Child deaths from infections see ‘remarkable’ decline but AMR fatalities of over-70s likely to rise by 146%, study finds.
Analysis: Drug-resistant infections are on the rise – so why aren’t we getting any new antibiotics?
Superbugs will kill more than 39 million people before 2050 with older people particularly at risk, according to a new global analysis.
While deaths linked to drug resistance are declining among very young children, driven by improvements in vaccination and hygiene, the study found the opposite trend for their grandparents.
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Bloomberg | Bloomberg | Getty Images The U.S. Food and Drug Administration on Mondaycleared Apple's new sleep apnea detection feature for use, which means it will come to the Apple Watch Series 9, Series 10, and Ultra 2 later this month.
Sleep apnea is a sleep disorder that causes a person's breathing to repeatedly stop and start throughout the night. The condition affects more than 30 million people in the U.S., but only around 6 million are diagnosed, according to the American Medical Association. If it goes untreated, sleep apnea can cause fatigue and lead to more serious health issues like heart problems, hypertension and Type 2 diabetes.
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Throughout modern medical history, Americans have underestimated or dismissed emerging health threats until the consequences became impossible to ignore.
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What can I do to take good care of my brain and lower my risk for a neurological disease?
That’s the No. 1 question neurologist Dr. Jonathan Rosand hears from his patients (and their family members) at the Massachusetts General Hospital McCance Center for Brain Health. To help answer it, he and his colleagues, with input from their patients, developed a short questionnaire, called the Brain Care Score, that they say can help predict people’s risk for developing dementia, stroke and depression later in life.
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World leaders will meet in New York this month to discuss growing antimicrobial resistance as researchers warn the development of replacement drugs is stalling.
Superbugs ‘could kill 39m people by 2050’ amid rising drug resistance.
Almost a century on from the groundbreaking discovery of penicillin by Alexander Fleming, his scientific successors are racing to save modern medicine.
Infections that were once easy to cure with antibiotics are becoming untreatable, and a novel treatment for bacterial infection is the holy grail for teams of researchers around the world.
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Bristol Myers Squibb, AstraZeneca, Eli Lilly and other drug companies have invested some $10 billion on promising cancer technology behind Novartis' Pluvicto.
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San Francisco 49ers running back Christian McCaffrey has been placed on injured reserve due to Achilles tendinitis, which means he'll miss at least 4 weeks.
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Almost two-thirds vote in favour of average salary increase of 22.3% over two years after 18 months of strikes.
Junior doctors in England have voted to accept the government’s pay offer, bringing to an end one of the longest and bitterest disputes in recent NHS history.
Just under two-thirds (66%) of the 45,830 junior doctors who voted backed the deal, which will see them receiving an average salary increase of 22.3% over two years.
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Pfizer's experimental drug for a common, life-threatening condition that causes cancer patients to lose their appetite and weight showed positive results in a midstage trial, the drugmaker said Saturday.
Patients with the condition, called cancer cachexia, who took Pfizer's treatment saw improvements in body weight, muscle mass, quality of life and physical function, according to the drugmaker. The results could pave the way for the drug, a monoclonal antibody called ponsegromab, to become the first treatment approved in the U.S. specifically for cancer cachexia.
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There continues to be much debate about whether or not social media truly harms the mental health of teens and adolescents, and whether or not it conclusively causes...
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Mobile phone use is not the biggest issue facing schools – or society. But device-free time is important.
The genie is out of the bottle. With the advent of smartphones and smartwatches, human life has moved online. Anyone seeking to curtail young people’s participation in the online world is as doomed as the fools who can’t figure out how to use the wishes gifted them in fairytales. The social ills blamed on the internet have complex causes that can’t be fixed by blocking children’s access.
This is a caricature of the tech-positive outlook. In real life, most people recognise that the portable computers we carry around with us make excessive demands on our time and attention. Just as children need support to develop healthy eating habits, they need encouragement to use the internet in moderation – especially when very young. But reluctance to give in to unrealistic “ban them!” messages about smartphones can shade into an impression that there is really nothing to be done. Or that if there is, it should be done by parents.
