately warned Wes Streeting, then health secretary, last year that Palantir’s reputation would deter NHS trusts from using its software, said The Guardian in February. Accusations that the procurement process was rigged also deepened after it emerged that Palantir had hired Peter Mandelson’s lobbying firm ahead of the successful bid.

In June, the Commons Health and Social Care Committee recommended that the contract not be extended. “People don’t trust Palantir, its benefits are contested and other tools could deliver the same or similar advantages,” said committee member and Labour MP Ben Coleman in The Guardian.

Has its software helped the NHS?

The NHS and government claims of benefits are fiercely contested. Many doctors say the FDP is less effective than existing technology; some senior NHS leaders called it “slow and clunky”, said Peter Geoghegan and Lucas Amin in the London Review of Books.

Active usage is far lower than official claims suggest. NHS England said that, as of June this year, 139 NHS trusts were “live” on Palantir’s software. But 52 of them “did not use a single FDP app”, said the LRB, citing a Department of Health and Social Care official.

NHS England claims Palantir’s patient discharge tool was responsible for a 15% decrease in delayed discharges. But the Health Foundation think tank reported that hospitals using the tool saw “no noticeable improvement” compared with those that didn’t, said The BMJ.

Palantir has claimed it is helping to deliver “99,000 more NHS operations”, but digital rights advocacy group Foxglove says that nearly a third of NHS trusts using Palantir’s theatre scheduling tool performed fewer procedures after it was deployed.

In July, the Office for Statistics Regulation said that NHS England lacked sufficient evidence for its claims that the FDP was directly responsible for performance improvements.

What might happen next?

The National Audit Office, the independent public spending watchdog, is reviewing the rollout and costs of the FDP, and will publish a report this winter. NHS England also commissioned Imperial College London to evaluate clinical outcomes, with that final report due in 2029.

The government’s review of Palantir’s contract is still under way, but Cooper told MPs she wanted to use the NHS “to develop UK sovereign AI”. The government is planning to put the FDP contract out to tender, said The BMJ. That would force Palantir to “rebid against UK-based competitors”.

Health officials have been “sounding out a handful of British companies to bid to run the FDP”, said the FT. Rivals “insist they are ready to take over the contract”, but Palantir’s defenders claim switching to “an untested alternative” would be “a significant gamble”.

A California startup has used AI to create a virus reportedly capable of fighting off a bacterial infection. The method, if effective, could help people combat disease without worsening antibiotic resistance.

How it works

Researchers at Radical Numerics administered the AI bacteriophage, through an AI model called Omnii-1, to a patient “suffering from a deadly bacterial infection,” with the hope the virus would “kill the microbes causing the infection,” said The New York Times. If successful, the findings could “point to a new way to use AI in medicine.”

Phage therapy existed long before AI. Phages can “target particular bacteria with remarkable specificity, sparing beneficial bacteria such as those in the gut that support digestion,” said a technical paper by Radical Numerics. The process can be time-consuming, though.

Creating the therapy without AI requires using a “bacterial sample from a patient’s infection” to “screen existing phage collections for effective candidates,” said the Radical Numerics paper. If no known phages are effective, researchers then turn to “additional collections, environmental samples or engineering.”

Using AI instead “can lead to rapid, on-demand generation of phages that meet patient requirements, accelerating the timeline for treatment,” said The Independent.

The future

“If it works, that’s incredible,” Michael Baym, a microbiologist at Harvard University, said to the Times. “My impulse is to be skeptical.” Radical Numerics has not revealed the clinical outcomes of the patient who was given the AI virus, and the study has yet to be peer-reviewed. The company aims to “protect patient confidentiality and maintain the trust” of clinical partners, though it intends to publish the results in the future, Eric Nguyen, the CEO of Radical Numerics, said to the Times.

Widespread phage therapy could help combat antibiotic resistance. Phages “do not infect human cells, and phage therapy is generally considered safe,” said Radical Numerics. “Unlike broad-spectrum antibiotics, phages can target particular bacteria with remarkable specificity.”

The global incidence of dementia is increasing at a much faster rate than previously known, according to new research. Cases could double by the middle of the century, with millions of people potentially at risk as the world’s population ages.

What did the study find?

An estimated 11.3 million people were diagnosed with dementia in 2023. That figure is expected to jump to 24.7 million diagnoses in 2050, according to research published in the journal JAMA Neurology. The estimate, a 118.5% increase, is based on “data from 38,418 people across 22 population-based studies spanning 18 countries and territories on six continents,” said the researchers at Australia’s University of New South Wales (UNSW). Overall, the rate of dementia diagnosis is 9.7 new cases per 1,000 people.

Dementia incidence is “higher among women than men and substantially higher in low- and middle-income countries than in high-income countries,” said UNSW. This marks a change from prior research, as a large part of what’s known about dementia has “historically come from high-income countries, despite some of the greatest future increases being expected in lower-resource settings.”

What can be done?

The results of the study “highlight the growing need for dementia prevention, diagnosis and care as populations age,” said USA Today, especially as dementia “already affects more than 57 million people worldwide.” Dementia is “not a future problem.” It’s an “accelerating epidemic crisis that demands immediate attention,” said Dr. Liron Sinvani, the director of research and innovation at the Northwell Institute for Healthy Aging, to HealthDay.

There’s some good news on the research front. For the “first time, we can compare dementia incidence across a geographically diverse group of populations using the same statistical approach, giving us a clearer picture of where and among whom new cases are occurring,” said lead study author Dr. Ashleigh Vella. Understanding risk factors among different groups will be “critical” in developing a prevention and care response to “populations facing the greatest future risk.”

The link between depression and disrupted daily rhythms has long been recognised. But research has now suggested there is a whole new subtype of depression – “circadian depression” – caused by “people’s body clocks being out of whack”, said New Scientist.

It affects an estimated one in four people with severe depression, according to a large-scale population and genetics study published in the British Journal of Psychiatry. But treatment with standard antidepressants like SSRIs seems to be less effective, and causes more side effects.

What is ‘circadian depression’?

It is “characterised by disrupted sleep, low energy and reduced physical activity during the day”, said Nature. It appears to be linked to dysregulation in the body’s internal clock and seems to affect women more than men. Depressive symptoms tend to start at an earlier age than with other forms of depression, and, although seasonality can aggravate them, it doesn’t necessarily trigger them, like seasonal affective disorder does.

The study researchers asked 11,380 people with severe depression to fill out surveys about changes in their symptoms and sleep patterns. Nearly a quarter (23%) met at least three of the researchers’ six proposed criteria for circadian depression. This was “not a formal diagnosis”, said The New York Times, but evidence of a “suggested subtype”. The criteria are: waking up feeling “very tired” regardless of sleep duration; identifying as a “night owl”; going to sleep later than most people; sleeping longer when most depressed; sleeping in on non-working days, and experiencing strong seasonal changes in sleep, mood, appetite or energy.

Moreover, analysis of participants’ saliva indicated that those who fell into the proposed subtype had genetic variants linked to a higher risk of developing ADHD, bipolar disorder, anxiety, a high body-mass index and insulin resistance. This indicates that circadian depression is “not just depression with bad sleep, but actually there is an underlying biology that is quite distinct from other forms of depression”, the study’s lead author, Emiliana Tonini of the University of Sydney’s Brain and Mind Centre, told the press.

How might it be treated?

What’s “critical” about this circadian type of depression is “its poor response to the standard therapies”, study co-author Ian Hickie, a psychiatrist at the Brain and Mind Centre told The Guardian. Those affected could benefit instead from treatments, such as melatonin or light therapy, that specifically target the body’s circadian rhythms .

The coordination of your body clock “underpins your mood, your metabolism, your concentration, your sleep-wake cycle and many other key factors”, said Hickie. You can help reset your body clock by exposing yourself to daylight in the morning and maintaining the rhythm and regularity of your sleep-wake cycle, while avoiding artificial light, large meals and exercise once it gets dark.

“Light is the most powerful signal for keeping our circadian rhythms in sync with the outside world,” Sophie Bostock, founder of The Sleep Scientist, told The Independent. “It helps us feel alert during the day and supports the timing of sleep at night.” In the autumn, after the clocks go back and mornings are dark, try to find an opportunity to get outside during working hours. “Even on a cloudy winter day, outdoor light is usually much brighter than indoor lighting.”

What are the caveats to the study?

Circadian depression is “a plausible” condition, said US chronotherapeutics expert Michael Terman. But the study findings don’t establish a new diagnosis, or prove that circadian depression will respond to different types of treatment, he told The New York Times.

A “significant limitation” of the study, acknowledged by its authors, was that the participants “self-reported their sleep-wake cycles”. It’s not clear whether “they did so accurately”. They were also mostly of European ancestry, which “may limit generalisability”. Further, more diverse studies are “needed to replicate our findings”, the researchers said.

The study also didn’t consider the impact of menopause, which is “predominantly one of the things that women describe as causing sleep disturbance”, Australian psychiatry professor Jayashri Kulkarn told The Guardian. But managing to tie “certain types of depression to a specific genetic profile” will be “important for onward treatment”.

The government is to reform the scheme that provides financial support for those injured or bereaved by unusually severe reactions to Covid-19 vaccines, following recommendations by the chair of the Covid inquiry.

What is the scheme?

The government’s vaccine damage payment scheme is designed to provide a one-off, tax-free sum of £120,000 to those who can prove they became severely disabled as a result of taking a vaccine for a number of diseases, including Covid-19.

“Disablement is worked out as a percentage, and ‘severe disablement’ means at least 60% disabled,” said the government guide. “This could be a mental or physical disablement and will be based on medical evidence from the doctors or hospitals involved in your treatment.” Those with a family member who died as a result of their injuries can apply for a bereavement support payment.

However, while more than 24,000 people have filed “Covid-related claims” with the vaccine damage payment scheme, only a little over 1% have received a pay-out so far, said the BBC. Most of the successful claims have related to the AstraZeneca vaccine.

What are the problems?

Critics say that the 60% disability threshold excludes many people who suffer a substantial, persistent condition that affects their ability to work, care for their family or lead a normal life.

For example, nurse Marie-Claire Hoyle developed transverse myelitis, a paralysing inflammation of the spinal cord that “left her in agonising pain and unable to use her limbs fully”, after taking part in the AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine trial, said The Telegraph. However, she was denied access to compensation because her condition had improved over time and she has since regained most of her lost function.

Claimants have also complained that the system is difficult to navigate, that lengthy backlogs are delaying decisions, and that pay-outs do not adequately reflect the impact of their condition.

What has the Covid inquiry recommended?

In her fourth report, the chair of the Covid inquiry, Baroness Hallett, called for “urgent” reform of the scheme, saying that it’s “not sufficiently supportive”.

She recommended that the government increase the payment at least in line with inflation, then reassess it annually. The report also suggested the government introduce graduated payment levels that reflect the degree of injury, rather than treating all qualifying cases over the 60% disablement threshold the same.

“We are carefully considering the Covid-19 inquiry’s recommendations on reforming the scheme and will respond shortly,” said the Department of Health and Social Care.

Social care was an “afterthought” during the Covid-19 pandemic, and government failures allowed the virus to “spread like wildfire” through care homes.

Those are some of the damning findings in the latest report by the UK Covid-19 Inquiry, chaired by Baroness Hallett. It focused on the “devastating” impact of the virus on adult social care in the UK. More than 43,000 people in care homes were recorded to have died with Covid between March 2020 and July 2022. Last year, a senior civil servant told the inquiry it amounted to “generational slaughter”.

Social care was an ‘afterthought’

All four UK governments initially focused on protecting hospitals. Adult social care “appeared to be something of an afterthought”, said the report. The “mantra of ‘protecting the NHS’ sometimes came at the expense of the users and providers of care”.

These failures “created environments in care settings in which the virus could spread like wildfire”.

Hancock’s ‘protective ring’ was false

Matt Hancock, then the health secretary, claimed ministers had “tried to throw a protective ring” around care homes “right from the start” of the pandemic. That claim was “unfounded”, said the inquiry. “Quite the opposite was true.”

“Unfounded is an understatement,” said Sky News. At the start of the pandemic, about 25,000 patients were discharged from hospitals into care homes – most without being tested for Covid – to “free up beds”. They and care home staff then received insufficient protection and guidance, “with devastating consequences”, said the inquiry.

