Editor Brian Harrod Provides Comprehensive up-to-date news coverage, with aggregated news from sources all over the world from the Roundup Newswires Network
‘I am very confident there will be a change,’ Elizabeth Gómez Alcorta says as new law goes into effect
Argentina’s historic decision to legalize abortion will help spur reform across Latin America, the country’s gender minister has told the Guardian, as a new law allowing the practice goes into effect.
The bill passed by congress on 30 December made Argentina the first major Latin American country to legalize abortion. It will be signed into law on Thursday evening by the president, Alberto Fernández, marking a turning point for a region where the Catholic church has been a major cultural and political influence for centuries.
The education secretary, Gavin Williamson, has put mass testing for coronavirus at the heart of his strategy to reopen schools after the lockdown. It is a controversial strategy that has divided scientists. Some believe mass testing can help reduce outbreaks at schools, while others argue it could make matters worse by giving teachers and pupils false reassurance.
Mass testing relies on lateral flow tests, or LFTs, which contain antibodies that bind to the virus. When a nasal swab is tested in an LFT, any virus present in the sample sticks to the antibodies and produces a dark band, a bit like a pregnancy test’s indicator. LFTs are not as accurate as the standard NHS lab-based PCR tests, but they are cheap and produce results fast – within 30 minutes.
Boris Johnson’s plans to test millions of schoolchildren for coronavirus every week appear to be in disarray after the UK regulator refused to formally approve the daily testing of pupils in England, the Guardian has learned.
The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) told the government on Tuesday it had not authorised the daily use of 30-minute tests due to concerns that they give people false reassurance if they test negative.
Children with parents in prison have been forgotten during lockdown, campaigners have told MPs.
The cross-party human rights committeeis looking at the impact on the right to family life, with a focus on people in institutional settings including prisons, care homes and mental health facilities.
When the UK’s first victim of Covid-19 died on 5 March 2020, there were only 116 recorded infections in the country and few people countenanced a death toll of 100,000.
But for government planners it was different. Emergency response experts tasked with “mortality management” braced for a death toll that they feared would dwarf anything seen since the second world war. As fatalities mounted in China and Italy, the worst-case scenario for the UK was so grim that one scheme hatched involved storing thousands of bodies in a warehouse in east London.
Australia’s chief medical officer, Prof Paul Kelly, and infectious diseases experts have defended securing 54m doses of a Covid-19 vaccine made by Oxford University and the pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca, amid concerns the vaccine will not be effective enough to achieve herd immunity.
When the scientists on the World Health Organization’s mission to research the origins of Covid-19 touch down in China as expected on Thursday at the beginning of their investigation they are clear what they will – and what they will not – be doing.
They intend to visit Wuhan, the site of the first major outbreak of Covid-19, and talk to Chinese scientists who have been studying the same issue. They will want to see if there are unexamined samples from unexplained respiratory illnesses, and they will want to examine ways in which the virus might have jumped the species barrier to humans.
NSW premier concerned over low testing levels as state grapples with growing number of mystery cases; partner of a Brisbane hotel quarantine cleaner who contracted new Covid-19 strain tests positive. Follow all the latest news and updates, live
Two Emirates flight attendants are in isolation in Australia after testing positive to Covid-19 on Sunday, two days after Australia introduced mandatory quarantining and testing of international flight crews.
The positive tests were included in Monday’s numbers.
The crew members identified as positive cases are being managed per usual processes and remain in Australia.
Since the incoming Emirates flight EK430 from Dubai to Brisbane was serviced by the same crew, as per the airline’s safety protocols the remaining crew members were determined to be close contacts. As a precautionary measure, the decision was therefore made to cancel flight EK431 from Brisbane to Dubai for the safety of its passengers.
The health and safety of our crew, customers and communities remains our top priority, and we continue to work closely with all relevant authorities to implement the latest health and safety protocols.
And just when you thought acting prime minister Michael McCormack’s controversial day was over, he has now used the controversial right-wing phrase “all lives matter” at a press conference when discussing the “black lives matter” protests.
The Nationals leader has come under fire today and yesterday for comparing the insurrection at the Capitol building by far-right rioters to the Black Lives Matter protest and riots earlier in the year.
I abhor violence of any form. The Black Lives Matter protests, as at mid-last year, cost 19 lives. That’s 19 lives that should not have been lost. I’m not going to apologise because I said that violence in any form should not happen, from a protest...
I appreciate there are a lot of people out there who are being a bit bleeding heart about this and who are confecting outrage, but they should know those lives matter too. All lives matter.
Repeated warnings were given that Khairi Saadallah, who murdered three men in a Reading park last summer, could carry out a “London Bridge-type scenario” shortly before the killings took place, the Guardian has learned.
Documents reveal that Nick Harborne, chief executive of the Reading Refugee Support Group (RRSG), who had had dealings with Saadallah since 2016, made four specific warnings to health and probation professionals between 4 December 2019 and 12 June 2020 that Saadallah could commit a violent crime if he did not receive appropriate support.
Photographs of crowded beaches, parks and queues at food stalls outside popular walking spots, all at a time when the UK is on highest alert under tough coronavirus restrictions.
Despite Matt Hancock describing these as examples of “flexing the rules”, and Chris Whitty, England’s chief medical officer, warning that stopping to chat in the street is a potential threat, many continue to interpret the government’s strict “stay at home” message as liberally as they can.
