Health news

The US Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices vote on Dec 5 to no longer recommend the hepatitis B vaccine birth dose, which had ensured that babies exposed to hepatitis B would not later develop hepatitis B-associated liver damage and liver cancer, caps the most disastrous year for US public health policy. Federal funding cuts had occurred under Joe Biden and mistrust in the nation's health leaders has been waning over time, but the goal of the Trump administration now seems to be to tear down the world's premiere scientific infrastructure.

With the rising use of nutrient-stimulating hormone-based therapy for the treatment of obesity, developing oral alternatives could help address the limitations of injectable therapies, including needle phobia, injection site reaction, and storage concerns, and could ultimately improve patient acceptability. Peptide-based oral GLP-1 receptor agonists, such as oral semaglutide, are limited by the need for diet restriction, timing of administration, and low oral bioavailability.1 Peptide-based GLP-1 receptor agonists are also more costly to manufacture and require refrigeration.

Perioperative management of localised pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) is informed by resectability criteria, which consider anatomy together with biological and clinical factors.1 In patients with resectable PDAC, adjuvant mFOLFIRINOX (modified 5-fluorouracil, leucovorin, irinotecan, and oxaliplatin) is a standard of care;2,3 however, many are unable to receive this regimen due to inadequate performance status after surgery. Trials have evaluated various neoadjuvant chemotherapy regimens; notably, two randomised controlled trials did not confirm superiority of mFOLFIRINOX or FOLFIRINOX over gemcitabine–nab-paclitaxel (SWOG 1505)4 and gemcitabine with radiation (PREOPANC-2).

Analgesia in the prehospital setting is a challenging but important priority for first responders. Retrospective military data indicate an association between early analgesia with morphine after injury and lower subsequent risk of long-term sequelae such as post-traumatic stress disorder.1 Yet, data show that the proportion of patients with pain receiving analgesia in the prehospital setting remains low.2,3 This small proportion might reflect difficulty in obtaining intravenous access and concerns regarding haemodynamic side-effects of many analgesic agents such as opioids.

The treatment landscape for systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) has shifted greatly in recent years, driven by the emergence of cell-based immunotherapies targeting pathogenic B-cell populations. Among these, autologous CD19-directed chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy has shown promise in inducing remission in patients with severe treatment-refractory SLE.1 This innovation addresses a substantial global burden of disease, with epidemiological data estimating more than 3·4 million individuals affected worldwide;2,3 notably, in an Asia–Pacific cohort study, at least 14% of patients were identified as having severe refractory disease.

For almost 80 years, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has been the nation's immune system, detecting threats early, coordinating rapid responses, and safeguarding population health. Its deep bench of epidemiologists, laboratory expertise, support for health departments, and evidence-based recommendations have fought threats to the public's health. During 2025 that immune system has been compromised, prompting our resignations, following the firing of the US Senate-confirmed CDC Director Susan Monarez on Aug 27, 2025.

In the call for submissions for the Wakley Prize earlier this year, we quoted Søren Kierkegaard's notion that life “must be understood backwards; but...it must be lived forwards” and encouraged people to reflect on the change they would like to see in medicine.1 We thank everyone who entered the competition and were impressed by the wide-ranging submissions.

A strength of the People's Health Movement (PHM), now 25 years old, is its capacious view of health and the determinants of health. In their People's Charter for Health, PHM underlines the economic, social, political, and environmental challenges to health, including war, violence, conflict, and natural disasters. They call for a people-centred health sector in which “governments promote, finance, and provide comprehensive Primary Health Care as the most effective way of addressing health problems and organising public health services so as to ensure free and universal access”.

Changes to how research grants are assessed and awarded are undermining the world's largest public funder of biomedical research. Washington Correspondent Susan Jaffe reports.

The seventh session of the UN Environmental Assembly passed several actions related to health, including improving antimicrobial resistance (AMR) surveillance. Sharmila Devi reports.

The history of human health and migration, the human story, is deeply intertwined with the natural environment. As described by Anthony McMichael,1 pioneering scholar of health and environmental change, the climate is not merely a backdrop to human life, it is embedded in who we are and how we live. Modern human civilisation has been facilitated by the remarkably stable climatic conditions of the Holocene: the past 11 000 years during which century-to-century global average temperatures varied by no more than 1°C.

Finding new therapeutic compounds from marine organisms holds great potential but comes with a unique set of challenges. Sophie Cousins reports.

Amid PEPFAR cuts and an economic downturn, programmes to control HIV in Botswana have disappeared. Andrew Green reports.

