Focus on overuse contributes to antibiotics reaching less than 7% of people with drug-resistant infections in poorer countries, say researchers

Less than 7% of people with severe drug-resistant infections in poorer countries get the antibiotics they need, a new study suggests, with researchers warning that not only is this causing suffering and deaths, but is also likely to be driving antimicrobial resistance (AMR).

With AMR forecast to cause 1.9m deaths a year by 2050, they are calling for urgent action, akin to the fight earlier this century to get HIV drugs to Africa’s virus hotspots.

Surgical menopause occurs on average 19 months earlier, while natural menopause happens five months earlier, new global research shows

Women with endometriosis face a higher risk of premature and early menopause and are seven times more likely to experience surgical menopause, a study has found.

Surgical menopause occurs when a woman has both ovaries removed before reaching natural menopause, and may be done to treat endometriosis if other treatments fail.

Comments from Stephen Kinnock come amid reports that pay review bodies could recommend up to 4% for teachers and nurses

The parents of four million children will get cheaper school uniforms because of a law reform making its way through parliament, the government has claimed. As PA Media reports, the Department for Education says its children’s wellbeing and schools bill will reduce uniform costs for families by £70m. PA says:

MPs have previously raised concerns about the high costs parents face in buying branded items of clothing for uniform.

Schools are required to limit the amount of branded uniform items but a survey has shown they are not doing so, with parents having to pay on average £442 for secondary school uniforms, and £343 for primary school uniforms.

In workplaces and services that are open to the public … trans women (biological men) should not be permitted to use the women’s facilities and trans men (biological women) should not be permitted to use the men’s facilities, as this will mean that they are no longer single-sex facilities and must be open to all users of the opposite sex.

About 14% of premature deaths in England attributable to unhealthy food, the most among surveyed countries

Consuming large amounts of ultra-processed food (UPF) increases the risk of an early death, according to a international study that has reignited calls for a crackdown on UPF.

Each 10% extra intake of UPF, such as bread, cakes and ready meals, increases someone’s risk of dying before they reach 75 by 3%, according to research in countries including the US and England.

Meeting will hear how exposure to verbal abuse leads to biological changes and can make mental ill-health likelier

Being shouted at by their parents reshapes children’s brains and makes them more likely to have mental ill-health and struggle to maintain friendships, MPs will hear on Monday.

Verbal abuse by adults can leave children unable to enjoy pleasure and seeing the world as threatening, experts in child development and mental health will tell a meeting at Westminster.

Spravato, derived from a popular club drug and also known as esketamine, offers hope to tens of thousands of Australians living with chronic mental illness

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A medication chemically similar to ketamine will be made cheaper to improve the lives of Australians suffering from treatment-resistant depression.

The drug, which comes in the form of a nasal spray, is a chemical cousin of ketamine, used for decades as a powerful anaesthetic before it was adopted as a party drug in underground rave culture.

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Barbara Altounyan recalls her father’s self-experimentation and invention

My father, Dr Roger Altounyan, discovered Intal (sodium cromoglicate) in the 1960s, at a time when many of his medical colleagues wrote off asthma sufferers as hypochondriacs (Letters, 18 April). He was an asthmatic and a doctor, and was determined to prove them wrong. He conducted experiments on himself and in a secret Cheshire laboratory over 10 years, testing about 500 compounds before finally declaring eureka.

Then he researched how best to dispense his drug into the lungs of patients. Thanks to his time spent behind a propeller as a wartime fighter pilot, he hit on the idea of the Spinhaler.

My fear growing up was gun violence. But a bigger threat to my body may have come from an invisible villain

Everyone experiences a moment that shapes who they are – a moment when childhood innocence is lost, and the burdens and traumas of the world become clearer.

For me, that moment occurred in elementary school when my friend discovered a gun in Denning Park in Englewood, New Jersey. For days, I worried about what might be lurking behind the trees and in the shadows. This anxiety lingered through high school; I even wrote in my local newspaper that “I couldn’t remember anything more frightening for a young girl in elementary school”.

Relationships matter to people, and public services must be designed with this in mind

That members of the public value access to in-person GP appointments sounds like a statement of the obvious. But the findings of an Institute for Government report about general practice in England have more complex implications too. One striking finding is that waits for appointments seem to matter less than is often assumed. Successive governments have pushed for same-day consultations. If this was done to please the public, the research suggests they should not have bothered. Surprisingly, it found no statistically significant relationship between patient satisfaction and length of wait. For many people, there is no substitute for a face-to-face conversation with the family doctor who they may have known for years. A higher number of online and telephone consultations is correlated with lower satisfaction. The shift away from in-person consultations, which accelerated during the pandemic and has not reversed, has coincided with falling confidence in general practice – though the reduction on spending on primary care, relative to hospitals, must also be factored in.

Appointments with other staff do not boost patient satisfaction to anything like the same degree. Once again, this finding raises a question over recent policy, which has been to substantially increase the “direct patient care” workforce, including pharmacists, in England’s 6,200 GP surgeries. The most popular appointments of all are those in smaller practices with higher numbers of GP partners. People’s preferences are not, in themselves, a mandate for change. This study found that practices with higher satisfaction scores also meet more targets. But measuring outcomes in primary care is complicated and previous research has raised doubts about some of the care offered by the smallest practices.

With two small kids and a dog to take care of, I often struggle to look after myself. Self-care apps promise to help – if you can handle the quests, magic potions and rainbow stones. I put four of them to the test

The other night, I didn’t moisturise before bed. The baby had just woken and was crying for a feed. I didn’t want him to wake the toddler he shares a room with, and I couldn’t, in that intensely fraught moment, locate my Elizabeth Arden.