In France, every child is now obliged to have 11 vaccinations. If parents want their children to attend school, or take part in many extracurricular activities, they must accept. There is no opt-out or concessions made to vaccine doubters.
On Monday France’s government and health authorities are speeding up the country’s Covid-19 vaccine drive – a process complicated by widespread scepticism about the inoculation that has encompassed the usual global conspiracy theories.
One in five people in England may have had coronavirus, new modelling suggests, equivalent to 12.4 million people, rising to almost one in two in some areas.
It means that across the country as a whole the true number of people infected to date may be five times higher than the total number of known cases according to the government’s dashboard.
The face of South Africa’s Covid science on why Africa has been hit less hard than Europe, the new variant in the region, and the danger of vaccine nationalism
The epidemiologist Salim Abdool Karim could be considered South Africa’s Anthony Fauci. As co-chair of the South African Ministerial Advisory Committee on Covid-19, he is the government’s top adviser on the pandemic and has become the country’s face of Covid-19 science. He also sits on the Africa Task Force for Novel Coronavirus, overseeing the continent’s response to the global crisis.
Karim, who directs the Durban-based Centre for the Aids Programme of Research in South Africa and is a professor at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, has long advocated for science and speaking truth to power. For three decades, along with his wife and scientific collaborator, Quarraisha Abdool Karim, he has been at the forefront of the fight against South Africa’s substantial HIV and tuberculosis epidemics and in the early 2000s was one of the scientists who spoke out against the government’s Aids denialism.
The health secretary promised vaccines would be offered to every adult in the UK ‘by the autumn’. Speaking on the BBC’s The Andrew Marr Show, Hancock said it was ‘very, very important’ that as many people as possible get a vaccine. More than 200,000 people are now being vaccinated each day, he added
Exclusive: government accused of failing to ensure access more than a year after terminations legalised
Northern Ireland’s human rights commission (NIHRC) has launched a landmark legal action against the UK government for its failure to commission safe and accessible abortion services more than a year after abortion was made legal in the country, the Guardian can reveal.
The Northern Ireland secretary, Brandon Lewis, is accused of unlawfully denying the rights of women in the country, who experts warn are being forced to use unregulated services and to travel to high-risk areas during the pandemic. The NIHRC is also taking action against the Northern Ireland Executive and the country’s Department of Health.
It’s cheap, widely available and might help us fend off the virus. So should we all be dosing up on the sunshine nutrient?
In March, as coronavirus deaths in the UK began to mount, two hospitals in northeast England began taking vitamin D readings from patients and prescribing them with extremely high doses of the nutrient. Studies had suggested that having sufficient levels of vitamin D, which is created in the skin’s lower layers through the absorption of sunlight, plays a central role in immune and metabolic function and reduces the risk of certain community-acquired respiratory illnesses. But the conclusions were disputed, and no official guidance existed. When the endocrinology and respiratory units at Newcastle upon Tyne Hospitals NHS foundation trust made an informal recommendation to its clinicians to prescribe vitamin D, the decision was considered unusual. “Our view was that this treatment is so safe and the crisis is so enormous that we don’t have time to debate,” said Dr Richard Quinton, a consultant endocrinologist at the Royal Victoria Infirmary in Newcastle.
Soon clinicians and endocrinologists around the world began arguing about whether sufficient levels of vitamin D might positively impact coronavirus-related mortality rates. Some considered the nutrient an effective treatment hiding in plain sight; others thought of it as a waste of time. In March, the government’s scientific advisers examined existing evidence and decided there wasn’t enough to act upon. But in April, dozens of doctors wrote to the British Medical Journal describing the correction of vitamin D deficiencies as “a safe, simple step” that “convincingly holds out a potential, significant, feasible Covid-19 mitigation remedy”.
The movement best known for its schools is firmly entrenched within the German health sector
In a pandemic where global leaders have peddled quack treatments and miracle cures, Germany has often stood out as a shining beacon for science.
It is the country that developed the first diagnostic test to detect the coronavirus, and the first vaccine approved in the west to shield people against the disease. It is a country whose physicist chancellor told parliament she passionately believes “there are scientific findings that are real and should be followed.”
How has life changed for you at the surgery during the pandemic? The biggest change has been having to talk to patients on the phone rather than seeing them in person. We only see around three per day now in person.
Do you miss seeing people face to face? Totally. It’s quite right that we do it the way we do but I love being with the patients and having that connection.
25 years ago, a mutation was discovered that makes some people susceptible to the disease, and now it has transformed treatment
Ten years ago, Tony Herbert developed a lump on the right side of his chest. The clump of tissue grew and became painful and he was tested for breast cancer. The result was positive.
“I had surgery and chemotherapy and that worked,” he said last week. But how had Herbert managed to develop a condition that is so rare in men? Only about 400 cases of male breast cancer are diagnosed every year in the UK compared with around 55,000 in women. A genetic test revealed the answer. Herbert had inherited a pathogenic version of a gene called BRCA2 and this mutation had triggered his condition.
The announcement offers hope to the mostly poor and marginalised women facing criminal sanctions. But lingering problems such as obstetric violence and sexism in the justice system show the struggle for reproductive justice is not over, according to campaigners.