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Gilead's twice-yearly shot reduced HIV infections by 96% in a second large study, the company said Thursday.
The positive phase three trial data on Lenacapavir sets the stage for likely approval by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for HIV prevention.
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Dead butt syndrome or gluteal amnesia can arise after you’ve spent too much time sitting and your glutes—gluteus maximus, medius and minimus—have become deconditioned.
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Pete Lavender writes that the NHS doesn’t need more reform, it needs funding, Prof Geeta Nargund says the Darzi review leaves out gynaecological services, while Dr Karl Brennan flags up social care, and Woody Caan staff morale.
When Tony Blair was elected in 1997, it was on a platform of “saving the NHS”. He assured us that it must change or die. Then followed Labour’s agenda for change, bringing in private healthcare to take some of the burden from a struggling NHS, which was only struggling because of repeated years of underfunding.
The Darzi report clearly shows that the NHS is still struggling due to underfunding from successive governments, yet Keir Starmer’s response is to fling that straight back at the NHS and blame it, now with the line “reform or die” (Darzi review says the NHS is in a critical condition but sets out a treatment plan, 11 September). It didn’t need “change” then, it doesn’t need “reform” now. It needs adequate funding and to stop the millions of pounds being diverted to private healthcare, paying the money instead into the coffers of the public NHS.
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Soon, people with AirPods in their ears might not be drowning you out — they might be wearing them to hear you better.
Apple announced on Monday that its AirPods Pro 2 headphones will become an FDA-cleared hearing aid in the coming weeks through a software update. That means that adults with mild or moderate hearing loss — about 30 million Americans, according to the Food and Drug Administration — will be able to use Apple earphones to amplify specific sounds they want to hear better.
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The genes you inherit from your parents may not only influence if you develop Alzheimer’s disease but also when. Although a family history of dementia does not guarantee that you will develop symptoms later in life, new research suggests that the risk may be higher depending on which parent is affected. This begs the question: is Alzheimer’s disease more likely to be inherited from mom or dad?
To answer this question, investigators at Harvard Medical School recruited over 4,000 cognitively normal adults between the ages of 65 and 85 across the US, Canada, Japan, and Australia. Participants were asked to report if and at what age either parent developed Alzheimer’s or other forms of dementia. The findings indicated that the risk was more prevalent when mom, rather than dad, was affected.
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Child C’s mother tells inquiry she made multiple attempts to discover details of investigations but was ‘left in the dark’
The mother of a baby boy murdered by Lucy Letby feels “betrayed on every level” at being “kept in the dark” by hospital managers about his death.
The mother of the four-day-old infant, who can only be named as Child C, told the Thirlwall Inquiry her family had been “misled” by executives in a way that had “compounded our grief”.
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Digital health company Noom on Thursday announced it will offer a compounded GLP-1 drug as part of a new weight loss product that starts at $149.
The treatment will feature compounded semaglutide, the same active ingredient in Novo Nordisk's blockbuster obesity and diabetes drugs Wegovy and Ozempic. Noom has offered weight loss programs for years, and consumers can already try to access those branded medications through its platform.
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Patti Scialfa, Bruce Springsteen’s Wife and E Street Bandmate, has been diagnosed with multiple myeloma. Find out more on this rare cancer and its evolving treatments.
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Health officials say jabs needed to bolster UK’s resilience after WHO declares clade Ib outbreak a global emergency.
The UK has ordered more than 150,000 doses of vaccine against mpox to bolster its preparedness after the World Health Organization declared a surge in cases in Africa to be a global emergency.
No cases of clade Ib mpox, the new strain that has spread rapidly in Africa after an initial outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), have yet been detected in the UK.
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Plexi Images | GHI | UCG | Universal Images Group | Getty Images
Moderna on Thursday said it plans to cut around $1.1 billion in expenses by 2027 and win approvals for several new products as it charts a path forward after the rapid decline of its Covid business.
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MRIs taken from before conception until two years after birth show some short-lived changes and some lasting years.
Profound changes that sweep across the human brain during pregnancy have been captured for the first time, after researchers performed precision scans on a woman carrying her child.
