health

Major hospitals across the country continued to experience disruptions Saturday as thousands of trainee doctors remained off their jobs for the fifth consecutive day in protest against the government's plan to raise the medical school enrollment quota.

On Tuesday, the first case of measles in seven years was reported in Northern Ireland. Outbreaks of measles have sprung up in parts of Britain in recent months amid concerns of what Dr Vanessa Saliba from the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA), has called a “worryingly low MMR [measles, mumps and rubella] vaccine uptake in some areas across the country”.

After a torrential downpour, most post-storm damages are impossible to miss: submerged cars, houses torn in half by fallen trees, debris floating through the streets. But in California, extreme weather is also mixing up a soup of rain and disease.

In 1857, the American writer Fitz Hugh Ludlow described his experiences with hashish in his memoir The Hasheesh Eater: Being Passages from the Life of a Pythagorean: For Ludlow, hashish infused meaning into everyday objects; his experiences seemed to reveal new parts of the mind, with either blissful or terrifying effects. In 1956, the psychiatrist Humphrey Osmond coined a term to encapsulate such “mind-manifesting” phenomena: psychedelic.

Dealing a blow to three of the world’s biggest agrochemical companies, a U.S. court this week banned three weed killers widely used in American agriculture, finding that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) broke the law in allowing them to be on the market.

Neat Burger is moving towards a “healthier” fast food menu and has unveiled a new brand image. Now named “Neat,” the fast food concept is “evolving from the occasional to the every day.”

The stories have become horribly familiar. Houses so overrun by bed bugs that the bloodsucking insects pile an inch deep on the floor. An airport shutting down gates for deep cleaning after the parasites were spotted brazenly crawling around. Fear and loathing during Fashion Week 2023 in Paris, with bed bug detection dogs working overtime when the insects turned up in movie theaters and trains.

Hundreds of chemicals stream from our bodies into the air every second. These chemicals release into the air easily as they have high vapour pressures, meaning they boil and turn into gases at room temperature. They give clues about who we are, and how healthy we are.

One of the hallmarks of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) is its unpredictability. Flares come and go, often with little rhyme or reason. Especially for people with moderate-to-severe IBD, most conventional forms of treatment—namely prescription drugs—are not enough to prevent flares or symptoms entirely.

The laws of human nature are very much like the laws of physics: stubbornly intractable and dangerous to ignore. And yet, in recent decades, American foreign policy experts and the presidents they serve have often discounted these simple rules about human action and reaction. From Afghanistan to Ukraine to the Red Sea, our foreign policy elites have failed to properly account for some of the tenets of basic human psychology, usually with poor or even disastrous results.