health

It’s 7:30am on a Monday and there’s already a queue of about 40 men, women and children against the wall of the still-locked warehouse. March temperatures in the South African backwater of Calvinia, some 430 kilometres (267 miles) north of Cape Town, average 30 degrees Celsius (86 degrees Fahrenheit) – but today an unseasonable cold front has everyone huddling together to keep warm. Wispy grey clouds blanket the usually-sunbaked Hantam Mountains and an empty chip packet skids past the police station across the road.

The protracted conflict between the government and doctors over the medical school quota hike policy will face its toughest challenge yet this week, with the authorities determined to suspend the licenses of the striking trainee doctors, starting from Tuesday at the earliest.

Oats have long had a reputation for being one of the healthier foods you can choose for breakfast. But some people on social media have been calling this claim into question, suggesting that rather than being a healthy staple, oatmeal (and porridge, which is often made using oats) might in fact have no nutritional value whatsoever.

In 2020 a coroner’s court in Rochdale found that two-year-old Awaab Ishak had died as a result of living in a mould-infested home. New housing standards, devised as part of the social housing regulation bill in response to this tragedy, are now set to come into force in England.

An experimental Alzheimer's treatment involving sounds and flickering lights also prevented a decline in mental sharpness among mice having chemotherapy

Concerns over the collapse of the emergency medical system are intensifying as professors at medical schools nationwide have decided to submit their resignations from their respective universities after March 25.

Over the last year, the Mediterranean diet has been surging in popularity. It was dubbed “2023’s hottest new diet trend,” and it counts Selena Gomez, Jennifer Aniston, and Penelope Cruz among its fans. It’s often believed to be one of the best diets humans can follow, but is this true? In this guide, we put the Mediterranean diet up against the plant-based (vegan) diet, exploring which is healthier, more ethical, and better for the planet.

When C. Michael Gibson of Boston saw his doctor in the spring of 2023, the blood test results were confusing. His cholesterol levels were decent — he was already taking statins to keep the “bad” cholesterol low — but the arteries delivering blood to his heart were nonetheless crammed with dangerous plaque. “It didn’t make sense,” says Gibson, himself a cardiologist at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.

The public are increasingly facing food-related “Russian roulette”, with hospital admissions for three common illnesses linked to food poisoning reaching their highest level in decades. Admissions for salmonella infections reached 1,468 hospital visits in England between April 2022 and March 2023, NHS data shows, a rate of three admissions for every 100,000 people, an all-time high.

Snakebites already inflict tremendous suffering across South Asia, where lack of awareness and access to treatment leaves thousands dead or disabled each year. Now, climate change threatens to dramatically worsen this humanitarian crisis.