MRI scans taken every few weeks from before conception until two years after childbirth revealed widespread reorganisation in the mother’s brain, with some changes short-lived and others lasting years.
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Eli Lilly on Thursday said it will invest $1.8 billion to boost manufacturing for its newly approved Alzheimer's drug and highly popular weight loss and diabetes treatments, among other medicines, in Ireland.
The pharmaceutical giant is spending $1 billion to expand an existing site in Limerick, Ireland, to increase the production of certain active ingredients in drugs, including those used in its Alzheimer's treatment Kisunla. That drug, which works by slowing the progression of the disease in people at the early stages of it, won approval in the U.S. in July.
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Apple’s latest event highlighted the company’s continued interest in personal health monitoring. In what was termed as the “iPhone 16 event,” the company went far beyond just announcing its new iPhone models, but also showcased key health features that will be available with the newest models of the Apple Watch and AirPods.
Specifically, the company announced that the latest Apple Watch will now be able to help users track sleep apnea, leveraging a new metric called “Breathing Disturbances.” The technology is unprecedented, and will leverage the device’s accelerometer to detect movements that indicate interruptions to normal respiratory patterns of sleep. Armed with this data, users will be able to understand their sleep metrics longitudinally and undertake more informed conversations and ascertain potential interventions with their physicians.
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Situation potentially fuelled by people unable to access mental health services self-medicating, clinic founder says.
Young people becoming addicted to ketamine is a national problem that is growing rapidly, a leading addiction psychiatrist has said.
Specialist ketamine clinics have recorded a surge over the past two years in the numbers of young people coming through their doors, many of whom have struggled to engage with mainstream treatments. NHS and private clinics have also reported significant rises.
Owen Bowden-Jones, a consultant psychiatrist and founder of the pioneering Club Drug clinic, said he had seen a definite increase in young people after “a pretty big lift off” in ketamine’s popularity, making the drug a national problem.
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Experts call it "economy class syndrome" — but it can happen to anyone in any class of an airplane.
Deep vein thrombosis, or DVT as it's known, occurs when blood clots in one or more veins.
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The U.K. government says it will ban junk food adverts online and on television before 9 p.m. in a bid to tackle obesity.
Public health minister Andrew Gwynne told members of parliament on Thursday the new rules would come into play from October next year.
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Survivors and other campaigners have done admirable work, but efforts to eradicate the practice by the end of the decade are way off target.
Each day, 12,000 girls are at risk of female genital mutilation, the UN says – subjecting them not only to immediate pain and violation of their rights, but to lifelong health complications and trauma. UN experts led by the special rapporteur on violence against women and girls, Reem Alsalem, described it this spring as “one of the most pernicious forms of violence” committed against them.
The UN set a target of eradicating FGM by the end of this decade, and impressive advances have been made in some countries. But overall, progress has stalled or reversed. In 2016, 200 million girls and women worldwide had undergone FGM. Since then, 30 million more women have endured it. Most FGM cases – 144 million – have happened in Africa, with a reported 80 million in Asia and 6 million in the Middle East. The rate of decrease has been slower than population growth in communities where the practice persists, and Unicef says that girls are also being cut at a younger age, reducing the opportunities to intervene.
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Courtesy of Safi Biotherapeutics Last month, the American Red Cross declared an emergency blood shortage after its national supply fell by more than 25% in July. One startup's solution: Lab-grown blood.
Shortages can be dire for patients since doctors have to make tough decisions about who needs blood transfusions the most. The American Red Cross collects and distributes about 40% of the U.S.' blood supply, per its website, and the organization is imploring more people to donate.
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Italy didn't allow field trials for genetically modified crops for twenty years — until this year. But anti-GMO activists destroyed it, repeating echoes of history.
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Readers comment on an article taking a different view of life after treatment from that presented by the Princess of Wales.