We all find it hard, at times, to fit in self-care. But if there’s one thing I’ve noticed since becoming a mum of two small children, it’s that even the most basic level of personal care requires military-level planning. Often, I pour from an empty cup because I haven’t had time – or, more likely, I’ve simply forgotten – to refill it.

From ‘wellness farms’ to expanded involuntary commitment policies, the US is embracing psychiatric incarceration under the guise of compassion

Across the country, a troubling trend is accelerating: the return of institutionalization – rebranded, repackaged and framed as “modern mental health care”. From Governor Kathy Hochul’s push to expand involuntary commitment in New York to Robert F Kennedy Jr’s proposal for “wellness farms” under his Make America Healthy Again (Maha) initiative, policymakers are reviving the logics of confinement under the guise of care.

These proposals may differ in form, but they share a common function: expanding the state’s power to surveil, detain and “treat” marginalized people deemed disruptive or deviant. Far from offering real support, they reflect a deep investment in carceral control – particularly over disabled, unhoused, racialized and LGBTQIA+ communities. Communities that have often seen how the framing of institutionalization as “treatment” obscures both its violent history and its ongoing legacy. In doing so, these policies erase community-based solutions, undermine autonomy, and reinforce the very systems of confinement they claim to move beyond.

A psychologist reveals five questions children can ask – and how to answer them

• Can I protect my seven-year-old daughter from the impossible beauty standards of the fashion world?

If your child is upset because a classmate has been unkind about their body, it’s natural to want to ease their distress with: “You’re not fat, darling, you’re beautiful!” However, trying to reassure them in this way is more likely to undermine their body confidence. First, it reinforces the message that being fat is bad, thereby perpetuating stigma, instilling a belief that only some body types are acceptable, and eliciting fear around weight gain. Second, it focuses on bigger bodies being the problem, rather than name-calling and stigmatising behaviour. And third, it insinuates that you can’t be fat and beautiful.

Solomon says the scale and depravity of what he was exposed to was far darker than he had ever imagined

• Meta faces Ghana lawsuits over impact of extreme content on moderators

When Solomon* strode into the gleaming Octagon tower in Accra, Ghana, for his first day as a Meta content moderator, he was bracing himself for difficult but fulfilling work, purging social media of harmful content.

But after just two weeks of training, the scale and depravity of what he was exposed to was far darker than he ever imagined.

The actor announced the change on her podcast. Apparently this is international news – and it has a serious side

You’re going to want to sit down for this one, because there’s a lot to digest. Gwyneth Paltrow, who has consciously uncoupled from multiple food groups in the past, is bringing pasta back into her life. And she can have a little bread and cheese, too, as a treat.

This week’s oral immunotherapy breakthrough is part of wider surge of interest in developing treatments

A severe food allergy is among the few conditions that can propel a person from robust health to unconsciousness within minutes, and the risk of accidental exposure often casts a shadow of anxiety over those affected.

But change is afoot, with a groundbreaking trial this week showing that two-thirds of adults with severe peanut allergies can be desensitised through clinically supervised daily exposure. The approach – oral immunotherapy – is already successfully used in children and is among a wave of treatments on the horizon aimed at reducing the burden of allergies – and potentially curing them.

The health secretary has pledged to fight chronic illness, but experts say he risks increasing it with department cuts

The US health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, entered office with a pledge to tackle the US’s chronic disease epidemic and give infectious disease a “break”. In at least one of those goals, Kennedy has been expeditious.

Experts said as Kennedy makes major cuts in public health in his first weeks in office, the infrastructure built to mitigate Covid-19 has become a clear target – an aim that has the dual effect of weakening immunization efforts as the US endures the largest measles outbreak since 2000.

‘Shocking blind spot’ in data collection comes despite ‘well-documented racial disparities in maternity care’

The NHS is facing criticism for not recording the ethnicity of people who sue it over poor maternity care, despite black, Asian and minority ethnic women experiencing much greater harm during childbirth.

Health experts, patient safety campaigners and lawyers claim racial disparities in maternity care are so stark that NHS bodies in England must start collating details of people who take legal action to help ensure services improve.

Party’s education spokesperson says Farage’s comments about doctors over-diagnosing children shows he wants to cut spending

John Swinney, the first minister of Scotland, is attending the funeral of the Pope on Saturday, the Scottish government has announced. In a statement Swinney said:

His Holiness Pope Francis was a voice for peace, tolerance and reconciliation who had a natural ability to connect with people of all ages, nationalities and beliefs.

On behalf of the people of Scotland, I am deeply honoured to attend the funeral of Pope Francis in Rome to express my sorrow, thanks and deep respect for the compassion, assurance and hope that he brought to so many.

Eating the Tories for breakfast. @Keir_Starmer

Reform leader accused of ‘wildly inaccurate’ remarks as he complains about UK creating ‘class of victims’

Nigel Farage says the UK is “massively overdiagnosing those with mental illness problems” and creating a “class of victims”.

In comments, which have drawn criticism from campaigners and charities, the leader of Reform UK said it was too easy to get a mental health diagnosis from a GP.

Up to 4,000 patients a year with early stage of disease could receive ribociclib, but charities want wider access to drug

Thousands of women with early breast cancer could be offered a drug to stop the cancer returning, after the medicines watchdog approved its use in England.

Up to 4,000 patients a year could be given ribociclib alongside hormone therapy, for hormone receptor-positive, HER2-negative early breast cancer, which despite initial treatment has a higher risk of returning.

Cancer present in at least four lymph nodes.

Cancer present in one to three lymph nodes that is either grade 3 (more advanced), or has a primary tumour at least 5cm in size.