The policy was later ruled unlawful by the High Court. Jean Adamson, speaking on behalf of bereaved families, called Hancock’s claim a “cruel lie”, said Sky News. Hancock isn’t commenting on the report.

Visiting restrictions did ‘immense’ harm

Elderly residents’ suffering was “compounded by draconian visiting restrictions”, said The Times. These caused “incalculable harm”, leaving people to die “abandoned and alone”, without “the comfort or support of their loved ones”, the report said.

Strict visiting limits were necessary at the start of the pandemic to protect people, but the “balance of harms” shifted; they increasingly did more harm than good, Hallett said.

The “profound isolation and sense of abandonment” caused by keeping them in place resulted in “immense emotional harm” to residents. Many whose loved ones died without them now remain “wracked with guilt that they do not deserve to carry”.

‘Desperate measures’ for protective equipment

Unsurprisingly, difficulties getting hold of personal protective equipment (PPE) were “a key theme of this report”, said the BBC.

Hospitals were “prioritised for supplies”, leaving care workers resorting to “some very desperate measures”. There were cases of workers “using festival waterproof ponchos, painters’ overalls and bin bags as makeshift PPE”.

Supply problems were a global issue, the report acknowledged, but better planning would have helped. The lack of PPE for care home staff was “wholly unacceptable”.

Social care was already ‘a concern’

A 2016 simulation exercise testing the UK’s response to a pandemic found the social care sector was a “particular concern”.

But when Covid-19 emerged, recommendations had “not been completed”, said the inquiry, leaving ministers to make decisions “without the information they needed”.

Millions of unpaid, “undervalued” carers were “heavily relied upon” without adequate support. The scale of death and suffering they witnessed was “unlike anything they had seen before”, said the report.

In March last year Wes Streeting, then the health secretary, suggested that mental health and neurodevelopmental conditions were being “over-diagnosed”. In doing so, he rode “headlong into another culture war”, said Patrick Butler in The Guardian.

Stretched services

Although he later changed his mind on the subject, Streeting seemed to be endorsing the popular view that everyday stresses and disappointments are being too often medicalised, “resulting in a surge of bogus clinical diagnoses” – and creating a “snowflake generation” of fragile, work-avoidant young people.

Last week, a “mammoth review” of mental health, autism and ADHD in England, commissioned by Streeting and chaired by Prof Peter Fonagy, published its findings. It “has no truck with the snowflake generation caricature”: there has been a steep rise in mental health problems, it concludes, particularly among the young, and this is causing genuine distress.

The report cites insecure work, unaffordable housing and the growing influence of social media as major contributing factors to mental distress, said The Guardian. There is a “lack of hope among young people that their lives will be better than their parents’”. And stretched mental health services are clearly failing them.

Surge in demand

The rise in mental distress is real, said The Times, but when it comes to diagnoses for ADHD and autism, the report suggests that the process is certainly in danger of “going awry”, and that there is an increasing risk of overdiagnosis. The report cites research estimating that about 1.2% of children in England are autistic. Yet by last year around 6% of boys aged six to 11 had been diagnosed with autism.

The overall surge is due, in part, to an explosion in the number of private clinics offering sometimes unreliable services. They should be prevented from direct advertising, as the report suggests. While sometimes necessary, diagnoses can also cause harm if they hold people back; children diagnosed with ADHD are four times more likely to end up as Neets – not in education, employment or training. Young people need “prompter psychological help”, not “a label for life”.

So what should be done, asked Sean O’Grady in The Independent. “It’s not that obvious.” The review backs government plans to help more people into work as a way of addressing underlying problems. It also recognises the dangers of over-medicalisation: many young people would benefit more from rebuilding social connections than from antidepressants. But Fonagy doesn’t offer any clear advice about the policy choices on, for instance, welfare. That will have to wait for Alan Milburn’s review into youth unemployment later in the year.

Most people think of testosterone as “the defining male hormone”, said biochemist Daniel Kelly on The Conversation. But women also produce it and levels decline with age.

Women have long used testosterone therapy to improve libido and energy. Now, many are turning to it to manage other menopause-related symptoms, such as brain fog and mood swings.

But concerns are growing that the hormone treatment’s surge in popularity on social media is fuelling demand that vastly outstrips evidence for its long-term safety and efficacy.

How widespread is this new use?

Only four countries – Australia, South Africa, New Zealand and the UK – have authorised a testosterone cream for women, but mostly only to treat low libido. The UK approved the female-formulated testosterone cream AndroFeme in 2025, but the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) still needs to appraise it for cost effectiveness; it isn’t yet available on the NHS.

Still, there has been a “very sharp increase” in testosterone referrals to the NHS in Wales for post-menopausal women, a consultant told the BBC. Women there are “posing as men” to buy products from online pharmacies because of difficulties getting NHS prescriptions, she said. In England, NHS prescriptions for testosterone gel to women rose roughly tenfold between 2015 and 2022, said The Pharmaceutical Journal.

The issue is “receiving attention from regulators”, said Kelly on The Conversation. In September, the US Food and Drug Administration held a landmark public workshop on testosterone therapy, “examining evidence gaps and the need for future drug development”.

Does it work?

Most studies have focused on testosterone’s effect on low libido. But preliminary evidence indicates it could help with “a wide range of menopause symptoms, from mood changes to muscle loss”, said New Scientist.

A study published last year involving 510 women at a specialist menopause clinic in the UK found that, after four months on testosterone gel, there were improvements in mood, cognitive symptoms and libido. These findings “do not prove that the testosterone treatment caused these changes”, said Kelly. Testosterone is usually prescribed alongside oestrogen and sometimes progesterone in standard hormone replacement therapy. A study in Wales is currently trying to discover if “anecdotal reports of improved cognition and energy could be scientifically backed”, said the BBC.

More than 30 trials studying testosterone use for various health conditions in women are under way or planned in the US, said Reuters. “We do not have any evidence in women that it will improve muscle mass or bone density or mood or well-being or really any other metric,” said Stephanie Faubion, director of Mayo Clinic’s Center for Women’s Health and medical director of The ​Menopause Society. “What testosterone is being touted for in the lay public and on social media is not really what we have data for.”

Placebo-controlled trials have also not conclusively proven that testosterone alleviates brain fog, mood, bone density or fatigue, endocrinology professor Susan Davis told LiveScience.

What are the concerns?

Most testosterone treatments are not formulated and dosed for female patients. So in the UK, a “workaround” has been to measure out a tenth of a sachet of men’s testosterone gel by eye, said Kelly. That’s “a less precise way to deliver a hormone for which the therapeutic dose is so small”. Too much testosterone can increase the likelihood of unwanted side effects, such as voice deepening or rapid growth of facial and body hair.

“When you persistently have very high testosterone levels, you can get undesirable permanent side effects,” menopause specialist Michelle Olver told the BBC. “Nobody wants to have baldness, deepening of the voice or enlargement of the clitoris.”

The potential impacts of extra testosterone on cardiovascular health and breast cancer risk are “poorly understood”, said LiveScience. There is little evidence or data on the long-term safety for women. Yet online, they are “being bombarded with a tsunami of information providing them with the most sky-high expectations imaginable”, said gynaecology professor Nanette Santoro.

A new United Nations report is sounding the alarm on another potential risk of our constantly evolving world: technology that could allow governments to “read minds” via brainwave interfaces. While your inner thoughts are mostly safe for now, the U.N. is worried this may not always be the case.

‘Introduces significant risks’

The U.N. believes this type of ‘neurotechnology’ is advancing so quickly that “governments’ ability to access and manipulate people’s brains could one day pose a threat to fundamental human rights,” said The New York Times, which first published the U.N.’s report. Neurotechnology “raises profound human rights challenges when applied to the administration of justice,” U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres said in the report, and its “expansion beyond clinical settings into investigative, judicial and correctional contexts introduces significant risks.”

This is not the first time the U.N. has issued warnings about the matter. The organization has been concerned about military applications of neurotechnology, especially “brain-computer interfaces, which translate brain activity into commands that can control devices such as computers or robotic prosthetic limbs,” said Politico. The U.N. fears that if a “brain-computer interface is used inappropriately by the military, it could lead to human rights abuses.”

In 2022, UNESCO also published a report on the ethical issues of neurotechnology. Unlike “many other frontier technologies, neurotechnology can directly access, manipulate and emulate the structure of the brain, which is central to notions of human identity, freedom of thought, autonomy, privacy and well-being,” said UNESCO’s report. Still, this marks the first time the U.N. as a whole is waving such a large red flag.

A ‘number of recommendations’

The U.N. report proposed some solutions to safeguard advancing neurotechnologies. It lists a “number of recommendations, including establishing regulations consistent with international law, recognizing thoughts as ‘highly sensitive personal data’ and requiring explicit consent for the use of neurotechnology in criminal justice settings,” said the Times.

The report also gives “states an opportunity to establish clear rules to regulate the use of neurotechnology, based on human rights,” Jeremy Laurence, a spokesman for the U.N. Human Rights Office, said to the Times. This should be accomplished before the technologies “become routine in investigations, courts and prisons.”

The City of Doncaster council has launched a health and safety investigation at Yorkshire Wildlife Park after a fatality in a big cat enclosure. William Chapman was killed by a Siberian tiger after he “allegedly climbed over a barrier into the animal’s enclosure” on Saturday, said The Times. Before entering the enclosure, he had been “dancing and wearing headphones” and was heard asking other visitors to take a photo of him.

Some are calling for tighter security measures at wildlife parks after recent high-profile incidents, but others argue that it is the changing behaviour of human visitors that poses a more serious threat to their existence.

‘Deeply tragic’

This is the “second serious incident at a UK zoo in just a few months”, said The Guardian. In June, a three-year-old boy was seriously injured in Cambridgeshire, after allegedly being thrown into a crocodile enclosure by a stranger. Police arrested a man in his 30s, but he was released after he was “assessed as not being fit for interview”.

Although this death is “deeply tragic”, there are “millions” of visits to wildlife parks every year, and these incidents are “vanishingly rare”, said Amy Dickman, professor of wildlife conservation at the University of Oxford. The “harsh reality”, however, is that it is “virtually impossible for zoos to stop people who are very determined to breach safety measures”.

“Zoos are actually one of the safest places you can visit,” Jo Judge, chief executive of the British and Irish Association of Zoos and Aquariums, told the BBC. They undergo a “huge number” of risk assessments, as well as “full inspections every six years and periodic inspections every three”.

Modern zoos must find a balance between allowing visitors to be close to animals and keep them safe without being too “heavy-handed”, Dr Campbell Murn, a former member of the government’s zoo expert committee, told the broadcaster. There is already “enormous consideration” for visitor safety. “despite the best security systems and enclosures” sometimes “a determined thief will get into somebody’s house or somebody’s car”.

‘Props’ for social media

Safety at zoos is “not always only about keeping animals in, it’s about keeping humans out”, Will Travers of the Born Free Foundation, which campaigns for the abolition of zoos, told the Daily Express. Turning animal habitats into public attractions encourages a “very unnatural relationship with dangerous wild animals”.

Zoo safety has not worsened, nor are animals “somehow more dangerous”: “human behaviour itself has instead become a problem”, said The Telegraph. In 2019, a woman “climbed over a concrete barrier” at a zoo in Arizona “in a bid to take a selfie with a jaguar” before bystanders intervened. And in May, two American tourists were arrested in Japan after allegedly scaling a fence to enter the enclosure of Punch, a “nine-month-old macaque who captured global attention” after becoming emotionally attached to a soft toy. In the face of this human-led change, “zoos may now have to reflect not just on how they are run, but what they are even for”.

It is “unarguable” that phones and social media have altered the relationship between animals and zoo visitors. Where people would once have been “happy to see a photograph” of a famous animal, now they are “desperate to put their own interactions with endangered species” online. Dangerous animals have become “props” for content, and all too often individuals “endanger their lives” for clicks.

At present, England’s adult care system is “one of the most threadbare in the developed world”, according to Thea Stein of the Nuffield Trust, which has analysed the arrangements of 11 comparable nations and regions. England is an “outlier” in that eligibility for any public funding at all is strictly means-tested.

The most generous system is in Denmark, where the state pays 100% of care costs, with no means test. Those in residential care do get billed for bed and board, but means-tested housing benefit is available.

Australia has a similar system, also funded by general taxation. In most cases, bed and board have to be paid for, but there are a series of daily spending caps on different elements, such as food and hotel costs.

