Category Archives: Health

Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall: ministers doing ‘next to nothing’ to tackle obesity

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Celebrity chef clashes with health secretary over what he calls government’s lack of obesity strategy

The celebrity chef and Green party supporter Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall has clashed with the UK health secretary, Victoria Atkins, over what he says is the government’s failure to tackle the obesity crisis.

Fearnley-Whittingstall challenged Atkins during a live discussion on the BBC’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg, accusing ministers of doing “next to nothing” to tackle obesity in England.

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East London fertility clinic has licence suspended after losing embryos

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Investigation begins into Homerton Fertility Centre after errors discovered in freezing processes

A fertility clinic in London has had its licence to operate suspended because of “significant concerns” about the unit, the regulator has said.

The Homerton Fertility Centre has been ordered by the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) to halt any new procedures while investigations continue.

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Sussex man doing well a year and a half after new brain cancer treatment

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Ben Trotman had an invasive growth of cells called a glioblastoma, which leaves patients with an average nine-month life expectancy

The only person in the world to receive a groundbreaking treatment for brain cancer is doing well almost a year and a half later, a charity has said.

Ben Trotman, 41, took part in a clinical trial that used immunotherapy to target his glioblastoma, an invasive growth of cells in the brain that gives an average life expectancy of nine months.

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Children at risk as Australia lags behind other countries on car seat safety, experts say

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Road crash deaths are the leading cause of death for children aged 1 to 13 in Australia and experts say many could be prevented with better restraints

Leading child safety experts are calling for regulations around child car restraints to be brought into line with the medical evidence and similar countries worldwide, saying that “a large proportion” of Australian children are being put in danger of life-altering traumatic injuries or death every day due to inappropriate use of car and booster seats.

The calls come as the state and federal ministers for transport undertake a review of Australia’s child restraint rules, which have been condemned as out of step with safe practice guidelines.

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‘My GP suggested it’: Britons explain why they went private for surgery

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As it emerges that one in 10 planned NHS operations in England are done in private hospitals, patients tell their stories

One in 10 planned NHS operations in England are now done by private hospitals, according to figures from the Independent Healthcare Providers Network, the trade body that represents private health providers. Here, three patients explain why they recently had to turn to the private sector for an operation.

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Private hospitals ‘cannibalising’ NHS in England by doing 10% of elective operations

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Campaigners say health service cannot provide care quickly because of underinvestment, which is allowing firms to ‘make a killing’

Private hospitals are doing one in 10 of all planned NHS operations amid patients’ frustration at long delays in NHS care and political pressure to cut waiting times.

New figures seen by the Guardian prompted campaigners to warn that the NHS is “allowing the private sector to make a killing” and is seeing more and more of its services “cannibalised” because years of underinvestment mean it can no longer provide care quickly.

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Private healthcare could become ‘a new normal’ as NHS grows weaker

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Sector’s boom times look here to stay as desperate patients seek care and more people take medical insurance

It is boom time in private healthcare. It has never been, or needed to be, a big provider of diagnostics and treatment in the UK before. The NHS’s provision of care to everyone, free at the point of delivery, has seen to that. That also explains why take-up of private medical insurance has remained stuck at about 10% of the population. The health service’s mere existence left little room for the private sector to expand.

However, the NHS’s fragile state – it still gives people mostly high-quality care, it just cannot do that quickly any more – is a historic opportunity for the private sector to go from small to significant. It could become what one expert calls “a new normal” – a not unusual place where people get treated.

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Health gains of low-traffic schemes up to 100 times greater than costs, study finds

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Research looked at three London boroughs to value overall health benefits of active travel over 20 years at up to £4,800 per head

Policies to help people walk and cycle such as low-traffic neighbourhoods can create public health benefits as much as 100 times greater than the cost of the schemes, a long-term study of active travel measures has concluded.

The research, based on six years of surveys among thousands of people living in three outer London boroughs that introduced LTNs or similar schemes, found they tended to prompt people to switch some trips from cars to active travel, although the effects were varied.

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Dramatic rise in women and girls being cut, new FGM data reveals

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Progress to prevent female genital mutilation needs to be ‘27 times faster’, says UN

The number of girls and women who have undergone female genital mutilation (FGM) has increased by 15% in the past eight years according to new data.

Figures released by the UN children’s agency, Unicef, show that more than 230 million girls and women alive today have undergone FGM, compared with 200 million in 2016. The trend is towards girls being cut at a younger age, said Unicef executive director Catherine Russell.

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UK politics: Sunak refuses to say how abolition of national insurance would be funded – as it happened

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PM says ‘people trust me on these things’ and refuses to be drawn on whether government would forgo entire £46bn raised from measure

Keir Starmer has accused Jeremy Hunt of repeating the budget mistakes made by Liz Truss during her disastrous premiership.

In comments on the budget during a visit to a building site this morning, Starmer focused on Hunt’s proposal to abolish employees’ national insurance over time, saying that this was a bigger unfunded tax promise than those in Truss’s mini-budget. (See 9.28am.)

How humiliating was that for the government yesterday?

We’ve argued for years that they should get rid of the non-dom tax status, they’ve resisted that. And now, completely out of ideas, the only decent policy they’ve got is the one that they’ve lifted from us.