I’m grateful to Hilary Osborne for helping me understand why the Princess of Wales’s video left me so disquieted (Kate’s recovery is great news – but be wary of a soft-focus view of life after chemo, 11 September). I had stage 2, grade 2 invasive breast cancer last Christmas, with talk of chemotherapy after the tumour biopsy – until genomic testing gave me a reprieve. So I “got off lightly”, and need to “look on the bright side”, as some friends unhelpfully remind me.
There are some silver linings, but all cancer is crap. And even without chemotherapy, I still feel greyed-out. My heart aches for Kate, and broadly speaking I’m a royalist. But did her PR team really have to add so much saccharine? And now I feel just a bit more rubbish about myself and my failure to fully thrive after my own tough, but less tough, year.
Ali Hutchison
Dorchester, Dorset.
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A large swath of insured Americans could be eligible for a popular class of weight loss and diabetes drugs. Meanwhile, Apple announces new health features.
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Two former Verily executives, Amy Abernathy and Brad Hirsch, announced this week that they’ve launched a new venture, Highlander Health. The organization will have two separate arms: Highlander Health Partners, which will invest in mid-stage healthcare startups, and the Highlander Health Institute, which will provide grants and mobilize partnerships with a goal of both accelerating clinical trials and utilizing real-world data to learn more about the effectiveness of different types of treatments.
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Some people with form of skin cancer that once had grim prognosis now live long enough to die from other causes.
More than half of people diagnosed with advanced melanoma now survive for at least 10 years when they receive a double hit of immunotherapy drugs, a trial has found.
The combined treatment has transformed survival rates for a form of skin cancer that once had a grim prognosis, with some patients now living long enough that they die from other causes.
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AstraZeneca shares fell more than 5% Tuesday morning, the biggest one-day drop in seven months, after the British pharmaceutical giant announced disappointing lung cancer drug trial results.
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Women with obesity and diabetes taking weight loss and diabetes drugs Mounjaro and Zepbound for over a year lost more weight than their male counterparts—but also experienced more nausea and vomiting, according to new research. Key Facts
Researchers from Eli Lilly who tracked weight changes for a group of 4,677 people with Type 2 diabetes and obesity found female participants lost up to 24.6% of their body weight during treatment, while males lost up to 18.1% of their body weight.
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As surprise pregnancies multiply, some scientists are investigating whether weight loss drugs can improve fertility in women with polycystic ovary syndrome.
Kathryn started taking Ozempic “off label” in April 2023 on her doctor’s advice. The Illinois resident had been diagnosed with gestational diabetes while pregnant and was struggling with her weight after the birth of her daughter. Following a short break from the drug in July because of side-effects, she started taking it again in August. In September, she found out she was pregnant.
Although Kathryn wasn’t using contraception, the pregnancy still came as a surprise. She had been told by doctors that she was unlikely to conceive naturally, and had been through several unsuccessful rounds of intrauterine insemination (IUI) before giving birth to her first child via IVF. “It was completely unexpected,” Kathryn tells me. “We hadn’t really planned to grow our family quite so soon – my first daughter was only 13 months old.”
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Leqembi's rollout has been slowed by bottlenecks related to reimbursement uncertainties, diagnostic test requirements and regular brain scans, among others.
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On healthcare, Harris repeated her positions on the Affordable Care Act, Inflation Reduction Act and abortion, while Trump was unwilling to commit to specific policies.
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Prof Sir Martin Landray: clinical IT functions are slow and ‘devastatingly user unfriendly’
The NHS will struggle to embrace technological advances in areas such as AI because its basic systems are too slow and “devastatingly user-unfriendly”, according to one of the UK’s leading scientists.
Prof Sir Martin Landray, the co-founder of the UK Recovery trial that saved thousands of lives during the Covid pandemic, said it was “deeply frustrating” that the health service was so far behind other industries such as banking and entertainment in its use of data and technology.
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Eli Lilly could be on its way to topping $1 trillion in market value. Meanwhile, Abbott launches its first over-the-counter continuous glucose monitor in U.S.
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Data from an early stage clinical trial suggests Novo Nordisk’s new weight loss pill amycretin could produce greater and more rapid weight loss than its popular obesity injection Wegovy.
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Properly organised, the mammoth database of medical information the health service holds has vast potential in the exploration of new treatments.
