Health secretary accuses food companies of ‘exploiting loophole’ over food safety and urges greater transparency

The US secretary of health and human services, Robert F Kennedy Jr, has directed the Food and Drug Administration to revise safety rules to help eliminate a provision that allows companies to affirm that food ingredients are safe.

The move would increase transparency for consumers as well as the FDA’s oversight of food ingredients considered to be safe, Kennedy said on Monday.

The health secretary will shrink NHS England’s workforce to save money and avoid ‘duplication’

NHS England will lose half its staff and a huge swathe of its senior management team as part of a brutal restructuring under its new boss.

Its workforce will shrink from 13,000 to about 6,500 as entire teams are axed to save money and avoid “duplication” with officials at the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC).

In January, the first person in the US died from bird flu. Learn what the symptoms are and how you can stay safe

Bird flu has been spreading in North America since late 2021, but recently the situation has taken some concerning turns.

In January, the first person in the US died from bird flu. In February, two more people were hospitalized, and officials detected two new spillovers into cows, indicating the virus is here to stay among livestock and farm workers. The price of eggs has also skyrocketed as bird flu moves through egg-laying chickens.

Projects to detect, treat and research new ways to fight TB among those disrupted by sudden funding freeze

Dangerous new forms of tuberculosis (TB) for which there is no treatment could emerge as a result of US aid cuts, a top doctor has warned.

Dr Lucica Ditiu, who heads the Stop TB Partnership, said she feared that interruptions to people’s treatment would allow the airborne bug to mutate into a new, untreatable form.

Comedian Angie Belcher offers country’s first such workshops in Bristol to help people process trauma

Survivors of child sexual abuse are taking courses in standup comedy to help process their trauma, in the first such scheme in the UK.

The comedian Angie Belcher, the first person to get standup comedy prescribed on the NHS through her project Comedy on Referral, ran the two-day programme in Bristol last week.

Your way of thinking could be making you miserable or stunting your emotional growth. But how can you challenge it?

The other night, I got home from work feeling very tired. It was really cold and what I really wanted for dinner was a jacket potato. In fact, I wanted two. So I heated the oven, slathered my potatoes in oil and sea salt and cooked them for an hour and 20 minutes.

I was so tired that I neglected to complete the final step, an error that risked turning this very ordinary dinner into an explosive disaster: I forgot to prick my potatoes.

Researchers report difficulties retaining staff as White House cost-cutting stresses US medical research system

Major Alzheimer’s disease research centers across the country face a $65m funding gap amid a Trump administration-imposed delay, with at least one struggling to retain highly trained staff.

Although courts have ruled a government-wide funding freeze is illegal, the administration has managed to delay research funding by canceling scientific meetings and failing to publish forthcoming meetings in the Federal Register, both which are legally required.

Pfas are poisoning our soil and polluting our lungs. The EPA is finally sounding the alarm – but that’s not enough

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Several years ago, I made a movie called Dark Waters, which told the real-life story of a community in West Virginia poisoned by Pfas “forever chemicals”. DuPont – a chemical manufacturing plant – contaminated the local water supply, killing cows and wildlife, making its workers sick and exposing local residents to toxic chemicals. It was an environmental horror story.

It’s still happening across the country.

We live in dark, depressing and – frankly – terrifying times. Will technology push us over the edge or help us exit our many crises?

Today we live in an era defined by crisis. Indeed, we are facing multiple overlapping threats at once: from accelerating climate breakdown to the rise of authoritarianism across the world, we are in a situation that the historian Adam Tooze calls “polycrisis”. It is no wonder that hope is scarce, pessimism is high and despair is pervasive. As one meme that captures the grim, morbid mood of our age reads: “My retirement plan is civilisational collapse.”

But not everyone shares this gloomy outlook. On the extreme other end of public sentiment sit Silicon Valley billionaires: they are some of the most optimistic people on earth. Of course, it’s easy to be optimistic when you are sitting on enough money to sway national politics. And yet, the source of their optimism isn’t simply money. It is also a deep-seated faith in unfettered technological advances.

Commission for Healthier Working Lives warns against cutting benefits and calls for proactive route for 8m affected

Providing more support for people in ill health to stay in work could save the UK government more than £1bn, according to a report warning ministers against cutting benefits.

As the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, looks for savings before the 26 March spring statement, the cross-sector Commission for Healthier Working Lives has called for a new approach to supporting the 8 million people in Britain with a work-limiting health condition.

Joe Collier tells of unveiling discriminatory practices against women and minority ethnic students being admitted to study medicine

Your article brings most welcome news (Female doctors outnumber male peers in UK for first time, 6 February). It also reminds one that change takes an eternity.

In 1985, Aggrey Burke and I published a study showing that secret quotas existed in all the London medical schools which limited the numbers of women and minority ethnic students that they allowed to be admitted to study medicine.

Malcolm Cunningham has advice for Wes Streeting on how he can expedite his plans, Chris Clough calls for changes in working practices, while Neil Blackshaw looks at the determinants of ill health

I have recently retired after more than 30 years of NHS service. The NHS is indeed broken (Editorial, 3 March), but it’s not quite in critical care, and there are signs that Wes Streeting is addressing some of the problems, including the use of the “private sector”. While this may sit comfortably with parts of the Labour party and patient groups, it’s important to understand three things about the use of the private sector. First, it’s NHS staff who perform the surgery, second, the private sector is paid the same price per procedure as an NHS trust and, finally, using the private sector creates additional capacity in the NHS.