Japan, with the oldest population in the world, introduced a tax on all over-40s in 2000, ring-fenced for care. Everyone who needs it is given a monthly care allowance. They contribute 10%-30% of costs, depending on income; total contributions are capped.

A similar insurance system operates in Germany, but with no cap. Individuals usually pay half of costs. Unusually, adult children can (in rare cases) be liable to pay for parents’ care if the parents run out of money.

The social care system is fragmented, severely underfunded, and creates stark disparities – particularly in England.

Adult social care covers a large range of services given to the frail and disabled, with the two main categories being long-term support for working-age adults with disabilities, and care for older people, which cost roughly similar amounts. In England in 2024-25, total spending in the area rose to £34.5 billion, a 4% real-terms increase on the year before. Growing costs are driven in part by a fast-ageing society. In 1972 there were around 7.5 million people aged 65 or over in the UK, about 13% of the population. In 2022, there were around 12.7 million (or 19%).

Publicly funded social care is provided by local authorities, and mainly outsourced to private providers. Growing expenditure puts local authorities under severe strain; adult social care now accounts for around 20% of English local authorities’ total spending. In addition, the system is seen as unfair and dysfunctional, placing a heavy burden on the NHS and on carers, paid and unpaid.

Why is the system thought to be unfair?

While “healthcare needs” – cancer, say – are theoretically met in full by the NHS, those with “social care needs” – trouble with eating, washing, mobility etc. – who have even fairly modest means have to pay for care themselves (although the dividing line between the two categories is often unclear). With health, the costs are shared across society; with care, the unlucky ones can face catastrophically large bills. The Department of Health and Social Care estimates that around a third of all over-65s in England need social care of some kind, and that about one in seven individuals over the age of 65 will face lifetime care costs exceeding £100,000.

How exactly does the system work?

First, the local council will conduct a needs assessment. Then there is a means test. In England and Northern Ireland, in most cases only people with assets worth less than £23,250 get any state support (income such as pensions is included in the calculation). Below that, there is a sliding scale: those with £14,250 or less receive full funding. The value of a home is ignored for at-home care but usually included if the person has to move into residential care, unless a spouse continues living there.

Care at home costs perhaps £20-£35 per hour, though the fees can be much higher. Residential care, for self-funders, costs on average £1,460 per week for the basics, according to healthcare data provider LaingBuisson. In many parts of the country it is higher than that.

In Wales, weekly care payments are capped, and the residential care thresholds are higher. In Scotland the system is more generous still: personal care at home is free for those who need it. Residential care is means-tested, though both the upper threshold (£36,750) and lower one (£22,750) are higher, and care costs, as opposed to accommodation and food costs, are met by the local authority.

What is Andy Burnham’s plan?

The PM said in his conference speech last week that Labour would create a “National Care Service” for England, along NHS lines: free at the point of use, funded from general taxation, “where everyone contributes and everyone is covered”.

The service will not be created until the next parliament, and the full plan won’t even be unveiled until Louise Casey has published her report next year, but we know it will follow the Scottish approach: offering free personal care at home, with those in residential care paying for “bed and board” costs only. Though much more generous – and more expensive – than the English system, this could still leave people very exposed to high costs. Average costs for bed and board alone often reach £1,300 a week.

How could such people be protected?

That would require either a full, wall-to-wall National Care Service, with residential care free at the point of use and funded by tax (which Burnham has not proposed); or a payment cap. This is a financial limit on how much an individual has to pay for their own personal care over their lifetime. The Dilnot Commission in 2011 suggested that no one should have to contribute more than £35,000 (over £50,000 in today’s money) towards care over their lifetime, nor more than £10,000 per year for bed and board.

How much would all this cost?

It’s hard to say. In 2023, the Health Foundation estimated that a comprehensive NHS-style system for England would cost an extra £18.5 billion per year; while a Scotland-style system would cost £7.5 billion; and a cap on care costs, £4 billion. Burnham announced that the pension triple lock would be replaced after the next election. But the authoritative Institute for Fiscal Studies has warned that this would not meet the costs of social care. Labour argues that there would be some savings from a decent care system: it would take pressure off the NHS, freeing up perhaps £2 billion a year in the long term, according to the King’s Fund think-tank. But it added that such figures should be treated with caution.

Why hasn’t it been fixed before?

Many governments have tried: there have been three major commissions and dozens of official inquiries since 1997. But politically, it is very difficult, partly because the costs of the current system only fall on a small number of people, so it is not widely regarded as an important issue, while the solutions are unpopular.

In 2010, Burnham, then the health secretary, outlined plans for a National Care Service funded from a £20,000 levy on estates at death. This was branded a “death tax”, and Labour lost the election. At the 2017 election, Theresa May’s Conservative manifesto proposed raising the means-testing threshold from £23,250 to £100,000, but recovering more costs from estates. This “dementia tax”, as it was dubbed, contributed to May’s disastrous campaign. Burnham aims to get “cross-party consensus”.

Donald Trump has said the US is looking “very strongly” at a suspected case of plague after the death of a researcher at a remote Siberian lab.

Darya Shipilova, 28, who worked at the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Research Institute of Siberia and the Far East, died on 2 October two days after falling ill following reported exposure to pneumonic plague bacteria. Russia’s public health agency, Rospotrebnadzor, said that her diagnosis was “pneumonia of unknown aetiology”, meaning they cannot confirm what caused it or where it came from.

“I don’t think it’s cause for alarm, but it is cause for focus”, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters yesterday.

What do we know so far?

It is still unclear exactly how Shipilova became unwell. Local media outlet Lyudi Baikala suggested she may have been infected after accidentally breaking a test tube containing pneumonic plague bacteria on 25 September, although this has not been confirmed by Russian authorities. Rospotrebnadzor has said that expanded tests of samples from the patient had found no microorganisms associated with her work. Other reports suggest she contracted the disease on a field trip to a region where plague occurs naturally among wild rodents.

The uncertainty has been compounded by conflicting messages from local politicians and relative silence from Moscow. Alexey Tsydenov, governor of the neighbouring Buryatia region, initially wrote on social media that she had died of plague, before editing his post to add the qualifier “possibly”.

While Rospotrebnadzor has described the “sanitary and epidemiological” situation in the area as stable, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty reported on Monday that several hospitals in Irkutsk had been placed under quarantine. Lyudi Baikala has reported that nearly 200 contacts of Shipilova have been placed under observation.

How dangerous is pneumonic plague?

Plague is caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, and pneumonic plague is the most virulent form of the disease, with an incubation period as short as 24 hours. The World Health Organization has said pneumonic plague is especially contagious because it “can trigger severe epidemics through person-to-person transmission via respiratory particles”.

Symptoms include severe respiratory symptoms such as shortness of breath and coughing, often with blood-tainted mucus. Common antibiotics can effectively combat the disease provided they are administered early enough. If left untreated, it can prove fatal within 18 to 24 hours.

This makes any outbreak “potentially very dangerous”, said The Times, but “it is important to distinguish the severity of the disease for an individual person, especially if untreated, from its ability to spread quickly”.

Could it be related to biological warfare?

Some US politicians have suggested the incident could be connected to military research into biological warfare. “I remember hearing from anti-Ukraine voices about their so-called bio labs,” Republican congressman Don Bacon, a senior member of the House armed services committee, wrote on social media. “But in reality it is Russia with the bio labs.”

Dr Ashish Jha, the White House Covid-19 response coordinator from 2022 to 2023, told NBC News that if this is an isolated case and no one else dies “it will probably end there”, adding that if there were “biological weapons programmes in these labs, that would be much more concerning to me,” and that “much more” information and transparency was needed from Russian authorities.

Simon Clarke, an associate professor in cellular microbiology at the University of Reading, told BBC Radio 4’s PM programme that it was “possible” that the lab in question might have been studying the pathogen’s potential as a bio-weapon. “Because this is Russia people’s thoughts are running to that”, he said, but added that medical research was still the “more likely” explanation.

What happened

The Trump administration on Tuesday said it had kicked 760,000 enrollees off the Affordable Care Act insurance marketplace. Vice President JD Vance told a press conference that the canceled enrollees were a mix of “phantom people” and “real people who just don’t meet the eligibility requirements,” didn’t submit the proper documents or weren’t even aware they were enrolled in an ACA health plan.

Who said what

Tuesday’s announcement by the Vance-led anti-fraud task force “represents one of the largest administrative purges targeting individual insurance exchanges” since the administration’s “crackdown on fraud began last year,” The Wall Street Journal said. There’s “widespread agreement that unauthorized enrollments should be canceled,” ACA expert Cynthia Cox at KFF said to The New York Times, but it’s not clear that “these were all indeed unauthorized enrollments,” and Vance’s panel didn’t appear to use the “appropriate process” to determine which to cancel.

What next?

Vance said his anti-fraud effort, including further scrutiny of up to 450,000 more enrollees and bans on about 600 ACA brokers, would save $2.2 billion. The “price of ACA insurance has skyrocketed” during Trump’s second term, prompting “millions to downgrade their plans or exit the program entirely,” The Associated Press said. “Early filings from insurers suggest that prices will increase substantially again next year,” the Times said.

While glucagon-like peptide-1s have been widely celebrated for transforming weight loss, some who attempt to use the medications find themselves in a less-studied patient category called nonresponders. This minority of people haven’t experienced any significant change in weight even after adjusting their dose or switching brands.

What are the influencing factors?

Between “9% and a third of participants” in clinical trials for GLP-1 weight-loss drugs lose less than 5% of their body weight after months of use, which is the threshold associated with health improvements, said The Guardian. Now, researchers are “trying to work out why” the drugs are ineffective for nonresponders — a discovery that could help doctors “tailor the use of the drugs, maximize cost-effectiveness and reduce side effects.”

The drug’s lack of efficacy cannot be blamed on patients, said Alexander Miras, an obesity expert at Ulster University, to The Guardian. If the drug does not “reduce hunger and food intake for someone,” it is “just not going to work.”

For now, the “short answer” to why some people don’t respond is that “we don’t really know,” said Miras. Research suggests that factors such as “motivation, intelligence, education and socioeconomics” are not predictors of how patients would “respond to GLP-1 medications.”

Other characteristics such as age, sex and whether or not someone has Type 2 diabetes do appear to have an effect. Studies have also suggested “ancestry might have an impact,” with the medications “most effective in people of European ancestry and least effective in people of African American ancestry,” said The Guardian.

Some may be jumping the gun, however. Many people labeled as nonresponders simply “do not take the medication correctly” or “discontinue treatment before adequate therapeutic effect can be achieved,” said Kingston University biologists Nadine Wehida and Ahmed Elbediwy at The Conversation. Studies show up to 20% to 60% of people “stop treatment within the first year” amid “widespread use of the drug in doses below the recommended amounts.”

Is there hope for nonresponders?

There is “no reliable way” to predict what group one will fall into when trying GLP-1s, said Stanford Medicine News Center. The good news is “you don’t have to wait long to find out.” In general, higher doses produce better results, so doctors “typically start patients low and increase gradually, watching for side effects.”

If the dose is not associated with any weight loss, “waiting three months on the same dose is not going to give you more answers,” said Stanford Medicine endocrinologist Sun Kim to the department’s News Center. You should “increase the dose and reassess.” Whether or not it’s working tends to become clear within the first few weeks.

Certain medical factors such as “thyroid disorders” can “disrupt metabolism,” said Yale Medicine. People with “impaired glucose regulation,” including those with diabetes, therefore tend to “lose less weight on these medications.” A less common underlying condition could also be playing a role.

Sometimes, “despite doing everything right,” a patient “just doesn’t respond the way we would hope,” said Avlin Imaeda, a Yale Medicine gastroenterologist. And this phenomenon isn’t “unique to weight-loss medications,” said Yale Medicine. Some patients may not react to “certain blood-pressure drugs, antidepressants or cancer therapies.” Biology is complex, and treatment responses can vary widely.

For those hoping for something to look forward to, a “series of promising new drugs are in development,” said The Guardian. In the meantime, for nonresponders still struggling to lose weight, “weight-loss surgery may be the only option left.”

GLP-1-based drugs not working does not “predict a lack of response to [bariatric] surgery,” said Miras. In the end, it’s “not your fault,” and it’s not the drug’s fault either. “This is purely luck.”

