Category Archives: Health & wellbeing

Coronavirus symptoms: how to tell if you have a common cold, flu or Covid

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Fever, runny nose, headache? Lost your sense of taste or smell? Your guide to differentiating between the three illnesses

With winter approaching, the UK is entering the traditional seasons for colds and flu, with the additional complication this year that symptoms of those two illnesses can be broadly similar to those experienced by people who have caught the coronavirus and may be at risk of spreading it.

The NHS in England has produced a guide to differentiate between the three types of illnesses, which health experts hope will make it clearer to people whether they have an illness they would have most likely brushed aside last year, but which this year might lead them to think they need to self-isolate or seek to have a coronavirus test.

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How to make your own luck and turn a mistake into the best thing ever

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Seeing meaning in the unexpected can help turn mistakes into opportunities, says researcher Dr Christian Busch

Dr Christian Busch has had a lucky life. He narrowly escaped a catastrophic car accident at the age of 18. The car was wrecked but he walked away without a scratch. It was just the wake-up call he needed. “I turned my life around. Before that I’d been a reckless teenager who lived in the moment, having fun. The accident instilled a sense of urgency to try to find meaning.”

Luck continued to play a positive role in his life. An accidental coffee spillage in Starbucks led to romance and though the person in question is no longer his girlfriend they are still close. In his work as an entrepreneur, researcher and community-builder, he co-founded several social enterprises and teaches at both New York University and the London School of Economics – enjoying plenty of lucky breaks along the way. But Busch noticed that he wasn’t the only “lucky” one among his friends and colleagues. In fact, many of the most successful and happiest people he encountered also seemed to be on a permanent lucky streak.

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‘Everyone was drenched in the virus’: was this Austrian ski resort a Covid-19 ground zero?

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At least 6,000 people say they caught coronavirus in Ischgl, dubbed ‘Ibiza on ice’, and their class action is gaining pace. Those who were there recall a terrifying week

In the first week of March, Charlie Jackson had an argument with his wife. The recruitment agent, 53, from Pangbourne in Berkshire, was due to catch a flight to Innsbruck for a three-day “boys’ holiday”, skiing in the Tirolean Alps. Jackson’s wife, Carol, felt Ischgl, the resort booked by the group, was a bit too close to the parts of northern Italy that had recently been shut down to contain the spread of a mystery flu-like illness. But Jackson threw caution to the wind: he had already spent more than £1,000 on the trip.

Ischgl, one of the most popular ski resorts in Europe, is what Jackson calls “a boyish kind of place”. He and his friends had been visiting the town in the Paznaun valley, Austria, for the past nine years. The snow is reliably powdery from November to May. The compact nature of the place means you don’t need a car to get around. The facilities are well-run: Ischgl has 45 state-of-the-art ski lifts, three of which take you directly from the edge of town to the mountain.

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Oliver Burkeman’s last column: the eight secrets to a (fairly) fulfilled life

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After more than a decade of writing life-changing advice, I know when to move on. Here’s what else I learned

In the very first instalment of my column for the Guardian’s Weekend magazine, a dizzying number of years ago now, I wrote that it would continue until I had discovered the secret of human happiness, whereupon it would cease. Typically for me, back then, this was a case of facetiousness disguising earnestness. Obviously, I never expected to find the secret, but on some level I must have known there were questions I needed to confront – about anxiety, commitment-phobia in relationships, control-freakery and building a meaningful life. Writing a column provided the perfect cover for such otherwise embarrassing fare.

I hoped I’d help others too, of course, but I was totally unprepared for how companionable the journey would feel: while I’ve occasionally received requests for help with people’s personal problems, my inbox has mainly been filled with ideas, life stories, quotations and book recommendations from readers often far wiser than me. (Some of you would have been within your rights to charge a standard therapist’s fee.) For all that: thank you.

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Pregnant women in hospital with Covid-19 may not show symptoms, study finds

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Analysis shows that pregnant women may be at a higher risk of needing admission to an ICU

Pregnant women in hospital with coronavirus are less likely to show symptoms and may have a greater risk risk of being admitted to an intensive care unit than non-pregnant women of similar age, a study has found.

The analysis, which encompassed 77 studies conducted globally and was published in the British Medical Journal, looked at 11,432 pregnant women admitted to hospital and diagnosed as having suspected or confirmed Covid-19.

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‘It destroys lives’: why the razor-blade pain of vaginismus is so misunderstood

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This common condition can lead to relationship breakdown and unnecessary surgery. So why is treatment still so poor and underfunded?

I was just a few weeks into a new relationship when the pain started. Whenever my boyfriend and I started to have penetrative sex, it felt as if there were razor blades inside me. At first I laughed it off, but soon I became terrified of intercourse. My body would freeze with fear as my clothes came off. By the time we said: “I love you,” even kissing made me feel anxious. I would spend entire day trips and holidays with him worrying about the pain.

When I first went to my GP, the advice I got was to “try and relax”. It was about as helpful as telling someone having a panic attack to “just chill out”. Without a real solution, I started to question whether I was imagining the pain. Or if maybe, somehow, I was to blame for it. My boyfriend was kind and supportive but I felt I was letting him down. Some days, I would feel so ashamed that it was hard to think about anything else. Other days, I’d feel an overwhelming sense of loss for the carefree woman I had been.