Monitoring the behaviour of transnational corporations is an important public health priority given the many ways corporate actors negatively affect health. Such effects can be mitigated by defining standards of corporate behaviour and implementing regulations to prohibit and sanction harmful behaviour. However, in the past two decades, market signals and corporate scorecards are increasingly being used to incentivise corporate actors to behave in a socially responsible manner. Two examples of relevance to global health are the Access to Medicine Index and the Access to Nutrition Initiative's Global Index.

Prostate cancer poses a substantial clinical challenge and accounts for a large proportion of cancer-related deaths worldwide. The therapeutic landscape has undergone a large transformation in the past 5 years, resulting in improved patient outcomes. In this Seminar, we review the pathology, diagnostic strategies, and treatments for prostate cancer. Active surveillance is the preferred treatment option for patients with indolent prostate cancer. For those requiring treatment, local therapies provide effective cancer control.

In 2024, more than 123 million people were forcibly displaced worldwide, driven largely by conflicts, persecutions, and human rights violations.1 Displaced populations include refugees (people who flee their country due to conflict or persecution), internally displaced people (those forced to flee their homes but who remain within their country's borders), and undocumented migrants and asylum seekers (individuals who cross borders without formal legal status, including those awaiting a decision on their protection claim).

Despite progress and advances in diagnostics and treatments, tuberculosis remains the world's leading cause of death from an infectious disease.1,2 The WHO Global Tuberculosis Report 2025 reveals that progress towards the End TB and Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) targets is lagging, with projections showing these goals might not be met until around the middle of the century.1,3 In 2024, an estimated 10·7 million people developed tuberculosis and 1·23 million died, including 160 000 people living with HIV.

Neisseria gonorrhoeae inexorably develops resistance to antimicrobials used for treatment. The discovery of novel antimicrobials to treat gonorrhoea is a global priority and antimicrobial-resistant N gonorrhoeae has been identified as an urgent public health threat.1,2 Ceftriaxone remains the primary recommended regimen for gonorrhoea treatment globally. However, reports from China, Cambodia, Viet Nam, and the UK, among other countries, signal a rising threat to the preeminent place of ceftriaxone within the gonococcal treatment armamentarium due to decreased susceptibility to ceftriaxone and periodic ceftriaxone treatment failures, highlighting the importance of enhanced global antimicrobial surveillance to monitor resistance trends.

An increasing number of national and international commitments have failed to reduce three intimately interconnected major global threats to population health: non-communicable diseases, outbreaks of infectious diseases, and environmental degradation.

IMPT showed non-inferiority to IMRT for progression-free survival, improvement in overall survival, similar disease control, and reduced high-grade toxicity relative to IMRT. Treatment-related and post-progression deaths occurred more frequently with IMRT. IMPT is a new standard-of-care treatment option for patients with oropharyngeal cancer.

Health systems are expanding artificial intelligence (AI) initiatives across imaging, diagnostics and patient-facing workflows, underscoring the shifting role of the on-premises data center from a legacy infrastructure component to a critical performance layer. The evolution is driven by rising clinical workloads that demand faster data access, tighter service-level expectations and compute capacity positioned closer to the point of care. It’s a shift that reflects both longstanding realities in healthcare IT and the accelerating demands of care delivery enabled by AI, says Murali Gandluru,...

More than 57 million Americans living in rural communities rely on a hospital for health, economic and social factors, according to the American Hospital Association. Yet many rural providers have had to operate in a deficit, and some have even had to cut vital services, such as labor and delivery, just to keep their doors open. “Rural hospitals provide essential care for nearly one-fifth of Americans, and ensuring they remain open and financially viable is critical to community health,” American Medical Association Board of Trustees member Dr. Ilse Levin said in an article last month by...

Healthcare organizations have a lot to gain from the adoption of artificial intelligence tools, whether they are using ambient listening, built-in productivity features or an algorithm that aids clinicians in diagnostics. However, the use of these tools across industries is putting more demand on the nation’s energy grid — in addition to the increasing severity of weather events. As the demand for energy goes up, so will its cost. AI use is also likely to increase the strain on healthcare data centers, which require modern cooling to protect hardware investments. As healthcare organizations...

The global surgical display market is expected to grow steadily over the coming years, though estimates vary in scale. One projection predicts that the market will expand from $774 million in 2023 to $958 million by 2030. The broader medical display market, which includes both surgical and diagnostic applications, is expected to grow from about $2.6 billion in 2025 to almost $3.5 billion by 2030. Regardless of the numbers, it’s clear that visualization technology is becoming an essential part of the surgical ecosystem and that the biomedical engineer is playing an increasingly pivotal role in...