A notorious rollercoaster at Six Flags Magic Mountain theme park in Santa Clarita, California, has been closed following claims that two people have suffered from brain injuries from riding it. An investigation by CNN found a dozen serious complaints over two decades, including customers who suffered life-altering disabilities or fell into comas after riding X2, with two dying of their injuries.

Ultimate daredevil

The Six Flags Magic Mountain website describes the X2 rollercoaster as a “right (sic) of passage for the ultimate daredevil”. What distinguishes this type of rollercoaster from others is its fourth-dimensional quality, meaning seats are rotating 360 degrees around the track, turning riders upside down, as the trains reach speeds of nearly 80mph for approximately two minutes.

Pamela Guillen said that she lost consciousness after banging her head against the seat’s headrest “multiple times” during an X2 ride in July. A CT scan revealed she had a severe subdural haematoma (bleeding inside the brain) and brain compression. Now, after learning to walk and talk again, she suffers from headaches and relies on medication to prevent seizures. “I’m taking it a day at a time to not overwhelm myself and to not go into a dark hole of mourning who I was and what I was able to do before this,” she told CNN.

A few days later, Naomi Greer-Wilkinson rode the X2 and also lost consciousness. She was hospitalised with a traumatic brain injury and remains in a coma. Her parents have been told to prepare for the worst, according to reports. Her father said that whoever decided to keep X2 open after the first July incident “has a lot to answer for,” and declared, “It’s got to stop.”

Violent halt

As well as complaints of life-altering disabilities, comas and deaths, park officials have received “scores” of complaints of head and neck injuries sustained after an X2 ride, “according to internal records cited by an expert witness for a plaintiff in court filings”. “Despite years of warnings” from riders, lawyers and medical experts about the “perils” of riding this rollercoaster, theme park officials and state authorities “allowed the attraction to continue operating”.

Six Flags Magic Mountain insists that X2 is regularly tested and meets industry safety regulations. It didn’t respond to queries from the media about the most recent injuries, beyond confirming that “the ride remains closed at this time”. Attorneys for the park have previously stated there are signs warning customers that “there are inherent risks” in park rides. The families of Guillen and Greer-Wilkinson said the park offered them food on the night of the injury, but have not been in contact since.

Last month, the family of Christopher Hawley, who died after a ride in 2022, reached a settlement with the park and with ride manufacturer S&S Worldwide Inc, said KTLA. During his ride, the coaster “suddenly, abruptly and violently jolted to a halt”, according to the lawsuit filed by the family. Afterwards, Hawley was rushed to hospital where a CT scan showed he suffered a catastrophic right subdural haematoma which the lawsuit alleged was caused by the rollercoaster, and he died the following day. His father, William Hawley, said legal action was the only way to get answers. “We want to make sure that ride isn’t going to kill somebody else,” he said.

Three-quarters of secondary schools in England are breaking healthy eating rules on the food being offered to pupils, according to a report from a charity set up by the chef Jamie Oliver. Bite Back said it discovered “alarming” and “shocking” breaches of school food standards at nearly 400 schools, said The Guardian.

What rules are being flouted?

After investigating 391 state schools, the researchers found that three out of four were breaching the guidelines in at least one respect. More than half (53%), were selling products with levels of fat, sugar or salt that are banned, including crisps, biscuits, chocolate bars and pastries. Under current rules, schools are allowed to sell fruit, vegetables, nuts and seeds as snacks.

No fewer than 224 secondary schools (57%) were offering processed meats such as burgers, nuggets, sausages and goujons more regularly than the twice-a-week frequency that the standards allow. Fried potato products, such as hash browns, were appearing on school menus more frequently than the same recommended limit in 144 schools (37%). At 123 schools (31%), chocolate was included in desserts or baked items, even though its use is not permitted.

In a more positive finding, only eight schools (2%) were flouting the ban on selling sweets as snacks and only three schools (1%) were selling banned sugary drinks.

Why is this a problem?

One in three children are overweight or obese when they leave primary school, and this is leading to more cases of type 2 diabetes, asthma and high blood pressure in children, according to the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health.

Diet is also linked to behavioural issues, said The Food Foundation. A significant majority of teachers agree that what children eat at school has a direct impact on behaviour and concentration. In a survey of more than 6,000 primary and secondary school teachers across England in May, 80% said unhealthy lunch or snack food can lead to disruptive behaviour, and 85% said diet affects classroom concentration.

What is the new overhaul?

Along with expanding the provision of free school meals to all pupils from a household where someone is receiving universal credit, the government is to further tighten healthy eating guidelines, after years of lobbying by child health and anti-obesity groups. From this month, there is a total ban on deep-fried food, such as chicken nuggets and chips, while high-sugar desserts will be restricted to once a week. Fruit-based options will largely replace puddings like doughnuts, cakes and ice cream.

The “ambitious overhaul” will make sure children have “access to healthy, balanced meals”, and are “protected from the harms of eating too much ultra-processed food”, said a spokesperson from the Department for Education.

“We know not every school is following these standards, which is exactly why we will introduce a strengthened enforcement regime, alongside requiring every school to publish their food policy and menus online to improve transparency for parents”, they added.

But a caterer revealed in April that a six-week pilot of England’s new school food standards led to a 15% decline in uptake of meals, with children rejecting healthier options in favour of a packed lunch. This has “prompted concerns” that these proposals, “though well-intentioned, could end up having a negative impact on children’s health”, said Sally Weale, The Guardian’s education correspondent. After all, as food writer and campaigner Bee Wilson told Positive News: “It doesn’t matter how healthy a lunch is if most of it goes in the bin.”

What happened

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. repeatedly testified in his Senate confirmation hearing last year that a 2019 trip to Samoa had “nothing to do with vaccines,” but new documents obtained through freedom of information requests “refute that testimony,” The Associated Press said Thursday. Kennedy was a “prominent anti-vaccine activist" at the time, and "critics said the visit fueled anti-vaccine sentiment" before a measles outbreak that killed 83 Samoans. In one letter, Kennedy “explicitly told the Samoan prime minister he wanted to study” the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine there and “used the words ‘vaccine’ or ‘vaccination’ eight times,” said The Guardian.

Who said what

“RFK’s platform is built on lies” that “leave a trail of dead children,” said Sen. Ron Wyden (Ore.), the top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee. “There are consequences for lying to Congress.” Watchdog group American Oversight on Thursday asked the Justice Department to investigate Kennedy’s testimony for false statements. The Health and Human Services Department told the AP that “any claim or insinuation” Kennedy “lied under oath or to Congress” based on these letters is “not only false but outright defamatory.”

What next?

“Lying to Congress is a crime, whether or not the witness is under oath,” Georgetown law professor Josh Chafetz told The Guardian. But this Justice Department is “unlikely” to prosecute Kennedy.

Over 100 days into the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), “the response is still struggling to keep pace”, said Liz Cookman in The Independent. It’s estimated that more than 2,500 people have now died, with the death toll accelerating sharply in recent weeks.

It is the fastest-growing Ebola outbreak on record, spreading much quicker than the deadliest crisis to date, the West African epidemic of 2014 to 2016, which killed more than 11,000 people. To put it in context, that outbreak took a year to reach 2,000 deaths.

Destabilised by conflict

“The situation is bad,” said Devi Sridhar in The Guardian. The mortality rate seems to be nearly 50%. More than half of victims are dying without receiving care. Children make up almost a third of all deaths.

Yet this outbreak isn’t attracting much attention abroad. Compared with the 2014 outbreak, the current silence is “astounding”. That year, Ebola was one of the most Googled terms in the world; this year, “no one wants to hear about infectious diseases”. Things are only going to get worse. A “perfect storm of factors” is making the spread hard to contain. The virus is the Bundibugyo species, for which there is currently no licensed vaccine or specific treatment, although clinical trials are under way.

The location of the outbreak has made it worse, said Matthew Mpoke Bigg in The New York Times. Uganda has succeeded in eliminating an outbreak; but Ituri province in north-eastern Congo is unstable, with ongoing conflict and roaming militias. More than 900,000 people have been displaced, while the region’s gold mines draw workers from a wide area. The virus has now spread to six provinces across the DRC. There are fears that it could spread to South Sudan, and to the Congolese capital, Kinshasa, one of Africa’s biggest cities.

Dismantling of USAID

The situation in DRC has been “disastrously compounded” by cuts to Western aid, said The Guardian, above all by the US. The dismantling of USAID has weakened health infrastructure and surveillance capacity, while Washington’s withdrawal from the World Health Organisation has also undermined the response. European countries, too, have started to treat international aid as “luxury expenditure”.

The 2014 outbreak laid bare the risk of Ebola spreading in the region and beyond. In the wake of the Covid pandemic, countless pieties were uttered about disease control. Yet here we are again. “Subsequent actions by governments have belied those words” leaving the DRC exposed to an epidemic that could soon spiral “out of control”.

What happened

The Food and Drug Administration on Wednesday approved a first-of-its-kind drug for advanced pancreatic cancer, one of the deadliest types of cancer and among the hardest to treat. The FDA’s expedited approval of daraxonrasib, a daily pill developed by Revolution Medicines and sold as Rasonque, followed a clinical trial in which patients on the drug lived a median 13.2 months, twice as long as those who underwent chemotherapy, and with fewer side effects. Some “patients who have gotten the drug through clinical trials have lived for years,” The New York Times said.

Who said what

Daraxonrasib has “electrified cancer specialists and patients,” the Times said. It’s “not a cure, but it is the first treatment to substantially extend the lives of patients” with a disease long considered among the “most hopeless in medicine.” Nearly all pancreatic tumors are fueled by a mutated cellular protein, KRAS, that’s stubbornly resistant to interventions. Daraxonrasib “uses what’s essentially a molecular glue to bind with multiple KRAS subtypes” and shut them down, The Associated Press said. Revolution is “studying its technology for several other forms of cancer, including lung cancer.”

What next?

Revolution said Rasonque is “now available in the United States at $39,800 for a 30-day ​supply,” Reuters said. The “vast majority of the cost is expected to be covered through insurance,” the Times said.

With the Trump administration pushing back against a swath of DEI-related federal grants, some research related to major diseases, including Alzheimer’s, is being caught in the crossfire. The most recent round of grant axing resulted in two major universities losing millions in funding related to studying brain disease, and experts say it could put them at a large disadvantage.

What research is being impacted?

In 2025, the U.S. awarded 52% fewer grants related to Alzheimer’s research than in 2024, according to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), with the number of grants falling from 369 to 177. The figure appears to be on track through 2026 as well, especially given the most recent cuts.

The newest funding slashes involve grant cancellations for “brain health and Alzheimer’s disease research at two leading research institutions, Emory University and the University of Pittsburgh,” said The Guardian. At least “three grants were canceled between the two institutions,” representing $15 million in funds that would’ve been used to study “how discrimination” — or racism — “affects long-term brain health.”

The topics “we’re measuring are scientifically valid concepts,” Andrea Rosso, an associate professor of epidemiology at the University of Pittsburgh, told The Guardian. Black people are two times more likely to develop dementia, according to the Alzheimer’s Association. And while these studies “don’t actually measure structural racism,” they do “use that as a framing for why one population is at such high risk.”

The DEI-related funding cuts are also coming alongside additional efforts by the White House to overhaul how grants are awarded. Under newly proposed rules by the Trump administration, any “multiyear grant could be terminated at any point,” and the government “would not be allowed to fund any DEI-related activities or projects or groups that ‘deny the biological reality of sex or the sex binary in humans,’” said The Boston Globe.

What does this mean for Alzheimer’s patients?

Many are worried that cutting Alzheimer’s research under the guise of the anti-DEI movement could negatively impact patients, specifically those who are Black. One canceled grant at the University of Pittsburgh “studied how Alzheimer’s disease risk was affected in people who live in divested, predominantly African American neighborhoods,” said The Guardian. The research tracked “socially driven Alzheimer’s disease risk factors by collecting surveys, brain imaging and blood samples.” Another grant at Emory University that was slashed by the White House “studied the impact of racial discrimination on the white matter of the brain, in part surveying participants’ self-reported incidences of discrimination.”

Behind all of these killed studies are “people waiting for answers, for therapies, for relief, for hope,” said a pain researcher at Mass General Brigham, per the Globe. This comes as the Trump administration has “been open about wanting a smaller NIH,” said Vox, and originally “proposed cutting the agency’s budget for 2026 by 40%.”

