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Health Policy InsightMedical professionals are entering the political arena as funding cuts, layoffs and RFK Jr’s vaccine skepticism spur them to action
When Abdul El-Sayed walked into Detroit’s health department in 2015, he found about 85 employees crammed into the back of a municipal parking building. The city had recently gone bankrupt and the 185-year-old institution was placed under state emergency management. His job was to rebuild it from practically nothing.
Within a year and a half, El-Sayed, who has a medical degree and PhD in public health, said he expanded the department to 220 staff members, opened a new headquarters and launched efforts that still define his reputation: free glasses for low-income schoolchildren; a legal fight that forced an energy company to invest $10m to improve air quality; lead testing in every school, daycare and Head Start facility in the city; and a peer mentor program for newly pregnant moms to address a surge in infant and maternal mortality.
Continue reading...Three studies add to evidence that jabs could be part of cancer-fighting toolkit to cut risk of developing or dying from disease
Weight-loss drugs can cut the risk of developing or dying from cancer by 30%, doctors have said.
Millions of people already use the drugs to treat obesity. Now a series of studies presented at the world’s largest oncology conference suggest the drugs could play a role in preventing and treating cancer.
Continue reading...It’s natural to focus on breakthroughs, but there are many challenges in Britain and around the world. There is no magic bullet, but there’s room for optimism
Cancer causes nearly one in six deaths worldwide every year, some 10 million all told. That is a stunning number, but it also masks the reality that some cancers are more deadly than others. We have become remarkably good at detecting and treating melanoma and prostate cancer, for example, and today five-year survival rates for those cancers are well over 90% in most rich countries. Others, such as pancreatic cancer, are more difficult. In the UK, just over one in 20 people with pancreatic cancer are still alive five years after diagnosis.
That is why a new drug for pancreatic cancer, called daraxonrasib and announced at the American Society of Clinical Oncology’s (Asco) annual meeting in Chicago at the weekend, has been met with such jubilation. The drug – taken as a pill once a day – doubled the survival time of those enrolled in a 500-person trial, with fewer side effects compared to traditional chemotherapy. The drug works by shutting down a protein, Kras, that causes cancer cells to grow and divide. One longtime cancer researcher reported that she cried reading the results. With so few effective treatments for this cancer available, the drug is likely to be a real game-changer.
Continue reading...Experimental tablet produces encouraging results in patients with world’s most common forms of disease
• ‘I was getting ready to say goodbye’: patient’s hope after smart drug success
A smart drug that stops cancer cells “hiding” from treatment can shrink tumours by at least 30% in six of the world’s most common forms of the disease, early trial results show.
While immunotherapy treatments have improved survival rates for many patients, their effectiveness can stall or fail when tumour cells hide and then spread.
Continue reading...Pat Brogan preparing to walk his daughter down the aisle after trial of treatment designed to stop disease from hiding
• Smart drug that strips cancer cells of ‘invisibility cloak’ can shrink tumours by 30%, trial shows
One of the first patients to benefit from a pioneering smart drug that appears to melt away the “invisibility cloak” that can shield cancer cells from treatment is Pat Brogan, from Cowdenbeath, Scotland.
The 68-year-old, whose tumours have shrunk by almost a third, is preparing to walk his daughter down the aisle this month and holiday in Spain with his wife, Linda – milestones he once feared he would never reach.
Continue reading...Miranda Fagandini says the noise made by these devices is dreadful and can be life-altering
On reading the latest column in your long-running series (Lawnmower hum: why the sound of the summer could cost you £5,000, 27 May), I noticed that the writer didn’t include the curse of the leaf blower in their list of antisocial garden tools.
The noise is dreadful and can be life-altering. We bought one which turned out to be so loud that it has caused permanent hearing loss and hyperacusis (sensitivity to loud noise) in my left ear.
Continue reading...To be a cancer specialist is to see the worst of harm caused by social media. Yet I have never changed a patient’s mind with outrage
“And so, of course, I have completely stopped eating red meat.”
The “of course” is galling, especially since we have been using precious bags of blood to top up my patient’s haemoglobin.
Continue reading...The acronym ‘FOH’ for ‘Fuck off home’ was used beside the names of expectant mothers. Senior midwives advised others not to be ‘too kind’. But as this and other shocking evidence is brought to light, sexism is only one part of the story
It’s said to be mother nature’s stunning con trick, the single most helpful move in the propagation of the species – that childbirth might be the worst thing ever to happen to anyone, but once you are through it, you instantly forget how painful it was. And that is true, up to a point, although you can often remember enough of the surrounding detail – swearing at strangers, wishing you were dead – that you can infer the rest.
What you don’t forget, however, is what the midwives were like, and nor, even in moments of extremis, do you fail to notice if they’re treating you scornfully. Panorama tonight is about the maternity unit run by Nottingham university hospitals NHS trust, the subject of the largest maternity inquiry in NHS history, spanning 13 years from 2012, and covering 2,500 families. The details are hair-raising: “FOH” written next to women’s names on a whiteboard, which stood for “fuck off home”; accounts of senior midwives advising others not to be “too kind”; gut-wrenching individual cases of women being warned off coming in to hospital for so long that, when one finally arrived, her baby was dead and her perineum and vaginal wall had collapsed. And every one of those women will have known, on some level, even if she was in no state to ask for her notes or read them, that someone wanted her to “fuck off”. You get a superpower in a life-and-death situation, though it’s unclear how helpful it is: you can tell pretty fast who’s on your side and who isn’t.
Continue reading...First clinical trial of its kind, involving 410 cancer survivors in US, also finds reductions in distress and fatigue
Yoga can reduce emotional distress, anxiety, fatigue and insomnia in people living with cancer, according to the results of the first clinical trial of its kind.
Hundreds of millions of people worldwide are living with cancer, with advances in treatments meaning more patients are surviving the disease than ever before. But for many, the physical and mental side-effects of their diagnosis and treatment regime can last long after treatment ends.
Continue reading...My husband, Craig, didn’t want to spend his last days in the hospital. His fight with bladder cancer then became a battle to get him hospice care at home
“This isn’t where I want to die,” my husband, Craig, whispered to me.
We were in a shared room on the top floor of NYU Langone hospital in Manhattan, the window obscured by a long privacy curtain. I barely had space to stand next to his hospital bed under the bright fluorescent lights, our thoughts interrupted by the constant beeping of machines.
Continue reading...Modernisation bill would require GPs and hospitals in England to share data, reducing errors and duplication
Sharing access to patients’ health data across NHS providers in England could result in 20,000 fewer A&E visits a year and save £20m annually, the government has claimed, before the second reading of the NHS modernisation bill on Monday.
The bill, which would also abolish NHS England, sets out measures including single patient records (SPR) for every person receiving health and social care in England, requiring GPs and hospitals to securely share data as part of the government’s 10-year health plan.
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