Last week’s report by Lord Ara Darzi on the state of the country’s health service made bleak reading. In relentless detail, the distinguished surgeon outlined the steady decline that has taken place in the NHS over the past 15 years, a decrease in effectiveness that now causes an estimated 14,000 unnecessary deaths a year, he argued. As headline writers for the nation’s newspapers made clear: the NHS now faces a simple truth. It must “reform or die”.
How this change can be brought about is unclear, however. Our health service needs to be better resourced, although the government has warned little money is likely to be made available for such a monumental transformation. Most of the reform that will be needed to save the NHS will have to come from within, ministers have emphasised. In other words, internal innovation and improved use of existing assets will be central in ensuring British people receive proper medical attention in the coming decades.
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Abbott Laboratories announced Thursday its over-the-counter continuous glucose monitor Lingo is available in the U.S. starting at $49.
Lingo is part of an emerging class of consumer-friendly biosensors that people can use to learn how their bodies respond to food, exercise, sleep and stress. These devices, called continuous glucose monitors, are small sensors that stick through the skin to measure real-time glucose levels. Glucose is a sugar molecule that comes from food, and it's the body's main energy source.
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Scientists researching the prevalence of Alzheimer’s disease have revealed light pollution to be a major risk factor.
A paper published in Frontiers today identifies a possible link between exposure to outdoor light at night and an increase in the prevalence of Alzheimer’s, particularly for people aged under 65.
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Lib Dem leader says government should use taxes on banks and wealthy to put nearly £5bn a year into health service.
Keir Starmer must abandon plans to delay investment in the NHS and instead use new taxes on banks and the wealthy to immediately plough almost £5bn a year into the ailing health service, the leader of the Lib Dems has warned.
In an interview with the Observer as the Lib Dem conference takes place in Brighton, Ed Davey said that the forthcoming budget must be squarely a “budget for the NHS”. He warned that waiting to begin the work needed to repair ageing hospitals and increase GP numbers was a serious mistake.
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Every weekday, the CNBC Investing Club with Jim Cramer releases the Homestretch — an actionable afternoon update, just in time for the last hour of trading on Wall Street. More weakness: There's been a couple attempts at a rally Wednesday, but stocks are still mostly lower in the second session of September after a rough start to the month Tuesday. Nvidia is acting a relatively better after its 9.5% plunge Tuesday, though it was a little lower in afternoon trading after trading in the green earlier. The stock has been lower in three of the past four sessions entering Wednesday. Elsewhere, we initiated a new position in home improvement retailer Home Depot , increasing our exposure to Federal Reserve rate cut beneficiaries. China in focus: GE Healthcare kicked off back-to-back days of Wall Street events Wednesday with a fireside chat with CFO Jay Saccaro at the Wells Fargo Healthcare Conference. We were most focused on what Saccaro had to say about China following the company's organic growth forecast cut in July that was entirely driven by weakness in region and a lack of new government stimulus spending. As a reminder, GE Healthcare actually rallied on the disappointing news because some investors believed the new outlook completely "derisked" the region for the rest of the year. About one month later, it looks like there is still limited traction around China stimulus. "It's kind of progressing as we kind of anticipated. There's increased interest in putting orders in what we call this pre-tender bucket. So we're seeing that progress kind of as we would expect," Saccaro explained. "But all this has to pay out from pre-tender to tender to approval to order to sale. And so it's a fairly extended process. The biggest thing is this is a longer process than the...
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“I just love dealing with human beings. I love them smiling. I love them being happier. I love them chasing their dreams. And if you're sick and not feeling good, you can't pursue your dreams.”
—Greg Brannon, MD, founder and medical director of Optimal Bio, author of Restore
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The £42m Transform project will recruit thousands of men, to spot early signs of cancer that affects one in eight in UK.
A £42m screening trial aimed at revolutionising the treatment of prostate cancer has been launched in the UK.
Thousands of men will be involved in its initial phase, which will begin in a few months. Several hundred thousand volunteers could be recruited as the programme progresses in coming years, say the trial’s organisers.
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