Some researchers say they are considering taking their studies offshore if things do not change. “While I hope to improve the lives of the American people with my research, if I am not able to pursue this aspiration in the U.S., I would rather continue to do so outside of the country,” one Ph.D. student said in comments about the cuts, per the Globe.

The current state of affairs “demonstrates a lack of understanding of our outcomes versus our exposures,” Ann Cohen, an associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh, said to The Guardian. “That’s epidemiology 101.”

Every cancer has its individual mutations, and scientists have long harboured hopes of developing treatments that can be tailored specifically for each individual patient. And now early results from a final-stage trial of personalised cancer vaccines has the research world holding its breath.

US pharmaceutical companies Moderna and Merck have been testing a personalised mRNA vaccine on melanoma patients who had had surgery for their skin cancer. This week, the firms announced that, combined with an established immunotherapy drug, the vaccine had significantly increased the length of time the patients remained cancer-free. This is “a major success in a new field of cancer treatment” that has sent both companies’ shares “surging”, said Reuters.

The results mark “a landmark moment” for the treatment of melanoma, one of the deadliest types of skin cancer, said the study’s principal investigator Georgina Long, medical director of the non-profit Melanoma Institute Australia. This is also “a pivotal moment” for cancer research, said Moderna’s chief executive, Stéphane Bancel.

How does the vaccine work?

It’s made using mRNA technology – as, famously, were some Covid-19 vaccines. But, while the Covid vaccines were created as a standard formulation for everyone, this time it’s created individually for each patient.

To do that, researchers sequence the DNA of each patient’s tumour (by analysing samples after it’s been removed) and identify its unique mutations. They then “encode selected targets into strands of mRNA”, producing a vaccine designed to teach the recipient’s immune system “to recognise and attack any tumour cells that remain”, said The Times. The result is “a personalised anti-cancer jab” specific to the patient’s tumour, said the BBC.

What do we know about the results?

Very little. The phase 3 trial involved 1,137 high-risk patients with melanoma, who were randomly assigned to receive either the vaccine and the immunotherapy drug Keytruda, or just Keytruda, for about a year.

In a similar smaller trial in 2022, Moderna reported that participants who received the vaccine and Keytruda were 44% less likely to develop new tumours or die within three years, compared to those who only received Keytruda.

Moderna has said that these new trial results “demonstrate statistically significant and clinically meaningful improvements” in survival times for the vaccine group, and that there had been “no new safety concerns”. But we don’t know exactly how much the vaccine increased survival times.

The results have not been publicly released or peer-reviewed. More findings from the trial will be presented at a medical conference in October.

What could this mean?

“I think it’s fair to call this a breakthrough,” said Marco Gerlinger of the Barts Cancer Institute. These results have “much wider implications” than just for melanoma treatment, he told The Times. They are “proof of principle that personalised cancer vaccines work”,

The hope is that this personalised vaccine “will work for many other types of cancer”, said New Scientist. Moderna and Merck are already trialling similar personalised mRNA vaccines for types of bladder, kidney and lung cancer. BioNTech, “the other big mRNA company”, is also testing personalised cancer vaccines in human trials. Several of these early-stage trials have produced “promising results”.

If successful, these vaccines could prevent nearly 50,000 deaths in the US alone, Yale University estimated last year. “The positive hit here leads us ⁠into truly this next phase in immunotherapy,” Karen Knudsen of the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy told Reuters. “This is an auspicious start – this is where things begin.”

What are the caveats?

Moderna and Merck have only released an interim analysis, not the full trial data. And experts “emphasise caution” until the dataset has been peer-reviewed, said the BBC.

The announcement gave Moderna’s shares “their biggest one-day jump on record”, said The Times, while Merck also rallied. But market moves are “imperfect indicators of real-world significance”, said the Financial Times. It’s “not quite the surprise clinical breakthrough” that the jump might imply. It’s “a big deal for Moderna” but, without all data, it’s “difficult to assess the magnitude, durability, and commercial relevance of benefit”.

Investors will be watching for the “next important steps”: “detailed clinical results, regulatory progress, and evidence that the technology works across other cancers”, a financial markets analyst told Sky News. Even then, they know that manufacturing personalised vaccines at scale is “expensive and complex”. One Reuters report suggested that each vaccine could cost about £147,000.

What happened

Moderna and Merck said Wednesday their experimental mRNA cancer vaccine successfully reduced recurrence of melanoma, and prevented the deadly skin cancer from spreading to other organs, in a large trial. The results “mark the first successful late-stage trial for a personalized mRNA cancer therapy,” The Wall Street Journal said, “validating decades of research” and “paving the way for a potentially new life-extending treatment” for people diagnosed with melanoma and other cancers.

Who said what

The ongoing study involves 1,137 high-risk melanoma patients whose cancer was surgically removed and genetically sequenced. The treatment combines Merck’s immunotherapy drug Keytruda with intismeran, a “made-to-order mRNA vaccine” created by analyzing and weaponizing “mutations found in the patients’ own tumors,” CNN said. The companies didn’t detail the results, but an earlier mid-stage trial showed that pairing intismeran with Keytruda reduced the risk of melanoma recurrence or death by 49% versus Keytruda alone. Moderna’s stock closed up 177% Wednesday.

What next?

Moderna and Merck said they planned to “present the details” of their latest “large, closely watched trial” at an “international medical meeting and to regulators,” The New York Times said. Investors and researchers “will be watching closely to see how effective and tolerable the vaccine proves to be,” the Journal said.

A new generation of drugs could transform the lives of people with narcolepsy and offer hope of future treatments for ADHD and depression.

Orexins help regulate wakefulness, as well as attention, motivation and the brain’s reward system. This month, the US Food and Drug Administration approved the first orexin agonist treatment for narcolepsy. Oveporexton (sold as Orzeyful) is designed to target the cause of the chronic sleep disorder, rather than treat the symptoms with stimulants.

But “the excitement is not just about narcolepsy”, said The Economist. Inspired by the success of drugs that mimic glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1), developed to treat diabetes and later used for weight-loss in medication such as Ozempic, drugmakers are “betting” that orexins could “follow a similar path”, potentially leading to treatments for conditions that “burden hundreds of millions” of people.

What are orexins?

They are two peptides (chains of amino acids that act as messengers in the brain) that are involved in the body’s sleep-wake system. Specifically, they are neuropeptides. They act as neurotransmitters, or chemicals, that carry messages between neurons. They are involved with reward and motivation.

Named after the Greek word orexis (appetite), orexins were discovered in 1998 by two teams working independently in the US. The discovery turned “the long march to develop a new kind of sleeping pill into a sprint”, said The Guardian.

But their “true role emerged” in 1999, said The Economist. People with narcolepsy were found to lack the specialised neurons that produce orexins, causing “abnormally low levels”. That means the brain “loses the ability to control when the body sleeps”, said Time.

How do they work?

In 2011, researchers at Takeda, a Japanese pharmaceutical company, found a chemical compound that could block the orexin receptor, and so promote sleep. Orexin antagonists were developed as a treatment for insomnia, differing from conventional sleeping pills that induce sedation.

But “the bigger prize may lie not in blocking orexin’s signal, but restoring it”, said The Economist. The results of Takeda’s trials of oveporexton, published last year in The New England Journal of Medicine, “created a stir”. Volunteers were able to stay awake 12.5 to 25 minutes longer with the drug (depending on the dose) than without it.

The drug “activates the orexin pathway” and “restores the brain’s ability to remain alert”, said Time. Volunteers also had fewer episodes of cataplexy, or loss of muscle control, as well as other symptoms such as hallucinations and irregular sleep. There were “no serious adverse events related to treatment”, said the Smithsonian magazine.

“It’s really a complete revolution,” Emmanuel Mignot, a sleep-medicine professor who led Takeda’s final studies, told The Wall Street Journal. “The first time patients take it, it’s like the light switch.” One 19-year-old trial participant said: “It was the first time I felt somewhat alive in the last 10 years.” “It’s the best thing that has ever happened to me,” he told Nature.

What might the future hold?

In the US and Western Europe, narcolepsy affects about one in 2,000 people, but there is no cure. Existing drugs – “decades-old stimulants and sedatives” – only manage symptoms, said The Wall Street Journal. Oveporexton and its competitors are “designed to treat the disease as a whole”. Morgan Stanley estimates that orexin-based medicines for narcolepsy and other sleep disorders could generate $16 billion a year by 2035, according to SF Globe.

Takeda is testing orexin-targeting drugs for sleep apnea and chronic daytime sleepiness. Alkermes, an Irish biotech company, is testing an orexin drug for ADHD in adults. And this year Eli Lilly (of Mounjaro fame) bought Centessa, a biotech firm with an orexin agonist in trials, in a deal potentially worth up to $7.8 billion. New research has also revealed “the essential role of orexin neurons” in motivation, said BioTechniques.

The twice-daily oral drug Orzeyful could be “a boon for the roughly 120,000 people in the United States with narcolepsy type 1”, said the Smithsonian. But its success also “opens the door to the use of orexin-mimicking drugs for other conditions associated with low levels of the chemical”, such as ADHD and depression. “Orzeyful is just the beginning,” said Andy Plump, Takeda’s president of research and development.

A methamphetamine known as the “crazy pill” is wreaking havoc in Bangladesh and fuelling an addiction crisis. The authorities have struggled for some time to crack down on yaba, which is also known as “Nazi speed”. Their efforts are bearing some fruit but tackling the widespread use of the drug remains an uphill battle.

Black market

Yaba is a street name for pills containing methamphetamine, a powerful, highly addictive stimulant. Users generally crush and smoke the pills, although some swallow them whole. They increase alertness and energy, and raise the heart rate and blood pressure of users. Heavy use can bring on a range of problems, including paranoia, psychosis, seizures, cardiovascular problems, and even death.

Yaba, which means “crazy pill” in Thai, is “pushing thousands into addiction” in Bangladesh, said The Telegraph. The tablets, which are a blend of the stimulant with caffeine and other adulterants, are particularly common in South and Southeast Asia.

Bangladesh has become a leading destination and market for yaba because of its geographic proximity to Myanmar, where production of the drug is particularly concentrated. Rebel militias there are increasingly using yaba and crystal meth as “partial payment for smuggled Bangladeshi goods”, said the Dhaka-based newspaper The Daily Star.

The drug is trafficked westward from Myanmar into Bangladesh, through border areas that are difficult to control. Fishing boats transport Bangladeshi goods to Myanmar and “return with narcotics”. Although most of the drugs are consumed in Bangladesh, some packages are flown on to Oman, Saudi Arabia and Dubai.

Daily drudgery

Since 2006, yaba has been a common for the poor and the realities of the “daily drudgery, which makes life so hard for so many of Bangladesh’s 178 million people”, means there is “little to dull the allure” of the drug, said The Telegraph.

“The reason yaba has become so prevalent here is that it is so easy to transport and far cheaper to buy than other drugs,” government social worker Adnan Zobayer told the newspaper. “People get an easy buzz and quickly become dependent.”

Authorities in Bangladesh have been fighting for years to stamp out trade in the stimulant. In 2018, the government passed a law which makes possession of yaba punishable by death. They are having some success: enforcement agencies seized 43,562,811 amphetamine-type stimulant tablets, including yaba, last year, up 90.58 % from 22,857,751 in 2024. However, drug lords are still able to “churn out” millions of yaba pills from camps in the jungle borderlands of Myanmar at a “relentless” rate, said The Telegraph.

Hospital wards are becoming “unbelievably dangerous” during heatwaves, said Helen Morgan, the Lib Dems’ health spokesperson, with temperatures of up to 41.8C.

“Almost all” hospitals have seen temperatures exceed the recommended NHS maximum of 28C during the recent heatwaves, said The Times, citing figures obtained by the Lib Dems under the Freedom of Information Act. On average hospitals recorded a maximum temperature of 31.9C in July.

How are staff and patients coping?

Put bluntly, they’re not. Nursing staff are “collapsing” on shift in the extreme heat and patients are “suffering” in facilities “not fit for humans”, said the Royal College of Nursing. Staff say they are “dripping with sweat from head to toe”, and one collapsed from dehydration after working a long shift on a ward with no ventilation.

Ambulance workers have described the difficult and “vile” conditions they have had to work in during heatwaves, said the Unison union. One ambulance worker told the union they “have one uniform whether it’s minus 10 or 30 degrees” and during heatwaves “you’re sweating even when you’re just driving”. Doing CPR in the heat is “ten times harder”, they said. “I could have cried during my last shift.”