Nothing that Jeremy Hunt did yesterday, nor anything the OBR said, changes anything very significantly. Which is a shame. Because that means we are still:

-heading for a parliament in which people will on average be worse off at the end than at the start,

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US health secretary on Alabama’s IVF ruling: ‘Pandora’s box was opened’ after fall of Roe

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Xavier Becerra says US must provide federal protections for reproductive rights if it hopes to avoid further restrictions

The health and human services secretary, Xavier Becerra, said the US must provide federal protections for reproductive rights if Americans hope to avoid further restrictions on in vitro fertilization, contraception and abortion in an exclusive interview with the Guardian.

Becerra’s comments come in the wake of an Alabama supreme court decision that gave embryos the rights of “extrauterine children” and forced three of the state’s largest fertility clinics to stop services for fear of litigation and prosecution. The fallout from the decision prompted the Alabama legislature to hastily sign new legislation that will give IVF providers with immunity from civil and criminal suits, which the governor signed into law on Wednesday night.

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MPs and campaigners accuse Polish government of betrayal over abortion laws

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Speaker says parliament will not consider updating country’s draconian abortion policies until mid-April

Women’s groups and opposition politicians have taken aim at Poland’s parliamentary speaker, accusing him of betrayal and seeking to “freeze” the issue of abortion, after he said parliament would not consider legislation to tackle the country’s near-total ban on abortion until mid-April.

“We feel disappointed and betrayed,” said Dominika Ćwiek from Legal Abortion, one of the groups that has been at the forefront of the battle against the country’s draconian abortion policies. “The rights of Polish women are being treated as a side issue.”

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Father of Indigenous man who died after incorrect diagnosis tells inquest ‘hospitals are not safe for us’

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Family members pay emotional tribute to Ricky Hampson Jr, ‘Dougie’, who died less than 24 hours after leaving Dubbo Base hospital

Family members have described an Aboriginal man who died after an incorrect diagnosis at Dubbo hospital as the “favourite” child and the “light of every celebration”.

Ricky Hampson Jr, known and referred to as “Dougie” throughout the inquest, died on 16 August 2021, less than 24 hours after leaving Dubbo Base hospital, after being “erroneously” diagnosed with a drug-related illness.

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‘Hypervaccinated’ man reportedly received 217 Covid jabs without side effects

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German man, who said he had vaccines for ‘private reasons’, suspected of selling certificates to people who didn’t want jab

A German man who voluntarily received 217 coronavirus jabs over 29 months showed “no signs” of having been infected with the virus that causes Covid-19 and had not suffered from any vaccine-related side effects, according to a study published in the medical journal Lancet Infectious Diseases.

The 62-year-old, from Magdeburg, Germany, whom doctors described as “hypervaccinated”, said he had had the large number of vaccines for “private reasons”, according to the researchers from University of Erlangen-Nuremberg who examined him.

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Companies portray menopause as ‘medical problem’ and push women towards ineffective treatments, papers find

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Medical researchers in US, UK and Australia point to healthier menopause perspectives in lower-income countries

Many companies have a commercial interest in portraying menopause as a “medical problem,” leaving women inundated with misinformation and pushed towards ineffective treatments, a series of papers published in international medical journal, the Lancet, has found.

The findings have prompted leading doctors and researchers – including those from the US, UK and Australia – to jointly call for a societal shift that challenges inaccurate assumptions.

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Drug that could slow womb cancer to be rolled out by NHS in England

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Dostarlimab or Jemperli, an immunotherapy used alongside chemotherapy, could extend life expectancy

A drug that could improve the quality of life of hundreds of women with womb cancer will be rolled out on the NHS across England from Tuesday.

Dostarlimab, also known as Jemperli, is an immunotherapy that works by attracting specific proteins on the surface of cancer cells to help the immune system attack them.

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Cancer warning after big rise in people smoking pipes, shisha and cigars in UK

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Greatest increase in non-cigarette tobacco in past decade was among young adults, researchers say

The number of people smoking pipes, shisha and cigars in the UK has risen fivefold over a decade, and experts say this could lead to a rise in smoking-related cancers such as mouth and lung cancer.

Last year there were about 772,800 exclusive non-cigarette tobacco users, compared with 151,200 in 2013, according to a study published in the journal Nicotine and Tobacco Research.

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France makes abortion a constitutional right in historic Versailles vote

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Eiffel Tower lit up to mark change, seen as way of protecting law that decriminalised abortion in 1975

The French parliament has enshrined abortion as a constitutional right at a historic joint session at the Palace of Versailles.

Out of 925 MPs and senators eligible to vote, 780 supported the amendment, which will give women the “guaranteed freedom” to choose an abortion.

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First over-the-counter birth control pill in US to go on sale later this month

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Opill is being shipped to retailers and pharmacies, and its arrival on shelves comes at a deeply fraught time for reproductive rights

Opill, the first birth control pill approved for over-the-counter distribution, is now being shipped to retailers and pharmacies, the company behind the pill, Perrigo, announced on Monday. It will be available in stores and online later this month.

The Food and Drug Administration approved Opill last year, paving the way for the United States to join the dozens of countries that have already made over-the-counter birth control pills available. Opill, which works by using the hormone progestin to prevent pregnancy, is meant to be taken every day around the same time and, when used as directed, is 98% effective.

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Catalan pharmacies hand out free reusable period products

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Move by Spanish regional government to tackle period poverty will benefit about 2.5m people

The Catalonia region in Spain has begun providing free reusable menstrual cups, period underwear and cloth pads at pharmacies, in one of the first initiatives of its kind in the world.

The programme is part of a drive by the regional government to reduce period poverty after a survey found 44% of women using menstruation products in Catalonia could not afford their first-choice product and 23% said they had to reuse items designed for single use.

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