IT service management involves a comprehensive approach to end-to-end IT service delivery, from creation to delivery and support. “ITSM is how organizations plan, deliver and support the technology services their people rely on every day,” says Rahul Tripathi, group vice president and general manager of ITSM at ServiceNow. A seamless ITSM approach helps ensure coordination, uptime and consistent service delivery across the entire enterprise, he adds. With healthcare’s highly complex systems and regulations, ITSM is essential. ITSM in healthcare entails everything from resolving issues with...

Leaders at Sentara Health, a healthcare system serving Virginia, North Carolina and Florida, knew that keeping their electronic health records stuck in an on-premises data center wasn’t ideal — for the organization or its customers. “Our customers should not have to come to my data center and sit in the hospital to be able to access their data,” says Jeffrey Thomas, senior vice president and CTO at Sentara Health. Moreover, he adds, an on-premises EHR meant that Sentara could not fully leverage new technologies, such as a data factory, in a cost-effective manner. Starting in 2018, Sentara...

A data clean room is a secure environment for partners to collectively use data without exposing underlying data elements. As the Federal Trade Commission points out, a data clean room differs from a traditional data transfer due to the constraints partners set to determine how data is shared, analyzed and subsequently exported. The data clean room’s value proposition for innovation is clear. Multiple entities can collaborate on research or technology initiatives without compromising governance controls, says Lee Kim, HIMSS senior principal for cybersecurity and privacy. “It preserves each...

For healthcare organizations looking to turbocharge their wireless networking capabilities, Wi-Fi 7 offers significant improvements via higher throughput, reduced latency, greater efficiency and enhanced security. This is critical for supporting bandwidth-intensive healthcare applications such as telehealth, remote patient monitoring and real-time medical imaging, as well as smart facilities and sustainability efforts that drive down operational costs. However, it’s important that healthcare IT leaders understand Wi-Fi 7 and what its implementation means for the rest of their IT environments...

Clinical informatics is playing an increasingly important role in healthcare organizations’ success. Health systems are seeking ways to address workflow inefficiencies with artificial intelligence, but if those tools aren’t implemented with a deep understanding of existing workflows and IT environments, then they aren’t likely to succeed. Clinical informaticists are well versed in health IT implementation and the change management required to ensure buy-in and adoption. HealthTech spoke with Murielle Beene, senior vice president and chief health informatics officer at Trinity Health — a large...

Mitigating and minimizing downtime is crucial for healthcare organizations because patient outcomes are on the line. With the cybersecurity landscape becoming increasingly perilous for health systems, organizations are focused not only on prevention but also on recovery to protect themselves and their patients. The CDW Healthcare Strategist team is made up of former C-suite executives who understand the challenges today’s organizations face in maintaining clinical care continuity. At the 2025 CHIME Fall Forum in San Antonio, we connected with our former peers to discuss how to solve problems...

Low pay could drive international medical graduate (IMG) GPs out of the UK because they do not meet minimum salary requirements for a visa, GP leaders have warned - after a solicitor was forced to quit the country over pay.

Talking General Practice speaks to Dr Vish Ratnasuriya, a GP partner and elected chair of Our Health Partnership, one of the UK’s largest super-partnerships, and a member of the National Commission for the Regulation of AI in Healthcare.

GPs are responsible for 15% more patients on average than a decade ago - despite a rise in the GP workforce over the past year and a spike in recruitment through the additional roles reimbursement scheme (ARRS). GPonline looks at how workforce changes compare with patients and appointments.

Government thinking around a potential radical overhaul of GP funding has been revealed this week as the BMA meets officials as part of the consultation process on next year's GP contract.

Health and social care secretary Wes Streeting has accused the BMA of seeking to 'inflict maximum damage' on the health service through strike action - and claimed the union may feel 'it doesn't need the NHS'.

There is a 'very wide gap' between BMA demands on pay and what the government can afford, health and social care secretary Wes Streeting has told MPs - in a claim that offers little hope of a swift resolution as a five-day strike by resident doctors began.

Catch up quickly with our weekly round-up of key news stories for general practice.

Exclusive: At least two thirds of ICBs - and possibly as many as 80% - have been notified by GP practices about concerns over workload or patient safety since changes to online consultation requirements took effect, GPonline can reveal.

Resident doctors in England have voted overwhelmingly to reject a government offer on jobs and are set to press ahead with a five-day walkout starting on 17 December, the BMA has announced.

GP federations could hold the lease for new neighbourhood health centre premises - and clear arrangements are vital to avoid disputes between healthcare organisations sharing space within them, NHS leaders have suggested.