A “surge” of patients have been “brought in for heat-related conditions”, said the BBC. July was the busiest ever month for A&E units in England and 2.5 million people attended A&E during the month’s two heatwaves, according to NHS data.

The number of patients enduring 12-hour waits in A&E was a third higher than this time last year. GP and doctor appointments and 999 calls in England were both up by around 10% compared with last summer.

According to the UK Health Security Agency, nearly 3,000 patients died in May and June from complications such as heart attacks and strokes linked to the extreme weather.

What issues have there been with equipment?

Hospitals have reported problems with equipment, including scanners and IT systems, and “difficult working conditions” for staff, particularly at “some of the older sites”, said the BBC. MRI scans, blood tests and surgery have all been delayed.

What problems are there with NHS buildings?

Very few hospitals or GP surgeries are equipped with either air conditioning or adequate ventilation. Air conditioning is prioritised for critical spaces such as operating theatres “due to capital and running costs”, said The Times.

Several hospitals have declared critical incidents this summer because ageing NHS buildings, many of which were built in the Victorian era, are “not equipped to cope”.

Tim Lane, president of the Royal College of Surgeons of England, said that “across the NHS, surgical teams are struggling to deliver high-quality care in ageing hospital buildings” and in “an infrastructure struggling to cope with continuing heatwaves”.

An “additional burden” is placed on the NHS “during periods of extreme heat”, said Health Secretary Yvette Cooper. “I have made clear that we must start planning for summer pressures in the NHS in the same way we do for winter.” NHS England said it must “adapt its sites and services to cope with the impacts of severe weather”.

What happened

President Donald Trump on Monday signed an executive order proposing a reduction in routine childhood immunizations to 11 from 17, and pushing for the combined measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine to be split into three separate single-disease shots administered over several doctor visits. This is Trump’s third attempt to “promote his long-held but discredited theory that childhood shots should be spaced out,” The Associated Press said, and a continuation of his fixation on “connecting autism to vaccines,” even though “scientific consensus and decades of studies have firmly concluded there is no link.”

Who said what

“Nothing bad can happen from what we’re doing,” Trump said before signing the order. But pediatricians and public health experts have “long warned” that spreading out vaccinations “will reduce immunization rates and leave children more susceptible to disease,” CNN said.

Trump’s “renewed focus on vaccines marks a departure” from his administration’s “recent efforts to emphasize less controversial health policies” ahead of November elections, the AP said. Trump’s “own pollsters have warned” that the issue is “unpopular” with voters, Politico said. But the president’s “personal interest” in changing vaccine policy has been “thrown into high gear by his allegiance with Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.,” a longtime vaccine skeptic.

What next?

It’s unclear whether Trump’s order “has any legal power,” The New York Times said. Federal immunization recommendations come from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and its outside experts, and “only states can require vaccinations for children to enter school or day care.”

What happened

Scientists at Stanford University on Thursday reported in the journal Science that they had successfully directed artificial intelligence to create 16 new viruses. This first-ever use of AI to design and build viruses not found in nature raised “hopes for medical advances” like eliminating drug-resistant bacteria, The New York Times said, while also “raising the disturbing possibility that the technology could someday be used to invent dangerous pathogens.”

Who said what

“Synthesizing viruses from scratch is hardly new,” the Times said, but the Stanford and Arc Institute researchers went “well beyond” previous efforts by teaching AI to “recognize patterns of DNA structure in nature, and then to use that data to write recipes for entirely new viruses.” Their AI tool, Evo, was fed genetic sequences “much like ChatGPT and other language models are trained on large sets of existing text material,” CNN said.

What next?

The new study “arrives at a moment of heightened anxiety regarding danger posed by increasingly powerful AI models,” The Wall Street Journal said. Evo was constrained to create “simple viruses” that can “only infect bacteria and pose no threat to humans.” But the breakthrough “raises urgent biosafety and biosecurity questions,” Johns Hopkins health security experts said in a corresponding Science article. “The ability to compose viral genomes using generative AI now exists; the governance to safely steer it does not.”

What happened

The Senate Homeland Security Committee on Thursday voted along party lines to hold former U.S. infectious disease chief Dr. Anthony Fauci in contempt of Congress for repeatedly refusing to answer questions during testimony on the federal response to Covid-19. Committee Chair Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and other Republicans contended that Fauci could not invoke his Fifth Amendment rights “because he’d already received a preemptive pardon from former President Joe Biden,” CNN said. But “GOP lawmakers also openly acknowledged” last week that they “hoped to get Fauci to perjure himself in his testimony, allowing them to bring new charges.”

Who said what

“Fauci faced no risk of federal prosecution,” Paul said. “All he had to do was tell the truth.” Fauci’s lawyer called the vote a “crude political stunt” to “punish” a public servant for “exercising his constitutional rights.” Paul appears so “hellbent on putting Fauci in jail” that his office immediately hand-delivered the contempt resolution to federal prosecutors, Politico said. Contempt referrals “rarely bypass the full Senate,” The Wall Street Journal said, and “it isn’t clear whether a referral made in such a manner is legally valid.”

What next?

The Justice Department on Thursday evening said it had received Paul’s referral, is “reviewing it and will work with the Senate accordingly.” If prosecutors decide to file charges and win a conviction, Fauci faces up to a year in prison.

What happened

The Senate on Wednesday confirmed Dr. Erica Schwartz as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s first permanent director in nearly a year. Schwartz is “widely considered a qualified and traditional selection for the role,” Politico said. She “has repeatedly affirmed the safety and efficacy of childhood vaccines,” The New York Times said, but the 51-44 vote “fell mostly along partisan lines.”

Who said what

Schwartz will take over a “public health agency beleaguered by political meddling and low morale,” The Associated Press said. Her predecessor, Susan Monarez, was ousted after less than a month following a clash with Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. over vaccine policy, The Wall Street Journal said, and the White House was “looking for a CDC nominee who would minimize controversy” this time around.

What next?

Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) said he joined Republicans in voting for Schwartz because public health leadership is urgently needed amid the U.S. outbreaks of measles and cyclosporiasis and Congo’s Ebola crisis. “It’s becoming very obvious what happens when the invisible workings of public health are not functioning the way we need them to,” Johns Hopkins biosecurity expert Gigi Gronvall told The New York Times. But it’s not clear “how much good” Schwartz can do when “the main problem is RFK Jr.”

TV might actually be rotting our brains. Watching television for extended periods of time could increase the risk of dementia and Alzheimer’s disease, new research says. To combat this danger, experts recommend taking breaks from binge-watching and engaging in more mentally stimulating activities.

Your brain on TV

Frequent TV watching in midlife was associated with reduced volume in the parts of the brain vulnerable to Alzheimer’s disease, according to a study published in Alzheimer’s & Dementia. The diminished brain systems include those associated with memory and cognition as well as executive functioning. More surprisingly, the brain volume reduction was not tied to sedentary behavior but specifically to watching TV. “People whose jobs involved sitting for much of the day tended to have healthier-looking brains,” said ScienceAlert. Also, “when the researchers accounted for differences in overall physical activity, that didn't seem to impact the outcome.”

The results also showed that men were particularly vulnerable to these brain changes. “This could be because men and women accumulate sedentary time differently,” Natan Feter, a biological scientist and the lead author of the study, said to ScienceAlert. “Women may interrupt their sitting more often,” or “biological differences in how the brain responds to prolonged sedentary behavior” may be to blame. In general, “women tend to prefer TV programming in shorter chunks, though they spend more time watching overall,” said ScienceAlert. By contrast, “men’s preferences for watching sports and movies” mean they are are “more likely to spend long, uninterrupted periods on the couch.”

Researchers analyzed a sample of 1,712 adults with an average age of 53 years who did not have a diagnosis of dementia when the research began. Between 1987 and 1989, “participants completed a detailed physical activity questionnaire during an in-person interview” where they reported “how often they watched television during their leisure time,” as well as “answered specific questions about how often they sat down during their work hours,” said PsyPost. Between 2011 and 2013, the participants underwent an MRI of their brains.

The study “shows an association, not a cause-and-effect relationship” between TV and dementia, Feter said to Healthline. The researchers also “relied on self-reported data for TV consumption, which can be less precise than timed tracking,” said a news release about the study.

Beyond the screen

“For years, we’ve focused on how much people sit,” David Raichlen, a professor of biological sciences and anthropology at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences and the senior author of the study, said in the news release. But these findings “suggest we should also pay attention to what they’re doing while they’re sitting.” For example, working from home, while sedentary, is more “intellectually stimulating” compared to watching TV, said the release.

Because TV watching appears to specifically affect the brain, “we might eventually see a different approach to health guidance around sedentary activities,” said the release. “Rather than just directing their patients to move more, for example, physicians might recommend they reduce television time and add cognitively engaging activities for when they do sit.” Activities like “puzzling, crafts and even texting, which require your brain to work while you are sitting might also change how much sitting negatively impacts your brain,” said ScienceAlert.

“The goal is not to eliminate passive rest,” Dung Trinh, a doctor at the MemorialCare Medical Group and the chief medical officer of Healthy Brain Clinic in Irvine, California, said to Healthline. It is to “build more cognitively engaging moments into the day.”

What happened

Ariana Grande “will be taking a step back from visibility” following the conclusion of her world tour due to “endless, ongoing public scrutiny,” a representative for the Grammy winner told People over the weekend. The announcement follows the Friday release of Grande’s “Petal” music video, which “reignited fan concerns about her weight loss,” Variety said.

Who said what

“She looks emaciated” in the video, with “sunken” cheeks and a “protruding” ribcage, said critic Monica Hesse in The Washington Post. Grande’s team is “thoroughly irresponsible for not guiding her away from this deeply damaging image for her young fans to see so glamorized,” actor and activist Jameela Jamil said in a now-deleted Instagram post.

The hiatus decision “was made from a thoughtful and empowered place,” Grande told fans during a tour performance in Chicago. “Human beings can need a break sometimes.” She “performs a very physical show,” a source close to the star told People, “and there is a lot of athleticism involved.”

What next?

Grande will finish her Eternal Sunshine tour on Sept. 1 and then take a “much-deserved break,” her representatives said. Her team confirmed that she is also pulling out of leading a revival of Stephen Sondheim’s “Sunday in the Park With George,” which was expected to open next summer in London’s West End.

What happened

Michigan health officials on Monday confirmed the first two deaths linked to the ongoing cyclosporiasis outbreak. The fatalities mark the “first known deaths related to the multi-state outbreak of explosive diarrhea in the United States,” CNN said.

Who said what

Both victims had “significant underlying health conditions” that may have been “impacted by cyclosporiasis and dehydration,” Michigan’s Department of Health and Human Services said in a website update. The parasitic infection is “generally not a life-threatening illness.” This is the “worst year on record for cyclosporiasis” in the U.S., said The New York Times, and Michigan is “at the center” of the “nine-state outbreak linked to iceberg lettuce supplied by Taylor Farms.”

What next?

Health experts in Michigan are “cautiously optimistic” that the outbreak there is “starting to wane,” said the Times. But the deaths reinforce the “importance of continuing efforts to investigate the outbreak, identify its source, and prevent additional illnesses,” food safety expert Wade Syers said to the Detroit Free Press.

Microplastics could be responsible for a lot of heartache. The tiny pieces of plastic have been found in high amounts in patients who suffered from heart attacks, leading experts to question their effect on cardiovascular health. Plastic likely has a more significant impact on health than we currently know and should be taken into account in analyzing environmental risk management.

Heart of plastic

Microplastics were “detected significantly more frequently” in patients who suffered heart attacks, said a study published in the European Heart Journal. Among those who had heart attacks, “micro and nanoplastics were detected in 84% of patients, compared with 40% of patients with chronic ischemic heart disease and 32% of patients with normal coronary arteries,” said a press release about the study.

The “highest levels of plastics were in blood drawn from the blocked artery itself, at the site of the blockage,” said Time. These tiny plastic particles are “found virtually everywhere in the environment, including the air we breathe, the water we drink and many foods we consume,” Pasquale Paolisso, the first author of the study, said in the release. “Scientists have begun to detect these particles in human tissues and organs, raising concerns about their potential health effects.”

The study also found that “people who smoke were six times more likely to have detectable micro and nanoplastics in the blood supplying their hearts than non-smokers,” David C. Gaze, a senior lecturer in chemical pathology at the University of Westminster, said in The Conversation. Therefore, along with the well-known detrimental effects of cigarettes, they “may also act as an efficient delivery system for microscopic plastic particles.”

