Jacobs familyA teenage girl with a severe dairy allergy died after drinking a Costa Coffee hot chocolate made with cows’ milk due to a “failure to follow the processes in place to discuss allergies”, a coroner has ruled.

ReutersTravellers should consider getting vaccinated against mpox if they will be visting affected areas in Africa, new advice says.

This week a meteorologist stepped away from a live broadcast when he noticed familiar feelings of panic start to arise. We can all learn from how he and his colleagues handled it.A meteorologist in Australia was delivering the weather report on live television this week when he started having a panic attack.Nate Byrne, the news presenter, later explained to BBC News that he was heading to the studio’s “weather wall” when he realized he was suddenly out of breath.“The specific position — in front of the wall — is a trigger for me,” he said. “My body starts tingling. I start sweating. Just everything in my body is screaming: Run. Go. Get out.”Because he had dealt with on-air panic attacks before, he and his colleagues knew what to do. Mr. Byrne explained what was happening to viewers, then quickly tossed to the anchor of the show while he went off camera to recover.How can you help if a friend, family member or colleague is having a panic attack? We asked experts for tips.First, what is a panic attack?A panic attack is a sudden wave of overwhelming fear and anxiety that is accompanied by physical symptoms.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

MultiPlan has helped big health insurers make billions by reducing reimbursements for medical bills, but its business model is now being questioned.Already under investigation in Congress, a data analytics firm that has helped major health insurers make billions of dollars by reducing reimbursements for medical bills is facing growing scrutiny from Wall Street and in the courts.The firm, MultiPlan, and the insurance companies it serves often collect larger fees when payments to medical providers are far lower than the amount billed. A recent investigation by The New York Times found the approach left some patients with unexpectedly high bills as they were asked to pick up what their plans did not cover.MultiPlan has seen its stock price drop by more than 70 percent since April, when The Times published its investigation, and its general counsel and chief financial officer have left their jobs. It disclosed quarterly financial results this month that its chief executive called “disappointing and unacceptable,” and it warned of a future hit to revenues as well.The chief executive, Travis Dalton, acknowledged during a call with analysts that “media scrutiny has been an ongoing challenge.” The firm attributed slumping revenues largely to changes by major clients, though it declined to provide more detail.In a note to investors, the research firm CreditSights, which regularly follows the company, said it suspected some clients were responding to “increased scrutiny on MultiPlan’s business model” and had “gravitated away from using MultiPlan in light of The New York Times article.”Insurers who manage so-called self-funded health plans for employers — the most common way Americans get health coverage — often turn to MultiPlan for payment recommendations when patients receive care outside their plan’s network. The Times investigation found that MultiPlan had encouraged some insurers to use its most aggressive pricing tools, leaving medical providers with slashed compensation and employers with high fees — in some instances higher than the medical care payment itself.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

We tend to think of scribes as being in the mold of Bartleby the Scrivener, the eponymous Wall Street law clerk in Herman Melville’s 1853 short story. Working “silently, palely, mechanically,” Bartleby is an industrious employee who consumes legal documents “as if long famishing for something to copy” — before he eventually turns into an inscrutable refusenik who is relegated to a desk behind a screen that looks out at a brick wall.In ancient Egypt, scribes were more than dreary papyrus-pushers. By and large, they were dignitaries, ranked above artisans and merchants but below priests and nobles. Their status derived chiefly from their literacy, a skill still in its infancy during the Old Kingdom, 4,200 to 4,700 years ago. Influential families sent their teenage sons to train for entry-level jobs at the royal court, where they performed vital administrative functions, such as drawing up contracts, measuring fields for tax purposes and recording the biennial cattle census. There were few if any female scribes.For all their prestige, the scribes of the third millennium B.C. faced many of the same occupational hazards as the desk jockeys and keyboard warriors of today. A new study in the journal Scientific Reports found that the repetitive tasks carried out by Pharaonic-era scriveners, and the postures that they assumed while scrivening, might have caused degenerative changes in their joints, spines and jaws.Museum and university researchers from the Czech Republic examined the remains of 69 adult male skeletons buried from 2700 to 2180 B.C. in a necropolis in Abusir, a complex of pyramids and tombs a few miles south of Cairo. Thirty of the deceased were presumed to have been scribes, judging by their burial location, inferred social rank, or, in six cases, titles found in their tombs.Two scribes in a relief from the Tomb of Akhethotep in Saqqara, Egypt. Scribes performed vital administrative functions, such as drawing up contracts and measuring fields for tax purposes.Heritage Image Partnership Ltd./AlamyThe skeletons of the scribes were compared with those of 39 non-scribes from the same region and time period. “These 39 individuals belonged to the lower strata of society,” said Veronika Dulikova, an Egyptologist at Charles University in Prague and an author of the new paper. “They were buried in humble, mud-brick tombs with a simple niche instead of an inscribed false door, as in the case of members of the elite.” False doors were believed to act as portals between the afterlife and the living world, allowing the soul of the deceased to freely enter and exit the tomb.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

The government has announced it will push ahead with compensation payments to infected blood victims.

Sweden’s public health agency has recorded what it says is the first case of a more dangerous type of mpox outside the African continent.

UK health chiefs say they are making plans in case a new type of mpox virus is detected in the country – but they emphasise the risk is low.

The virus is evolving, and the newest version spreads more often through heterosexual populations. But the vaccines should still work.Faced once again with a rapidly spreading epidemic of mpox, the World Health Organization on Wednesday declared a global health emergency. The last time the W.H.O. made that call was in 2022, when the disease was still called monkeypox.Ultimately the outbreak affected nearly 100,000 people worldwide, primarily gay and bisexual men, including more than 32,000 in the United States.The W.H.O.’s decision this time was prompted by an escalating crisis of mpox concentrated in the Democratic Republic of Congo. It recently spread to a dozen other African countries. If it is not contained, the virus again may rampage all over the world, experts warned.“There’s a need for concerted effort by all stakeholders, not only in Africa, but everywhere else,” Dr. Dimie Ogoina, a Nigerian scientist and chair of the W.H.O.’s mpox emergency committee, said on Wednesday.Congo alone has reported 15,600 mpox cases and 537 deaths, most of them among children under 15, indicating that the nature of the disease and its mode of spread may have changed.Here’s what to know.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

Getty ImagesThe UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) is warning about a small but significant rise in cases of antibiotic-resistant gonorrhoea.