Public health

Public health

Rising temperatures are projected to increase the prevalence of physical inactivity, translating into additional premature deaths and productivity losses, especially in tropical regions. Prioritising heat-adaptive urban design, subsidised climate-controlled exercise facilities, and targeted heat-risk communication is essential to mitigate these emerging health and economic burdens, in addition to ambitious emissions reductions.

The National TB Surveillance System said 44 in every 100,000 residents had active TB in Harrow, and cases "still seem to be rising", the council said. Laurence Gibson, Harrow's director of public health, said the current cohort of residents with TB were "likely to have been infected before they travelled to the UK", adding that it was an issue across north-west London.

Retsef Levi, a professor of operations research and business at MIT, was selected by Kennedy for the role last year. Levi also serves on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC) Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), which advises the agency on matters relating to vaccines.

What are scientists, clinicians, and public health practitioners supposed to do in this moment? What use is research when our patients might be deported tomorrow? Why try to stem the tide of outbreaks when the world has fallen apart? This is why: because even in these times, enlarging the scope of human knowledge matters. The search for cures still matters. The fate of individual patients still matters.

Good Law Project revealed on Thursday (12 March) that the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) temporarily halted the upcoming PATHWAYS trial because of concerns raised by cardiology physician professor Jacob George. The £10 million study, headed by King's College London (KCL), was designed to analyse the effects of puberty suppressant hormones, known as puberty blockers, on transgender youngsters.

The strain the animals have contains a mutation allowing it to more easily transmit between mammals. It is also a different variation than the ones found in dairy cows and commercial poultry. This one is Eurasian in origin, first seen in 2022. It has been detected in birds that fly along the Pacific Flyway, and is responsible for a mass mortality event in 2023 in northern fur seals on an island in eastern Russia.

When you purchase the top-selling creatine gummies on Amazon, you expect to get what you pay for. But a recent study found that four out of six popular brands contained virtually no creatine at all. In the case of the worst offender, customers would need to consume 2,000 gummies to get the advertised 5-gram dose. Still, combined these products sell over 50,000 units monthly and boast 4.4+ star ratings.

The Scottish fire and rescue service confirmed that, while standard city-based fire engines were on the scene within minutes of the first 999 call, the nearest available high-reach appliance which adds vital additional capacity to tackle a large blaze came from Coatbridge, an 11-mile (18km), 26-minute drive away in light traffic.

Bottom line, these new guidelines represent a political message, not a scientific one. What raises red flags is when they are saying, 'Everything you ever knew about nutrition is wrong.' You have to roll your eyes.

We feel robbed. Nicola was handling her epilepsy, taking her medication which was reviewed periodically but she nor us knew anything about sudden unexpected death. Because of this they had become 'too complacent' about the illness and the family would have been more wary if they had been made aware of the risk of SUDEP.

Kennedy made his most brazen attack on vaccines in January, slashing the CDC's childhood vaccine schedule from 17 immunizations down to 11 to be in line with recommendations of Denmark, a much smaller country with a relatively homogenous population and universal health care. The US is now an outlier among peer nations for recommending so few childhood vaccines.

We are fearful that this is a prototype for other studies. The US could fund global studies with the similar ethical concerns as the Tuskegee experiment five or 10 or 100 times a year. It could be extraordinarily deadly.

Risks of outbreaks with pandemic potential rise with increasing land-use change, biodiversity loss and climate change. The Pandemic Agreement adopted by the World Health Assembly in 2025 marks a historic shift that establishes the One Health approach as a legally binding obligation for pandemic prevention.

NHS England is "separately reviewing the evidence for the use of MAF in adults with gender dysphoria" with the aim of launching a consultation on its findings in late 2026. A separate section clarifies that its ban on new prescriptions will only apply to youth gender services, adding that the NHS will continue to prescribe hormones for adult patients in its gender identity clinics (GICs).

In children below the age of five, whose immune systems are still developing, the infections can lead to malnourishment; they cause up to 42,000 deaths annually. Soon there may be a vaccine to protect against these infections. In the Lancet Infectious Diseases last month, scientists shared the results of the first study to evaluate the safety and efficacy of an ETEC-controlling vaccine in a large pediatric population in Gambia.