Journalists

With the increase in cases of mpox, the European Union's Health Security Committee met on Monday. According to the Ministry of Health, the meeting concluded ‘with recommendations very similar to those previously issued by the WHO and the ECDC’. The risk of the likelihood of mpox spreading to the general EU population is currently considered to be ‘low’, although it increases in populations with close contact with diagnosed cases and in particularly vulnerable people. Further imported cases in the EU are not excluded and vaccination of the general population is not recommended. In addition, the HSC does not recommend border control.  
 

If you're traveling to –or from– distant lands, this brief guide can help you minimize the effects of the time difference, the feared jet lag, so you can enjoy your vacation more (or go back to the routine less harshly).

The mental health of young people has deteriorated over the last two decades and is entering a dangerous phase, according to a new Commission by The Lancet Psychiatry. Several global factors are involved, including inaction on climate change, intergenerational inequality, and adversity linked to the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Abandoned farmlands in Europe could find new life through rewilding, a movement aimed at restoring devastated landscapes to their wild state before human intervention. A quarter of the European continent, 117 million hectares, is ready for rewilding, according to a study published today in the journal Current Biology.

Sweden's public health agency issued a statement on Thursday indicating that a person has been diagnosed with mpox - formerly called monkeypox - caused by variant clade I. According to the Swedish agency, this is the first case of this variant to be diagnosed outside the African continent. The person would have been infected during a stay in a part of Africa where there is an outbreak of this variant of mpox, according to the statement. The announcement comes a day after the World Health Organisation declared the mpox outbreak a public health emergency of international concern.

An international team of researchers has studied 241 brain-damaged people apparently unable to respond to external stimuli. Using techniques such as functional magnetic resonance imaging and electroencephalogram, they have detected signs of brain activity in 25 % of them that, according to the authors, ‘suggest that they may be interacting with the outside world’. The results are published in the journal NEJM. 

A ketogenic diet improves the results of a pancreatic cancer therapy in mice, according to a study published in Nature. The US research team fed the animals a high-fat, low-carbohydrate diet before administering them a new drug, currently in clinical trials; in the absence of glucose, the body converts fat into ketone bodies. The drug blocks the metabolism of fat - the cancer's only source of energy while the mice are on this diet - and slows the growth of pancreatic tumours. 

The impact of animal abandonment goes beyond the pets who suffer it, it is a public health, safety and funding issue as well. Although there have been some improvements in recent years, the experts consulted agree that the system continues to fail. In this guide, we analyze what has changed, who does this issue affect, and what must be improved.

Heat-related mortality in Europe would have been 80% higher last year without recent adaptation measures to rising temperatures, such as changes in infrastructure and public behaviour, according to a study led by ISGlobal. The study, published in Nature Medicine, estimates that more than 47,000 deaths were related to the heat in 35 European countries in 2023 - the second highest number in the 2015-2023 period, behind 2022. Heat-related mortality was highest in southern European countries including Spain (175 deaths per million people), Italy (209) and Greece (393). 

Summer is a season of beaches, pools, excursions, trips, and mountain hikes. But it is also the best time of the year for bedbugs, wasps, jellyfish, and mosquitoes. With this guide, we will know what to do (and not to do) if we have an undesirable encounter with one of these animals: the first step, stay calm.