The same pattern for smoking held for those who were exposed to bad air quality. “Both exposures appeared to amplify each other,” Paolisso and Emanuele Barbato, another author of the study, said to El País. “All patients who smoked and lived in areas with high air pollution had detectable plastics, compared with only one in eight of those who neither smoked nor were highly exposed.”

World of plastic

The study’s findings “do not prove that microplastics cause heart attacks, but they reveal a strong association between environmental exposures, microplastics in the blood and cardiovascular disease,” Barbato said in the press release. Microscopic plastic particles are present in “synthetic clothing fibers, tire wear, degraded packaging and countless other environmental sources,” Gaze said in The Conversation. But “at the moment, we cannot measure our exposure to plastics” in an accessible way, Rocco Montone, an interventional cardiologist at Fondazione Policlinico Universitario Agostino Gemelli in Rome, said to Time.

Microplastics were previously “found inside the liver, kidney, intestine and human brain, among other tissues,” said El País. Scientists have been interested in the health implications for some time. This study “reframes the issue of microplastics not as an isolated curiosity but as another link in a wider environmental exposome interconnected with the air we breathe and our habits,” the study authors said to El País.

The apparent connection between microplastics, smoking and air pollution also “underscores the urgent need to shift from isolated risk factor management toward comprehensive environmental health strategies,” said the study. Such strategies may include the “integration of air quality monitoring, anti-smoking interventions, plastic pollution reduction and exposomic assessment into cardiovascular disease prevention guidelines.”

Almost three in 10 Britons now use AI chatbots to get health advice. And UK medical-policy experts are concerned that this could create confusion, undermine trust in GPs and other healthcare workers, and make it more difficult to take an informed decision about your health.

The warning, from The Academy of Medical Sciences, comes as Open AI rolls out ChatGPT Health in the US. It allows users to “securely connect” their medical records and wellness apps to “ground conversations” in their own health information, so that the bot can “take a more active role” in their health.

ChatGPT Health is not yet available in the UK but, with more than 300 million people worldwide regularly directing their health-related questions to ChatGPT, it could swiftly become a “democratising force in healthcare”, Tanzeem Choudhury, a health-innovation expert at New York’s Cornell University told CBS News. But there are definite risks and trade-offs. “Used well,” an AI tool such as this can “help direct people to trusted sources”, said Yvonne Doyle, a fellow of The Academy of Medical Sciences and former medical director of Public Health England. But it can also mislead “convincingly”.

‘Zero awareness of fallibility’

People have been using the internet to answer their questions for decades, but the “danger” with an AI chatbot is that it responds with “fluent, emotionally convincing paragraphs” and “remembers context”, making it “sound more ‘human’ than many humans”, said Celina Cartoto and Anthony Kelly on RTE. Yet it has “zero awareness of its own fallibility”, always providing an answer, “even when one doesn’t exist”. People need to remember that, though it “speaks like a doctor, listens like a therapist and remembers like a friend”, it is actually “none of them”.

We know that all AI chatbots can “hallucinate” and provide “misleading, inaccurate or even dangerous” information, said CBS News. Open AI has been careful to state that ChatGPT Health is designed to support, not replace doctors, but it has not responded to questions about whether it is “equipped to recognise when to advise a user to seek help from a medical professional”. It seems that “onus is on the user”.

Even before the rollout of the Health feature, there were indications that users could become dangerously reliant on ChatGPT for medical advice. Last month, a 55-year-old US pastor sued OpenAI, claiming its bot “brought him to the brink of death”, by “repeatedly and insistently” misdiagnosing his symptoms of near-fatal pulmonary embolism, said the BBC. An OpenAI spokesperson told CBS News that “ChatGPT is not a doctor and should never be a substitute for medical care, diagnosis or treatment”.

AI can be a “useful educational tool” for health information, said Leana Wen, an emergency doctor in the US, and a clinical associate professor at George Washington University, told CNN. It can “explain medical terminology” and “compare treatment options at a high level”, helping “people prepare questions” for their doctor and be “more engaged” in their care. But “it has important limitations” and “should not replace clinical judgement” by a medically qualified human.

Privacy concerns

There is also the question of privacy. How risky is it to share so much of your individual medical information with an AI tool, such as ChatGPT Health? Open AI has said that Health has “enhanced privacy” and encryption, and that conversations used in the Health tab won’t flow into non-Health chats. But it’s no accident that Health has not yet been rolled out in the UK, or the EU, where data protection and digital privacy laws are stricter than in the US.

“If you are providing data directly to a technology company that is not providing any healthcare services, then it is buyer beware,” Bradley Malin, a biomedical informatics expert, told Time. OpenAI says it will protect your data but “what exactly does that mean”?

It all comes down to whether or not “you trust OpenAI to keep to its word”, Robert Wachter, a medic who has written extensively about AI and healthcare, told the magazine. OpenAI does have “really strong corporate interest in not screwing this up”. Its brand is “dependent” on the user “feeling comfortable” in sharing their information, and any sort of data breach would end that trust.

The end of doctors?

The increasing use of AI programmes for health queries is becoming “existentially threatening” for medics, Jonathan Chen, a doctor at Stanford University Medical Center, told The New York Times. What is our purpose going to be now? Should we “get out of the way and let a computer take over”?

Not for a while yet, Lee Schwamm, associate dean for digital strategy and transformation at Yale School of Medicine, told the paper. And that’s because chatbots can’t yet think critically enough about the health information people are providing – and more importantly, not providing – them with. AI is “really good at matching patterns and making predictions”. But it can only do so “based on the data that it is given about the patient. It has no way to extract” what may be crucial further information itself.

Besides, patients still need a human connection. If you’re going to be told you have a serious health issue, or even how much longer you have to live, “you want to look someone in the eye”.

While the jury is still out on whether diet and zero-sugar drinks are really better for your health than sugary sodas, a recent study has found that the artificial sweeteners they use may have one very unintended side effect: memory loss, particularly among younger consumers. But even though the study found a significant link between artificial sweeteners and memory issues, experts say this is still only a correlation, not causation.

What did the study find?

Several widely used artificial sweeteners may be “associated with faster declines in memory and thinking skills over time,” according to the study published by the American Academy of Neurology. It followed 12,772 adults in Brazil for about eight years and examined their intake of seven sugar substitutes: aspartame, saccharin, acesulfame K, erythritol, xylitol, sorbitol and tagatose. These are “frequently added to ultra-processed products, including flavored water, soft drinks, energy drinks, yogurt and desserts marketed as low in calories.”

Researchers found that the people who consumed the highest amount of artificial sweeteners “experienced a 62% faster rate of cognitive decline than those with the lowest intake,” said USA Today, a rate “estimated to be comparable to about 1.6 additional years of brain aging.” People who were in the mid-range of consumption “experienced cognitive decline that was 35% faster than those in the lowest-intake group.” The memory loss itself was also most prevalent in study participants who were under 60; researchers “did not find the same association among participants older than 60,” said the study.

When it came to the amount of sweetener consumed, those in the “lowest consumption group averaged 20 milligrams per day, while those in the highest group averaged 191 milligrams per day,” said the study. Regarding aspartame, one of the most common artificial sweeteners, the “amount consumed by the highest group was roughly equal to the aspartame in one can of diet soda.”

What is the bigger picture?

This study suggests that sugar substitutes are not as good for you as their marketing makes them seem. “Low- and no-calorie sweeteners are often seen as a healthy alternative to sugar; however, our findings suggest certain sweeteners may have negative effects on brain health over time,” the lead study author, Dr. Claudia Kimie Suemoto of Brazil’s University of São Paulo, said in a press release.

This is not the only new study to suggest that artificial sweeteners have negative health effects; recent research published in the journal Current Atherosclerosis Reports showed that these chemicals are “linked to higher fasting insulin levels and a higher HbA1c — a measure of long-term blood sugar control,” said HealthDay. It also “found that people who consume more artificial sweeteners may have a higher risk of cardiometabolic conditions, including type 2 diabetes and heart disease.”

When it comes to memory issues, scientists are careful to point out that this research doesn’t necessarily mean artificial sweeteners cause lapses. The study “identified a relationship between sweetener intake and cognitive decline but could not determine whether the sweeteners caused the changes,” said USA Today. The data also “did not include every artificial sweetener currently used in foods and beverages,” and Suemoto emphasized that more research was needed.

It’s widely assumed that eight hours is the perfect amount of sleep but a new study found the “sweet spot” is a little less than that, said sleep specialist Dr Allie Hare in The Telegraph.

Getting it right matters because new research, published in Nature, found that “falling short, or exceeding” the “precise window” discovered by the research, is “linked with poorer brain, heart and immune health”.

What did the research say?

People who got between six hours 24 minutes and seven hours 48 minutes of sleep a night were found to have better functioning immune systems, brains and hearts, according to researchers at Columbia University Irving Medical Center.

This ideal amount of sleep was associated with less ageing, as measured by organ-specific biological clocks. Duration alone doesn’t cause organs to age faster or slower, but the findings do suggest that insufficient or excessive sleep may be “markers of poorer overall health across the body”.

Is it different for men and women?

There is also a gender factor because women “seem to do better with a little longer”, Marie-Pierre St-Onge, a professor at Columbia University, told The Washington Post. They need “15, 20 minutes” more sleep, which reflects the “slightly longer” sleep duration reported by the “general population”, which “tends to be slightly longer in women than men”.

Previous research found that sleep is “largely linked to ageing and the pathological burden of the brain”, said Junhao Wen, an assistant professor at Columbia and lead author of the study. But the new research "goes further” and shows that “too little and too much sleep” are “associated with faster ageing in nearly every organ”.

Should we all be getting seven hours?

There are a number of conflicting theories about how much sleep we need. According to individual needs theories, there is no single ideal amount of sleep, because genetics, age, health, activity level and even life circumstances influence how much sleep someone needs. Adaptive or evolutionary theories hold that the correct amount of sleep varies depending on factors such as season, workload, stress, illness and safety.

But we “might be overthinking it”, said Emma Beddington in The Guardian. Sleep is “important and fascinating for science to explore, but surely, for the rest of us”, it’s “best left mysterious”.

There’s “so little we can do” to reach the “ideal” amount of unconsciousness, so “knowing precisely how bad that is for us is unhelpful”.

Social media feeds full of hiking content and glorious views have contributed to a growing interest in the outdoors among young adults. But a worrying number of young people have also needed rescuing from mountainous regions.

Hiking influencers have become an “inadvertent source of inspiration” for their followers to take treks “without understanding the scale of the challenge” and that are “beyond their skill set”, said The i Paper.

#Hiking

Hiking posts can make the “toughest climbs look like a walk in the park”, said Kate Davis, from the Ramblers walking charity. While no influencer would “encourage novices” to take intermediate hikes without proper preparation, said The i Paper, not “everyone is honest” about their experiences.

For example, some content creators will “walk to a scenic spot” and “pose with merchandise” before heading back down, said Nige, who posts on TikTok as W33k3ndwanderer. This can “mislead viewers into thinking” that certain mountains with challenging inclines and scrambles are “easily accessible”.

This combination of misleading content and hikers unaware of factors like weather, technical clothing and time needed to complete a hike could be behind the rise in rescue call-outs.

‘Excitable explorers’

In the Scottish Highlands the number of “mountaineering incidents” involving the 17–25 age group has “nearly quadrupled since 2022”, said The Economist.

In England and Wales last year, 18 to 24-year-olds “kept mountain rescue services busy”, said The Times, with almost 400 incidents, “more than double the 166 in 2019”.

This trend of “excitable explorers” following in “influencers’ footsteps without fully understanding” what the hike entails has led to more rescue call-outs in the US, France, Italy and Switzerland.

Nathan Mburu, 24, a fitness influencer, told the BBC that he and his two friends being “overconfident” and “under-prepared” led to them getting into difficulty on Crib Goch in north Wales last year. The weather conditions quickly turned a “manageable day into something extremely dangerous”, resulting in the group being stuck on a ridge waiting nearly six hours for a rescue team to reach them.

Last year, nearly “a quarter of rescues” in England and Wales were the result of “slipping or tripping”, with common injuries being to the “ankles, lower legs and head”, said The Times. Almost “one in 10 incidents” was because of “poor equipment” and around 20% were due to “severe weather conditions”.

