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Latest health news and analysis from around the world.
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HealthChat to strangers and let your kids be bored: how to embrace a ‘slow September’ – and enjoy life more
The pressure to self-optimise at the start of the new school year can lead to disappointment and burnout. Instead, here are seven ways to slow things down and reap the benefitsIt is a hangover from our school days that September can feel like a time for getting back to the grind. As in January, there is a sense that we should return as better workers, partners, friends and parents. This sense is even stronger now a culture of optimisation – has taken over – evidenced by the fad for adding “maxx” to everything. Yet that can lead to disappointment and burnout, which Mental Health UK reports up to 91% of adults were at risk from over a recent 12-month period.One antidote to this drive is to embrace a slower way of living. Rather than always rushing from one activity to the next, we could be enjoying life. Continue reading...
HealthIs a recommended diet affordable any more? – video
High food prices are affecting everyone right now, but it turns out they are affecting some people way more than others. Josh Toussaint-Strauss looks at the grocery price situation and official healthy eating advice in different countries to find out how food prices are hitting lower-income households harder and whether it’s even mathematically possible to eat a government-recommended healthy diet Continue reading...
HealthA remarkable documentary made by blind students: ‘We were stunned by the footage’
In Brailled It, the tension and stakes of the annual Braille Challenge are brought to the screen by three of the competitorsFor the past 26 years, about 22,000 blind and visually impaired schoolchildren from around the world have competed in the Braille Challenge: a literacy test against a loudly ticking clock. It has all the theater of a Model UN competition, all the stakes of a make-or-break standardized exam and young competitors from first grade through high school juggling their own expectations, ambitions and emotions – with a degree of difficulty that is surely unfathomable to most.Brailled It is a new film that immerses viewers in the ups and downs of the 2024 edition of the Braille Challenge, which saw more than 1,100 students descend on the University of Southern California campus. But instead of Emmy-winning director David Grabias steering a phalanx of camera and sound operators through the scenes, as he has done for past documentary projects on climate change and immigration policy, he strapped cameras to the competitors and left them to their own devices. “Every documentary is a collaboration, and you’re giving agency to your participants,” he says. “But this was: you’re going to go off and make the film, and we’ll help put it together.” Continue reading...
HealthThe Global Story
The US is an outlier in its approach to prosecuting infanticide. Why?
Health‘If you can’t understand what sex is, it’s irrelevant if you seem to be enjoying it’: how Queen at Sea upended the dementia drama
Lance Hammer’s first film in 18 years is a heart-wrenching masterpiece about family, mental decline and sexual consent. He and supporting actor Juliette Binoche discuss how they brought unabashed realism to a condition rarely seen on screenThe first time we see Martin and Leslie, the elderly couple at the centre of Lance Hammer’s wrenching new film, Queen at Sea, they are walking together up a set of stone steps: one of their regular outings, we assume, in days filled with pottering and quiet companionship. They have their backs to us, and we can’t see their destination beyond a bleached sky that fills the top half of the screen. Symbolically, it may be deemed a bit on the nose: two people near the end of their lives, moving gently towards the white light of oblivion. There’s a whiff of sentimentality about it.But any doubts about this story’s willingness to confront difficult truths are blasted away by the next scene. Leslie’s daughter, Amanda, played by Juliette Binoche, pays a visit to the couple’s house in drizzly, middle-class north London, her teenage daughter in tow. Unable to find her mother and stepfather, she arrives at the bedroom door. Opening it, she finds Martin (Tom Courtenay) on top of Leslie (Anna Calder-Marshall), who lies impassively beneath him, the mask of dementia obvious on her face. Continue reading...
HealthNew Zealand drugs regulator approves use of MDMA to treat severe PTSD
New Zealand decision follows Australian approval in 2023 of psychedelics to treat PTSD and treatment-resistant depressionTwo psychiatrists in New Zealand won approval on Friday to prescribe pharmaceutical-grade MDMA to people with severe post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).The move by New Zealand’s pharmaceutical regulatory body Medsafe makes the country only the second worldwide to approve the party drug for use in treating PTSD, following Australia in 2023. Continue reading...
HealthThe body snatchers: how a young Nigerian man was lured to London in an organ-trafficking plot – podcast
Daniel was working at a market in Lagos when he was given the chance to start anew in the UK. He had no idea what was expected of him in returnBy Alexis Okeowo. Read by Nneka OkoyeRead the text version hereSupport the Guardian today: theguardian.com/longreadpod Continue reading...
HealthTransplanted pig kidney works in US man's body for record 271 days
A man has lived for a record nine months with a transplanted pig kidney while waiting for a human transplant.
HealthGenetically modified pig kidney keeps man alive for record nine months
Organ kept Tim Andrews off dialysis and acted as a ‘bridge’ while he waited for a human transplant in the USA genetically modified kidney from a pig called Wilma has kept a 66-year-old man with kidney failure alive for a record nine months and successfully acted as a “bridge” to a human transplant in a world first.Tim Andrews was seriously ill with end-stage kidney disease caused by type 2 diabetes and had only a 9% chance of receiving a human kidney within five years, against a more than 40% risk of dying or being removed from the waiting list. Continue reading...
HealthDo people really smell different as they get older? The truth behind ‘old person smell’
Experts say that the smell comes from a chemical compound called 2-nonenal, and it can show up much earlier than one expectsLast week, my mom complained that she’s starting to smell “like an old person”.She had grabbed her favorite sweater and draped it over herself at the movie theater. “It smelled like my grandmother,” she said, almost whispering. “I thought someone must have borrowed the jacket. But it was just me.” Continue reading...