There are a number of things that Mr Streeting should look at to expedite his plans. He should address the payment system, as payment by results needs an urgent overhaul. It’s fine for low-cost, high-volume activity (like that undertaken in the private sector) but needs drastic reform for urgent and more complex care. He should also reform the consultant contract – for example, ensuring that consultants have to work a number of years as an NHS consultant before they can work privately. Next, move community services back to general practice. GPs can’t prevent people going into hospital if they have no support in the community to look after people. Finally, GPs (and employers) must be more proactive with the public and staff about the importance of being active.
Malcolm Cunningham
Sale, Cheshire

TTT therapy burns away nodules that lead to salt buildup in body, which increases risk of stroke or heart attack

Half a million people in the UK with dangerously high blood pressure – a “silent killer” that causes tens of thousands of deaths a year – could be cured by a new treatment.

Doctors have developed a technique to burn away nodules that lead to a large amount of salt building up in the body, which increases the risk of a stroke or heart attack.

Kits could allow ambulance crews to identify patients with blood clots in their brain, allowing for quicker treatment

• How lateral flow tests are becoming a diagnostic gamechanger

Ambulance crews in Cambridgeshire are piloting the use of finger-prick blood tests to diagnose the deadliest form of stroke, with preliminary data suggesting they may be up to twice as effective as relying on patients’ symptoms alone.

The tests, which work on a similar principle to the lateral flow tests (LFTs) used to detect Covid, are designed to rapidly identify whether someone suspected of having a stroke has suffered a large vessel occlusion (LVO), where a blood clot blocks a major artery in the brain.

Familiar from the Covid era, the tests are becoming incredibly versatile, with potential uses including detecting killers such as strokes and sepsis

• Speedy finger-prick tests to diagnose strokes trialled in Cambridgeshire

Swab, swoosh, splat. During the pandemic, many of us got used to using lateral flow tests to check if we were infected with Covid or were likely to infect others. But despite the gag-inducing testing routines of the pandemic thankfully fading into memory, we may not have seen the back of those small diagnostic cartridges.

Boots UK recently launched finger-prick lateral flow tests (LFTs) to detect levels of vitamin D, iron or cholesterol in people’s blood, as well as an influenza test. Trials of LFTs to rapidly diagnose strokes are under way, and the type of sample that can be loaded on to these tests is expanding rapidly, from fingerprint sweat or river water to cat vomit.

Virus that caused death of actor’s wife in Santa Fe is rare but serious illness that can damage major organs of the body

Authorities said on Friday that actor Gene Hackman died of heart disease days after his wife, Betsy Arakawa, died from hantavirus pulmonary syndrome. But what exactly is this rare illness?

Hantavirus pulmonary syndrome is a rare but serious viral disease that can damage the heart, lungs, and other organs. The syndrome progresses quickly and can be fatal, according to the Cleveland Clinic, one of the largest and most respected medical centers in the US.

Readers respond to an extract from Dr Suzanne O’Sullivan’s book on the pathologising of mental health problems and behavioural disorders

While I agree with viewing health holistically and treating the person, not the disease, I felt uncomfortable with some of the conclusions that Suzanne O’Sullivan draws from the cases presented (Are we less healthy than we used to be – or overdiagnosing illness?, 1 March). Implying that we are overdiagnosing certain conditions only reinforces the stigma associated with them, and will prevent people in need from being taken seriously and receiving appropriate support and treatment. The scepticism, however well-meaning, can be damaging for patient outcomes and public health in general. Treatments and support available for conditions such as ADHD and autism are already lacking and underresearched.

The rise of diagnostic levels of most of these conditions comes from increased awareness, and also from the environmental changes in our society that place ever-increasing pressure on individuals to perform at a certain standard. Neurodiversity conditions have become a lot more debilitating for those experiencing them. Increased population density exposes individuals to more stimuli than their nervous system can handle. Technological progress, particularly the advent of smartphones, has led to an expectation of being always available and a pressure to react and respond in real time that did not exist 20 years ago.

Amanda Goodall says the next boss of NHS England should give more decision-making powers and responsibility to outstanding doctors and clinicians

Re your report (Next boss of NHS England prepares purge of senior leadership team, 6 March), I hope that Sir Jim Mackey will consider the body of research showing that the best hospital systems are on average led by doctors, not non-medically-trained managers. The Mayo and Cleveland clinics sit consistently at No 1 and No 2 in global healthcare rankings. Notably, both have, since their inception in 1864 and 1921 respectively, been led only by doctors. Naturally, they also provide doctors with good training in leadership and management.

Having researched this area of leadership for 20 years, I suggest to Sir Jim that if he wants improved patient care, reduced waiting lists, efficiencies, and innovation through a greater use of AI and health tech, he gives more decision-making powers and responsibility to outstanding doctors, and other clinicians, who understand the core business of healthcare, medicine and the NHS.
Amanda Goodall
Professor of leadership, Bayes Business School

All cases were in Lea county, near the county in Texas where more than 100 cases and one death have been recorded

The New Mexico health department reported 30 measles cases in the state on Friday, an increase of 20 cases from its previous count.

All the cases were reported in Lea county, which is located adjacent to Gaines county, Texas, where nearly 200 cases since late January and one death of an unvaccinated child have been reported, according to new data released on Friday.

Some mental health professionals are incorporating political views into the healing process: ‘I want to let them know it’s really safe’

In his conversations with trans clients, Will Williams, a therapist in Oakland, California, sees the psychic toll exacted by the fusillade of recent executive orders targeting transgender protections. Many of his patients are filled with fear – and for legitimate reasons.

In the days after Donald Trump took office, the administration required passports to be marked with sex assigned at birth, banned trans people from serving in the military and cut funding for gender-affirming care. On some federal websites, the “T” was removed from “LGBT”.