While it’s “great to see more young people going outdoors”, the question is how to make sure every hiker is prepared for the journey ahead. Since people “rarely use maps and compasses”, some parks are “developing signage with common routes”, said Nick Phillips, from Mountain Rescue England and Wales. An initiative will allow people hiking in the Lake District, Peak District and Wales to “scan a QR code” and “upload a map” on to their device with the route “they need to follow”.

“Overlooked and underfunded” adult social care has become “the Cinderella service of our wider welfare system”, said Labour List. Now Andy Burnham, whose father has Alzheimer’s and lives in a care home, has told the BBC that he will put “whatever political capital I have” into fixing it.

He is not the first prime minister to vow to tackle the issue. But “successive governments have come undone when faced with the tricky reality” of adequately funding state support to help older people live safely and independently, said The Times.

What did the commentators say?

There have been 22 botched attempts to the reform the English adult social care system in the past 30 years. And those successive failures carry “a heavy political cost”, said Chris Smyth in the Financial Times: long-term underfunding has made pay and conditions in the sector so unattractive to British workers that “visa rules were loosened after Brexit” and care workers arriving from abroad became “the single biggest reason why net immigration to the UK rose to all-time high”.

Now, as Britain’s “demographic centre of gravity” tilts towards retirement, social care is reaching its “most painful financial pinch point” yet, said The Telegraph's editorial board. In 50 years, more than 25% of the population could be over the age of 65, according to the Office for National Statistics. The “best solution” for funding social care on that scale would be an “insurance-based system, where Britons would be encouraged to pay into a fund that would cover their own care in old age, should they need it”.

But Burnham has said social care should be delivered “on an NHS basis”. This implies “a public service free at the point of delivery and funded by some form of taxation”, said The Guardian’s editorial board. When Burnham was health secretary in 2010, he proposed a “national care service” to be funded by a deferred levy on dead people’s estates. Other options could include “a new form of social insurance” or “a combination of private and state payments”.

A more “ambitious” solution would be take responsibility for funding social care away from local councils, whose “revenues don’t map neatly on to local care needs”, and simultaneously reform council tax as a central tax that better reflects current property values and generates revenue for a national social care service, said Ben Zaranko in The Observer. That would “create losers, be complicated and take time but the course of true radical social care reform never did run smooth”.

What next?

Burnham is scheduled to deliver a speech on adult social care on Wednesday. In it, he will “stop short of unveiling” any concrete plans, said the BBC, instead announcing that he is speeding up Louise Casey’s independent review of possible solutions for the system.

Yet “the veteran Whitehall troubleshooter on whom Burnham is relying to come up with answers” has already warned there is no quick fix, said the FT’s Smyth. Earlier this month, she said “we cannot keep pretending that a few tweaks will fix adult social care, or attempt major reform without the public’s backing”.

“Ticks are small, and you might not notice when they bite,” but their bites have the potential to “dramatically harm” your health, said Amanda Roome, co-director of the University of New York’s Tick-Borne Disease Center, on The Conversation. Ticks can carry viruses that “really pack a punch” in terms of “how sick they make you” or even trigger an allergy to red meat. And, in the UK, the number of ticks are on the rise.

What are ticks?

They are small arachnids that feed on the blood of animals, including humans. They tend to live in woodland, heathland or scrubland, climbing to the tips of grass blades or other vegetation and using the sensory organs on their front legs to detect carbon dioxide, body heat and movement from a passing animal host. When they bite, they inject an anaesthetic that prevents you from feeling pain or itchiness as they dig in.

The majority of tick bites don’t cause illness – many ticks don't carry disease-causing pathogens and not all bites from an infected tick cause infection. But the illnesses some of them can cause can be pretty nasty.

The most common is Lyme disease, carried by the castor-bean tick, which can do long-term damage joints, heart and the nervous system. Cases of Lyme disease are spiralling in the US but, in the UK, it’s still pretty rare – although 1,168 cases were recorded last year, a 20% increase from the previous year. But cases could well in increase as the number of ticks in the UK grows.

Some ticks can also carry a type of encephalitis, with symptoms that range from a mild flu-like illness to a stiff neck, brain inflammation and loss of consciousness. These ticks have been detected in a small number of areas in England but very, very few cases of tick-borne encephalitis have been diagnosed. The UKHSA classes the risk to the general population as “very low”.

In the US, other tick-borne illnesses, including Heartland virus disease, Powassan virus disease, babesiosis and anaplasmosis, have been causing concern. They can all cause “serious health problems” and in, “severe cases”, even death, said Roome on The Conversation.

There’s also been much media coverage of a rare allergy that can be triggered by tick bites: Alpha Gal syndrome. Affected people can develop a potentially fatal reaction to red meat, dairy products and some animal-derived medicines and vaccines. There have been more than 110,000 suspected cases in the US and an estimated 5,000 in Australia but hardly any in the UK.

Why are there more ticks?

“Tick populations are expanding geographically because we’re changing the climate,” Vett Lloyd, a tick expert at Mount Allison University in New Brunswick, told The Guardian. Our milder winters and warmer summers are boosting ticks’ survival rates, and there are also more mice to act as hosts: ticks “feast on rodents” as well as deer and birds. Reforestation and the expansion of green spaces closer to residential areas also play a role. Ticks – and the pathogens they can carry – “are expanding almost exclusively because of human changes” to the environment.

What can we do?

The best way to prevent infection is to avoid a tick bite “in the first place”, said Roome. If you’re planning a walk away from paths over areas of long grass, make sure you’re wearing socks, sturdy enclosed shoes, long trousers, and a long-sleeved shirt. Choose light-coloured clothing if you can: it can help you spot – and brush off – a tick before it bites. When you get home, check your skin thoroughly for ticks: they tend to lurk in armpits, the groin, behind the knees, around the waistband, the wrists, the back of the neck and the hairline.

If you do get bitten, “try to get the whole tick out”, Charlotte Mao, a US doctor who works with the Bay Area Lyme Foundation, told The Guardian. She recommends using “fine tip tweezers with firm gentle pressure” to grasp the tick at its head and pull it up. “You want to try to not have the mouth parts break off and stay stuck in the skin.” Then you should wash the site of the bite, and your hands, thoroughly with soap and water or rubbing alcohol.

After a tick bite, if you notice a spreading “bullseye” rash at the site of the bite (a common of Lyme disease infection) or symptoms including feeling flu-ey, a facial droop or numbness or tingling in the hands or feet, do seek advice from your GP.

Scientists are testing the “surprising theory” that “splitting sleep into two separate blocks” may be “the most effective sleep pattern for people working through the night”, said the BBC.

Better management of insomnia

Biphasic sleep means two distinct sleep periods in 24 hours instead of one. Researchers suggest it may be a more natural rhythm, even if the biological reasons for it are still being debated.

The concept has “captured the interest of many today”, said MediaFeed, and some individuals are “experimenting with segmented sleep patterns”. Its supporters say the benefits include “improved restfulness and better management of insomnia”.

During pre-industrial times people often slept in two blocks. Roger Ekirch, a historian at Virginia Tech, found that sleeping in two halves was the “predominant pattern” in the Western world until the mid-19th century. A “typical family” would “go to bed around nine, wake naturally after midnight for an hour or so – for prayer, chores, conversation – then sink back into what they called their ‘second sleep’.”

This changed when artificial light transformed the “economics of the night” and gas lamps “began lighting London’s streets in 1807”. As a result, “people stayed up later, the gap between the two sleeps narrowed and eventually closed”.

‘Dubious’ findings

The shift to a single period of sleep came at the time of the Industrial Revolution, as people changed to new work schedules, which were dictated by “mechanised time”, said MediaFeed.

But Ekirch believes the old approach hasn’t fully disappeared because the prevalence of “middle-of-the-night insomnia” represents a “persistent echo, a relic of this earlier pattern of sleep”.

A study in 1992 sought to discover whether, without industrialisation, humans would have remained natural biphasic sleepers. It limited participants to just 10 hours of light per day and found that they naturally shifted into a biphasic sleep pattern.

But the experiment drew criticism. In 2023, Niall Boyce wrote in the journal Medical History that its findings were “dubious” and suggested participants were simply restless.

Disrupted sleep, whether by working night shifts or insomnia, does have health implications. When we sleep, “our brain consolidates the memories of the day, processes emotions, and solves problems that defied it in the waking hours. It also strengthens immune defences and repairs muscle tissue”, said the BBC

So for those struggling to get enough sleep, “it’s not solely about being tired, but potentially about repeatedly disrupting a system that's doing far more behind the scenes than many people realise”.

Some experts have warned that biphasic sleep could have health risks, including from disruptions to circadian rhythms. Existing research on the topic is “fragmented” because some studies treat biphasic sleep as “one long sleep plus a brief nap”, but others “count only two equal periods”, so there is “no agreed definition”.

Spring forward, fall back — that old rule of thumb for resetting clocks at the start and end of daylight saving time may soon be a relic of the past, as the House of Representatives last week overwhelmingly supported a bill to make the time change permanent. And President Donald Trump has expressed his support. After all, people like later sunlight hours. But keeping the clock on summer hours could have negative ramifications.

‘Hidden consequences’

Americans are “tired of the biannual time change,” and making daylight saving time permanent is a “commonsense reform that will improve everyday life for millions,” bill sponsor Rep. Vern Buchanan (R-Fla.) said in a statement, per The Hill. Trump agrees. Passing the bill would be a “very nice WIN for the Republican Party,” he said on Truth Social. But there would be “hidden consequences” to year-round daylight saving, said Axios. Under the reset the “sun won't rise until 8 or 9 a.m. in the winter,” leaving “millions of children” and commuters to start their days “in the dark.”

There would probably be health consequences too. Morning sunlight is “key to maintaining our circadian rhythms” and “overall health,” said The Washington Post. “Circadian misalignment” can cause lost sleep, which in turn is connected to “obesity, Type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, mood disorders” and other health challenges. Americans “would be misaligned all year long,” Vanderbilt University’s Beth Malow said to the paper.

The change would disrupt the daily prayer practices of Orthodox Jews, said NPR. Some prayers “can only be said communally” and are often performed “every morning before heading out for work or school.” The change would be a problem for a “synagogue that has had a morning prayer service for 100 years” if it cannot muster enough of the congregation to “show up at the prayer time close to 9 o'clock because they have jobs,” Rabbi A.D. Motzen, national director of government affairs for Agudath Israel of America, said to the outlet. “Some Muslim prayers and religious observances” would also be affected, said Axios.

Airlines “could take up to two years” to adjust their “complex scheduling” to permanent daylight saving, said CBS News. The shift could affect “crew and aircraft positioning” as well as “domestic and international connectivity,” trade group Airlines for America said in a statement. Trucking and railroad companies that are “also timetable dependent” would face challenges as well, said CBS.

‘Abandoned prematurely’

Congress authorized permanent daylight saving in 1973 to save energy during the oil crisis, said The Independent. The project was “abandoned prematurely” amid concerns about “children and criticisms from the construction and agricultural industries.”

Permanent standard time might be a healthier alternative, said Yahoo News. Stanford University researchers determined that sticking to the regular clock all year would result in “300,000 fewer strokes and 2.6 million fewer people with obesity.” People need “more morning light and less evening light” to have a balanced day, Stanford University’s Jamie Zeitzer said to the outlet.

What happened

More than 1,000 people have died of Ebola in Congo, in the fastest-growing outbreak on record, African health officials said Wednesday. Congo’s Ministry of Health said 2,536 cases have been reported since this outbreak was declared May 15. There are no approved vaccines or treatments for the Bundibugyo virus responsible for the outbreak.

Who said what

“These are people dying” because “we don’t have vaccines, we don’t have medicine, we don’t have funding,” Dr. Jean Kaseya, head of the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said at a health summit in Ghana. In the worst outbreak to date, which killed more than 11,000 people between 2013 and 2016, it “took about eight months from the first case to reach 1,000 deaths,” The Associated Press said. The current outbreak in Congo appears to be “spreading faster than health officials can track it.”

What next?

An Ebola vaccine from Merck licensed to target the Zaire virus could also offer some protection against the Bundibugyo species, according to a paper published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine. The World Health Organization has “expressed lukewarm support” for testing the vaccine in Congo, Stat News said, but Bundibugyo-specific vaccines are “still months away” from clinical trials.

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.