Public health

Public health

Medical negligence in the NHS keeps harming and killing patients because governments and health service bosses have not acted on 24 years' worth of warnings, MPs have said. In a scathing report published on Friday, the public accounts committee (PAC) excoriates the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) and NHS England for allowing the cost of mistakes to balloon to 3.6bn a year.

Record numbers of women who were abused and controlled through technology were referred to Refuge's specialist services during the last three months of 2025, including a 62% increase in the most complex cases to total 829 women. There was also a 24% increase in referrals of under-30s. Recent cases included perpetrators using wearable tech such as smartwatches, Oura rings and Fitbits to track and stalk women, disrupting their lives through smart home devices that control lights and heating, and using AI spoofing apps to impersonate people.

I think this is a fairly recognized phenomenon,

It's almost zero - that's phenomenal,

New findings on cancer survival rates offer hope for the more than 2 million Americans diagnosed each year. Seven out of 10 Americans diagnosed with cancer now survive five years or more, according to the American Cancer Society, a 7 percent increase since the mid-1990s, when the rate stood at 63 percent. The survival rate data - from patients diagnosed with cancer between 2015 and 2021 - showed, significantly, that those with high-mortality cancers and advanced diagnoses had the largest gains.

Wind chill is a measure of how quickly bodies lose heat when you combine low temperatures with high winds. And wind chill conditions can be dangerous. "The stronger the winds [and] the colder it is, the more likely you are to develop frostbite in a short amount of time or hypothermia," says Jessica Lee of the National Weather Service's Weather Prediction Center.

OAKLAND, Calif. (KGO) -- BART officials say there is a major delay at West Oakland in all directions due to a "major medical emergency" on Friday.

The Vallejo Fire Department have removed hazardous materials, including a five-gallon bucket of methamphetamine, at the Vallejo Inn on Wednesday afternoon. At approximately 1:40 p.m., the department arrived at the venue located at 444 Tennessee Street and found the unidentified hazardous material inside the five-gallon bucket, which warranted a full HazMat response. The property was then evacuated to ensure the safety of occupants and roads were closed off nearby soon after.

Common Sense Media's new report, "Betting on Boys: Understanding Gambling Among Adolescent Boys," finds teen boys are largely exposed to gambling through sports betting and video games "in loot boxes, skin cases, and other reward systems that blur the line between playing and paying." More than a third of the boys surveyed, ages 11-17, admitted to gambling in the past year, with that number rising to nearly half of the 17-year-olds. Additionally, 60% reported seeing ads for gambling on YouTube and social media.

I was considering retiring after I turned 80, but the cost of geriatric care is high. My sister and ex-wife both require care. My sister is in full-time memory care, and my ex-wife has needed more care over the past two years after a dementia diagnosis, so I decided to keep working. I'm trying to help support them, whether it's paying the care facility directly or paying them to provide some support or outside nurses.

While life expectancy is growing, the average American can expect to spend nearly 12 years in poor health, and lifestyle diseases including heart disease, cancer, stroke and diabetes are now leading causes of death, driving unprecedented expense and tremendous strain on individuals and their families. In 2024, 90% of the nation's $4.9 trillion in annual healthcare spending was attributable to chronic and mental health conditions, and projections suggest that by 2030, more than 80 million Americans will live with three or more chronic diseases.

One might ask why an epidemiologist like me would be interested in Latin American history at this moment. What drew me to that era was the key role that clinicians and public health workers played in the resistance against the dictatorship; their simultaneous push for a national healthcare program; and the ways in which this sector organized, even as more conservative physicians sided with the putschists, happy to see their more progressive colleagues jailed and persecuted.

Meth. We're On It.

From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging. At such a critical moment in US history, we need reporters on the ground.

Dan Kenger, the chief design officer at Hims & Hers, told Business Insider that the figures in the ad "aren't specific individuals," and instead "symbols of an intimidating, members-only healthcare culture." Kenger said Hims & Hers is aiming for the ad to be a provocative conversation starter about health inequity. "We don't shy away from uncomfortable truths, and we fully expect this will ruffle some feathers," Kenger said. "But if our message makes the industry uncomfortable, it's because we're exposing an outdated system that benefits the very few at the expense of everyone else."

The issue is particularly critical right now for people who have insurance plans through the Affordable Care Act marketplace. Prices for those plans have skyrocketed this year after Congress failed to extend critical tax credits. Without those credits, monthly premiums for ACA plans have, on average, more than doubled. Early data on ACA enrollments for 2026 not only suggests that fewer people are signing up for the plans, but also that those who are enrolling are often choosing bronze plans, which are high-deductible plans.

Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging. At such a critical moment in US history, we need reporters on the ground. Your donation allows us to keep sending journalists to speak to both sides of the story. The Independent is trusted by Americans across the entire political spectrum.

Selling a business doesn't make you rich, according to Rory Godson - even though he sold Powerscourt for over €50m At the end of every week, public-relations powerbroker Rory Godson sits down with a list of clients, and works out how much service his company, Powerscourt, has given them. "Typically, our clients will pay us a retainer - X pounds or euro a month," he says. "And our culture has always been that we owe them.

Each year, 20,000 children and adolescents across the U.S. lose a parent to gun violence, while an estimated two to three times more have a parent who has been injured due to a firearm. Investigators from Harvard and Mass General Brigham analyzed records from a large health insurance database and found that in the year following a parent's injury, children had increases in psychiatric diagnoses and mental health visits, especially if the parent had suffered a severe injury.

The patchwork efforts to identify and safely remove contamination left by the 2025 Eaton and Palisades fires has been akin to the Wild West. Experts have given conflicting guidance on best practices. Shortly after the fires, the federal government suddenly refused to adhere to California's decades-old post-fire soil-testing policy; California later considered following suit. Meanwhile, insurance companies have resisted remediation practices widely recommended by scientists for still-standing homes.

NYC Health + Hospitals announced that three of its acute care hospitals have been named as recipients of the Level 2 Special Pathogen Treatment and Network Development (STAND) Award from the National Special Pathogen System (NSPS) on Thursday, Jan. 15. The three locations to earn this award were NYC Health + Hospitals/Elmhurst in Queens, NYC Health + Hospitals/Jacobi in the Bronx and NYC Health + Hospitals/Harlem in Manhattan.

The conventional approach to evaluating the impact of air pollution is to focus on a single exposure during a fixed period of time. But evidence suggests that contaminants work together, magnifying the damage to people's lungs. Conventional studies fail to probe synergistic effects. They also ignore the cumulative effects of lifelong exposures to pollutants, known as the exposome. Researchers need to shift away from single-pollutant studies and towards those involving a broad range of exposures.

CITYWIDE- NYC HEALTH + HOSPITALS/BELLEVUE, IN PREPARING FOR THE U.S. HOSTING THE WORLD CUP SOCCER CHAMPIONSHIPS THIS YEAR, has trained close to 500 health care and public health professionals to respond to high-consequence infectious disease threats. The city's public hospital system announced on Tuesday, Jan. 27, that during 2025, the health care professionals were trained across four jurisdictions encompassing New York, New Jersey, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

Akido Labs, a Los Angeles-based health care technology company that runs clinics and street medicine teams in California, plans to start using its AI model on homeless and housing insecure patients in the Bay Area next month. The program generates questions for outreach workers to ask patients and then suggests diagnoses, medical tests and even medication, which a human doctor then signs off on remotely.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Italian scientists documented something interesting: in areas with more trees per capita, the number and severity of COVID-19 cases were lower than in places with fewer trees, even when accounting for differences in human population density. This work is part of a growing body of research around the world investigating whether time spent in forests and nature can provide protection from infections, such as COVID-19 and pneumonia; inflammatory conditions, such as asthma, emphysema and bronchitis; and even cancer.

After 17 years of partnership, the San Francisco Department of Public Health has proposed the complete defunding of Sunday Streets beginning in 2026. The proposal reallocates funding that was originally advocated for and appropriated by the Board of Supervisors for Sunday Streets, towards department deficits. If approved, this would spell the end of this legacy San Francisco tradition. The Sunday Streets team is moving quickly into advocacy to stabilize the program and ensure the city doesn't lose something that residents deeply value.

In her 10 years as a health-care administrator, Cheryl Prescod has seen firsthand the ways Black Canadians can feel left behind by the blanket approach sometimes taken by the country's health-care system. As executive director at the Black Creek Community Health Centre in Toronto's Jane and Finch neighbourhood. Prescod serves a diverse clientele, including a large proportion of Black and racialized individuals people who say it can be difficult to access health care that makes them feel safe and culturally respected.

The recent snow and ice storm turned much of the nation into a winter wonderlandfrom the safety of a nice, cozy sofa indoors. If you step outside in such conditions, however, you'll find a dangerous obstacle course that can turn walking the dog or checking the mailbox into an emergency room visit with just one false step. There's no good clearinghouse for data about injuries related to winter weather, but studies do suggest that fall rates increase with snow and ice, especially among older adults.