Spray-on surface could prevent bacteria building up and reduce household water use
The toilet brush need never leave its holder again. Scientists have created a super-slippery coating that helps usher excrement on its way without leaving traces behind.
The spray-on coating, which is slipperier than Teflon, reduces adhesion of even tenacious faeces by up to 90%, tests suggest, so far less water is needed to flush them away and leave the toilet clean.
Continue reading...Campaigners hail Alberto Fernández’s pledge to oversee U-turn in official policy
Argentina’s president-elect, Alberto Fernández, has promised he will move to legalise abortion after taking office on 10 December.
He will send a bill to congress which, if approved, would make Argentina the first major Latin American nation with legalised abortion. The ruling in the 45 million-strong country would follow decisions by its much smaller neighbour Uruguay, which legalised the practice in 2012, and Cuba, in 1965.
Continue reading...At least six deaths have been linked to the outbreak, in a nation where vaccination rates are alarmingly low
Samoa has closed all schools and cracked down on public gatherings as it enters a state of emergency over the deadly measles outbreak spreading across the Pacific islands.
The island state of just 200,000, halfway between Hawaii and New Zealand, announced the state of emergency on Saturday after declaring a measles epidemic late in October, when the first deaths were reported.
Continue reading...Bundestag backs law that will fine parents up to €2,500 if children are not inoculated
Germany’s parliament has voted to make measles vaccinations compulsory for children, in response to a global rise in cases of the disease.
Parents who refuse to get their children inoculated face fines of up to €2,500 (£2,140) and a likely ban from nursery or school.
Continue reading...Campaigners urge global action on reproductive rights as US comments embolden anti-choice groups at Nairobi summit
The US will only support family planning programmes that offer alternatives to abortions, a senior policy adviser has told a conference in Nairobi.
In a statement that has emboldened anti-choice groups in the city, Valerie Huber, the US special representative for global women’s health, also told a summit on population and development that her country sought to combat gender-based violence by investing in programmes that respected the rights of women and girls, but didn’t compromise “the inherent value of every human life – born and unborn”.
Continue reading...Easy to catch but hard to diagnose, TB is almost as deadly today as it was 150 years ago. Better, cheaper drugs are a priority
Tuberculosis has killed more people than any other disease in history. Last year, 1.5 million people died from TB and 10 million more acquired it. A shocking one-quarter of the world’s population is infected. That’s not much better than 1993, when one-third of the world was infected and the World Health Organization declared TB a global emergency. We are losing the battle.
Earlier this month, experts gathered in Hyderabad for the 50th Union World Conference on fighting the disease. When the first such gathering was held in 1867, TB was the leading cause of death in industrialised nations. Today, it still ranks in the top 10 worldwide. Why, despite all the progress in medicine and public health over the past 150 years, is TB still the most common and lethal of all infectious diseases?
Continue reading...The prime minister delivers the first big set-piece speech of the campaign as Labour pledges £26bn extra per year for NHS
That’s all from us for this evening. Thanks for reading and commenting. For a comprehensive rundown of the day’s events, see my colleague Andrew Sparrow’s daily election briefing:
Related: Andrew Sparrow's election briefing: Johnson won't change Brexit stance to please Farage
Related: Boris Johnson heckled over floods but does not apologise for 'slow response'
Hoey also said complained that MPs had spent the last two years trying to thwart Brexit, telling LBC:
We’ve had two years of parliament – a remain parliament – doing everything they can to stop us leaving; by different methods and some not so serious as others. But most of the Labour MPs in there and a substantial number of Conservatives have tried to stop it.
Continue reading...Centuries of female exclusion has meant women’s diseases are often missed, misdiagnosed or remain a total mystery
From the earliest days of medicine, women have been considered inferior versions of men. In On the Generation of Animals, the Greek philosopher Aristotle characterised a female as a mutilated male, and this belief has persisted in western medical culture.
“For much of documented history, women have been excluded from medical and science knowledge production, so essentially we’ve ended up with a healthcare system, among other things in society, that has been made by men for men,” Dr Kate Young, a public health researcher at Monash University in Australia, tells me.
Continue reading...Family planning services are reaching more women, but population growth is hampering efforts to reach 2020 goal
More women and girls in low income countries are using family planning than ever before, but global efforts to widen access to contraception are still falling well behind targets, according to a report.
One year away from a global deadline to widen access to modern forms of family planning, such services are accessible to less than half of the women that policy makers hoped to reach.
Continue reading...Source claims government plans secret vaccinations after 12 children fall prey to disease
Officials in Pakistan have been accused of covering up an outbreak of the most dangerous strain of polio and planning a covert vaccination programme to contain the disease.
According to a source in Pakistan’s polio eradication programme and documentation seen by the Guardian, a dozen children have been infected with the P2 strain of polio, which causes paralysis and primarily effects those under five.