Listen to the JAMA Editor’s Summary for an overview and discussion of the important articles appearing in JAMA.

There is something appealing in the doctrine of the healthfulness of fresh air and sunshine. It almost seems as though they represent instinctive preferences on the part of mankind so far as modes of living are concerned. These atmospheric factors play a large part in the propaganda of medical climatology, yet it has not been easy to define their potencies in terms of concrete benefits or to describe their functions in the language of scientific endeavor. The demonstration that the sun’s rays may destroy certain microorganisms was welcomed, for it gave the semblance of tangible advantage to sunlight. The antirachitic effects of exposure to sunlight discovered during the last few years indicate the therapeutic and prophylactic efficacy of sunlit air. Hope has been awakened of further advantages to be learned, and warnings have even been issued against the possible harmfulness of overexposure to such types of radiation in the belief that it may be healthful, curative or even injurious, depending on the “dosage.”

laryngitis do you want to know a secret?

Although not nearly as ubiquitous as haiku, senryu is a Japanese poetic form that more loosely follows the familiar 5-7-5 syllable line arrangement. Traditionally, the older haiku form was used by masters such as Bashō to address themes of nature and the seasons, its quiet artistry evoking zen-like tranquility; in contrast, senryu, arising a century later, was conceived as entertainment, more like light verse, that often gently poked fun at human foibles. When haiku entered the English language via the work of imagist poets such as Ezra Pound and Amy Lowell, the US confessional tendency created perhaps a hybrid haiku-senryu variant, which is delightfully carried forward in “Hush.” The opening 3 lines are at once utterly concise and yet cleverly loaded, beginning an interplay between contemplative solemnity and confessional jest. The medical diagnosis of laryngitis, at once banal and yet potentially serious, provides an apt basis for such a double-natured study of the loss of one’s voice. “How strangely sweet/this vow of silence” the speaker ironically states, the whispery senryu form itself an embodiment of his near voicelessness and his attendant bemusement. The more portentous “laryngoscopy/sibilances rising/from the deep” mixes both the worry at, and the beauty in, what our bodies may contain. Yet the self-reflection and seasonal awareness of haiku and the witty urbanity of senryu are both expressed in the deft final lines: “first frost/more and more/I just smile,” reminding us that when poetry and medicine meet, we are soothed.

The 2024-2025 COVID-19 vaccines effectively protected against SARS-CoV-2 infection and emergency department visits, hospitalizations, and deaths during the circulation of JN.1 subvariants, new research finds.

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recently approved elinzanetant, marketed as Lynkuet, for moderate to severe hot flashes due to menopause, the third FDA-approved nonhormonal treatment option for vasomotor symptoms, which include hot flashes and night sweats.

Viral infections may elevate cardiovascular risks, according to a meta-analysis recently published in the Journal of the American Heart Association. The findings support the importance of preventive measures such as vaccines, the authors wrote.

New guidelines from the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) recommend concurrent therapy for those experiencing recurring bacterial vaginosis (BV) and their sexual partners.

New guidelines from the Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA) urge influenza and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) vaccination for immunocompromised individuals.

In the Original Investigation titled “Factors in the Initial Resuscitation of Patients With Severe Trauma: The FiiRST-2 Randomized Clinical Trial” published on September 22, 2025, an author’s name was omitted from the byline. Dr Solh’s name and academic degrees were added to the byline as follows: Ziad Solh, MD, MSc. Dr Solh is affiliated with the Division of Transfusion Medicine, Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, Schulich School of Medicine and Dentistry, Western University, London, Ontario, Canada and Division of Hematology, Department of Medicine, Schulich School of Medicine and Dentistry, Western University, London, Ontario, Canada. This article has been corrected.

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Allergy

This cohort study of patients with allergist-documented penicillin allergy label assesses agreement between primary reaction symptoms documented by allergists and the allergy module of the electronic health record.

This economic evaluation estimates the implementation costs and cost per additional patient receiving the vaccine associated with each of the intervention strategies for increasing rates of human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination in primary care practices.

This cohort study uses electronic health record data to compare cancer incidence among adults with primary biliary cholangitis who were or were not treated with ursodeoxycholic acid (UDCA).

This cross-sectional study assesses the characteristics associated with bedbound status during the last year of life among community-dwelling older adults.

This survey study describes the process of creating and testing an instrument for assessing quality-of-life concerns of patients with cancer aged 14 to 39 years with input from these patients and their clinicians.

This comparative effectiveness study evaluates several clinical cervical spine injury prediction tools for test characteristics and lowest projected computed tomography rate in a secondary analysis of a large cohort of US children.