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‘Fear of failure’ giving UK children lowest happiness levels in Europe

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More than a third of UK 15-year-olds scored low in the annual Good Childhood Report

Children in the UK have the lowest levels of life satisfaction across Europe, with “a particularly British fear of failure” partly to blame, according to a major report into childhood happiness.

More than a third of UK 15-year-olds scored low on life satisfaction, the annual Good Childhood Report from the Children’s Society found. They also fared badly across happiness measurements including satisfaction with schools, friends and sense of purpose compared to children in other European countries.

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From giving up gambling and getting fit to coping with grief: how our lives changed in lockdown

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This year’s isolation has been painful, but in some cases it has also provided a valuable chance to pause, reflect and take decisions that seemed unthinkable before. Here, six readers describe how lockdown inspired them to turn their lives around

As soon as he heard about the impending lockdown, Alex Harrison, 34, drove to his local casino in Liverpool and asked them to ban him for life. In the manager’s office, his photograph was taken and his details were recorded on an iPad. To his surprise, the manager congratulated him.

Harrison has battled with a gambling addiction for 10 years. When he walked into the casino that day, he owed around £1,000 to friends, family and payday lenders. Occasionally, he would gamble his entire month’s salary on the day he was paid.

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Listen to your migraine to help you feel better – and to learn about yourself

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Headaches are telling you something about how your brain works with your body, influencing your behaviour and feelings

We need pain. It seems contradictory to say it, particularly now that we have so many ways of dealing with it and switching it off. Pain not only tells us something is wrong, it also protects us. If you slam the car door on your hand, it’s going to hurt. You will have damaged the soft tissue; all the muscles and ligaments that help you move your fingers. It will no doubt swell up to twice its size. This inflammation is part of the healing process. Your hand feels hot and looks red because of all the extra blood flow. All these inflammatory agents that are acting to heal you are stimulating the pain receptors in your hand, the ones in your skin and your muscles. Your head is not so different except, crucially, the underlying cause can be much more subtle and varied.

As a neuroscientist who writes about headaches, it is somewhat ironic to admit that I suffer from them still. Two recent headaches stand out. The first happened when I couldn’t find my glasses. I’m astigmatic so I see the world on a bit of a slant because my left eyeball is shaped like a rugby ball instead of a football. Just looking around can be effortful. Plus, the search made me late for everything that day which was unpleasant. By the time I got home, my head felt like it was in the grip of giant hands and they had begun to squeeze hard. All I wanted for dinner was a paracetamol sandwich.

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Improve your relationships – with advice from counter-terrorism experts

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Emily and Laurence Alison specialise in communication and co-operation with criminal suspects. But their methods work in the home and at work, too

“The more you push someone, the more they close up,” say Emily and Laurence Alison, a husband-and-wife psychology team. “The hungrier you are for information, the harder it will be to get that out of someone. But give the person a choice about what they say; give them some autonomy and you begin to build the rapport that may lead to a better conversation,” says Laurence.

This sounds like parenting advice and yet the Alisons’ specialism is helping counter-terrorism officers and the police to improve communication and co-operation with criminal suspects. When the atmosphere turns adversarial and competitive, as it so often does, they turn to the Alisons to help them navigate and negotiate.

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Cooking eased my exile and became my homage to the lives of immigrants

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Preparing food helped me reconcile my old and new world. Now my restaurant produces a beautiful mongrel cuisine

‘Now you better behave and don’t cry!” was the warning from my mother, shot with a stern look to show she was deadly serious. We disembarked from the aircraft at Heathrow. It was a dark and dank day. Cold rain spat at us as we walked across the tarmac into the immigration hall. In the terminal, the world seemed full of strangers and I swallowed back my tears.

The sunless flat above a shop that my father had found for us was full of draughts and damp. At the makeshift kitchen table, I stared at the exposed electrical wires knotted together on the wall and pined for the warmth of the neat, beloved grandmother we had left behind in our haste to leave Kenya. England welcomed immigrants, but its housing did not. Back home, when you opened the door, every room was fragrant with the scent of ripening guavas. Here, there was just a solitary freckled apple in the fruit bowl that, like us, had seen better days.

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Covid-19 threatens access to abortions and contraceptives, experts warn

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Unplanned pregnancy rates have fallen globally, report finds, but coronavirus could endanger access to services

Rates of unplanned pregnancies have fallen around the world, according to new data published by health research organisation the Guttmacher Institute and the UN Human Reproduction Programme (HRP) on Wednesday.

Global rates of unintended pregnancies have fallen from 79 per 1,000 women aged 15 to 49 in 1990 to 64 in 2019, thanks in part to a concerted effort to increase access to contraceptives, but there are concerns that decades of progress in reducing the numbers risk being undone by Covid-19, as lockdown restrictions hamper health services.