Continue reading...Exclusive: European experts fear WHO recognition will encourage use of unproven therapies
Europe’s leading doctors are to call for tighter regulation of traditional Chinese medicine, anxious that recent recognition by the World Health Organization will encourage the use of unproven therapies that can sometimes be harmful.
The Federation of European Academies of Medicine (FEAM) and the European Academies’ Science Advisory Council will issue a joint statement on Thursday urging the WHO to clarify how traditional Chinese medicine and other complementary therapies should be used.
Continue reading...Respect in childbirth is a human right. As a midwife of many years’ experience, I am calling for a global effort towards more compassion in maternity care
Respectful maternity care is a universal human right due to every childbearing woman in every health system around the world. So why do women continue to endure violence, abuse and substandard care during childbirth?
As a midwife with more than 44 years of international experience, I have seen disrespect and abuse in many countries.
Continue reading...Previous research suggested health benefits increased with greater volume of running
Any amount of running is good for you, according to research suggesting it is linked to a similar reduction in the risk of early death no matter how many hours you clock up a week or how fast you go.
According to the World Health Organization, about 3.2 million deaths each year are down to people not doing enough physical activity.
Continue reading...Lawyers argue that while farming families toil over backbreaking work in desperate poverty, BAT is reaping the rewards
Even Dickens did not describe harder toil. Life for the child of a tenant farmer who works the tobacco fields of Malawi is unimaginably arduous: up at 4am for several hours of labour with no breakfast, cutting into the earth with a heavy hoe.
School – if they go to school – is a brief respite. The first and often only meal of the day, maize porridge, is eaten when they get home, before more digging. Sleep is on the bare earth under a straw roof.
Continue reading...From a festival that helps artists trade work for healthcare to a regional micro-currency, Kingston is trying to build an inclusive and self-sufficient local ecosystem
Kingston, New York is a diverse city of 23,000, flanked to the east by Rondout Creek and the Hudson River and to the west by the Catskill mountains. It boasts a rustic industrial waterfront, a colorful historic district and Revolutionary War-era stone buildings. A stranger might call it bucolic. The streets of uptown are bustling with eateries and, of late, places to buy velvet halter dresses, vintage boleros, CBD tinctures, and LCD tea kettles with precision-pour spouts. But strolling by 10-year-old Half Moon Books, passersby might glimpse a different side of this city. The bookshop’s windows exclusively feature nonfiction on the end of the world as we know it. “I started out putting together a window of utopias,” says bookseller Jessica DuPont, “but somehow I ended up with the death throes of capitalism.”
I moved to Kingston from New York City just over a decade ago, on the heels of the 2008 recession. I was three years out of university, but my fledgling career in media stalled with the economic downturn. Friends of mine – two painters, one in her 30s, the other in his 40s – owned a building with an available apartment on the second floor where I could afford to live and work.
Continue reading...New agreement secures 66% reduction in cost of rifapentine, which prevents ‘latent’ TB from becoming active
The price of a drug crucial to prevent tuberculosis is to be slashed by two-thirds in a deal that could stop millions from developing the disease.
TB is the leading cause of death from infectious disease worldwide, killing 1.5 million people a year, according to the latest World Health Organization (WHO) global TB report.
Continue reading...Trump administration may have violated Siljander amendment by lobbying to remove protections, four Democrats said in letter
The Trump administration may have violated federal law by lobbying more than 70 countries to remove protections for “sexual and reproductive health” from a UN agreement, according to a letter from four US senators seen by the Guardian.
The letter from the senators, all high-ranking Democrats, focuses on an effort from the Trump administration to remove “sexual and reproductive health” from a high-level UN agreement on universal health coverage.
Continue reading...New study shows evidence of positive outcomes is scarce while symptoms can be exacerbated
The use of cannabis medicines to treat people with depression, anxiety, psychosis or other mental health issues cannot be justified because there is little evidence that they work or are safe, according to a major new study.
A review of evidence from trials conducted over nearly 40 years, published in the journal Lancet Psychiatry,concludes that the risks outweigh the benefits. And yet, say the authors, they are being given to people with mental health problems in Australia, the US and Canada, and demand is likely to grow.
Continue reading...Healthier food choices almost always benefit environment as well, according to analysis
Eating healthy food is almost always also best for the environment, according to the most sophisticated analysis to date.
The researchers said poor diets threaten society by seriously harming people and the planet, but the latest research can inform better choices.
Continue reading...System sold by Optum estimates health needs based on medical costs, which are much less than for white patients, report finds
An algorithm used to manage the healthcare of millions of Americans shows dramatic biases against black patients, a new study has found.
Hospitals around the United States use the system sold by Optum, a UnitedHealth Group-owned service, to determine which patients have the most intensive healthcare needs over time. But the algorithm, which has been applied to more than 200 million people each year, significantly underestimates the amount of care black patients need compared with white patients, research published on Friday in Science magazine found.
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