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How to stop your glasses steaming up – and 19 other essential facts about face masks

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How often should you wash a cloth mask? And how effective are the disposable ones? The expert guide to choosing, wearing and caring for your face covering

The British have been slow to embrace face masks, despite calls from public health experts. Uptake has been just 25% in the UK, compared with 83.4% in Italy and 65.8% in the US. The president of the Royal Society, Venki Ramakrishnan, said this week that wearing one “is the right thing to do” and that a refusal to do so should be seen as socially unacceptable as drink-driving or not wearing a seatbelt.

Perhaps one of the problems has been the changing advice as new evidence emerges. The World Health Organization (WHO) now recommends people wear cloth masks. Ramakrishnan said that in the UK, “the message has not been clear enough, so perhaps people do not really understand the benefits or are not convinced”. It also doesn’t help that the guidance across the UK is different.

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The death of the bra: will the great lingerie liberation of lockdown last?

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Working from home has been a chance to do away with uncomfortable, unnecessary underwear. And many women have no intention of returning to underwires and constriction

It was after a shopping trip, the first time for weeks that Louise Kilburn had ventured out during the lockdown, that she realised she wasn’t wearing a bra. “I’d completely forgotten to put it on,” she says. Kilburn, a university lecturer, had been shielding since the last week of March. She was still busy teaching online, although not usually by video, and had created a more comfortable work wardrobe of pyjamas, loungewear “and, more importantly, no bra”. Her bras were somewhere, she says, with a laugh, under a pile of pre-lockdown clothes – lost enough that she had to buy some bralettes, a more unstructured style, to try out. She had, she says, “mislaid my boob cages”.

Lockdown has changed a lot of things about the way we present ourselves to the world, and for many women, ditching their bra has been a particularly popular one. “I just don’t see bras making a comeback after this,” tweeted the Buzzfeed writer Tomi Obaro in May. Her tweet has been “liked” more than half a million times. The feminist satire website Reductress ran a headline last week reading: “Bra furlough extended.”

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Jenni Murray: ‘I hate the diet industry. It’s caused me misery’

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The Woman’s Hour presenter has written a book about her lifelong struggle with her weight. She discusses fat-shaming, body positivity and what happened when she had bariatric surgery

A few years ago, Jenni Murray was out walking with her son and dogs when she saw a potential vision of her future. While she was strolling painfully around the park, stopping to rest at benches where she could, a woman not much larger than Murray passed them on a mobility scooter, her own dogs’ leads attached to the handlebars. If Murray – at 24 stone (152kg) – didn’t do something about her weight, her concerned son said, that might be her before long. How did she feel about herself at that point?

“Extremely obese,” she says. “I was not the fit, active person that I wanted to be. I just lumbered everywhere. I’d had breast cancer and a double hip replacement in my 50s, but it was the obesity that was going to kill me.” It was the final push Murray needed, after a lifetime of dieting, and a warning from her doctor that she was on the way to developing type 2 diabetes. “I thought, I’ve got to do something about it, I’m 64 and I’m not going to make it to 70.” She adds, triumph in her voice, “And I did make it to 70!” She reached the milestone birthday in May.

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‘One in a 50m chance’: woman with two wombs carrying a twin in each

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Kelly Fairhurst found out about uterus condition when she went for 12-week scan

The case of a woman who discovered she had two wombs and was pregnant with a twin in each has been described as “one in 50m” by doctors.

Kelly Fairhurst, 28, only learned she had uterus didelphys, a condition where a woman has two wombs, when she went for her 12-week scan. She was also told she was carrying twins, one in each womb.

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Experience: my yoga class turned out to be a cult

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After a few months, I realised I wasn’t seeing my friends and family as much as I used to. The organisation didn’t like it

I was 22 when I moved to a different US city and needed a new yoga studio. I discovered a place that believed in eastern mysticism – perfect for an open-minded spiritualist, which was how I saw myself at the time.

I walked in and a young woman was very excited to see me. She paid attention to my every word, making me feel cared about. I then met with a “master”, who informed me I was in very poor energetic health and needed to sign up right away. The classes were quirky. We’d do 40 minutes of exercise and meditation to a mix of new age flute music and Michael Jackson. It was far less pretentious than the yoga studios I had visited before. I decided to join for the haggled price of $100 (£79) a month.

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Why coronavirus has placed millions more girls at risk of FGM

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As lockdowns linger and economies falter, girls who are out of school are at increased risk of being cut

Covid-19 has exposed just how much work remains to be done to wipe out female genital mutilation (FGM) around the world. Two million girls who would otherwise be safe from the practice are believed to be at risk over the next decade as a direct result of the virus.

As lockdowns linger and economies tumble, many families have been spurred into action over the fate of their daughters, using school closures to cut them and marry them off, campaigners say.

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Vitamin K could help fight coronavirus, study suggests

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Scientists in Netherlands explore possible link between deficiency and Covid-19 deaths

Patients who have died or been admitted to intensive care with Covid-19 have been found to be deficient in a vitamin found in spinach, eggs and hard and blue cheeses, raising hopes that dietary change might be one part of the answer to combating the disease.

Researchers studying patients who were admitted to the Canisius Wilhelmina hospital in the Dutch city of Nijmegen have extolled the benefits of vitamin K after discovering a link between deficiency and the worst coronavirus outcomes.

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