In the early months of 2020, as the Covid-19 pandemic settled over the country, a psychologist and Harvard lecturer named Richard Weissbourd approached his colleagues with a concept for a new kind of study. Loneliness, or the specter of it, seemed to Weissbourd to be everywhere — in the solitude of quarantine, in the darkened windows of the buildings on campus, in the Zoom squares that had come to serve as his primary conduit to his students. Two years earlier, he read a study from Cigna, the insurance provider, showing that 46 percent of Americans felt sometimes or always alone. In 2019, when Cigna replicated the study, the number of lonely respondents had grown to 52 percent. God knows what the data would say now, Weissbourd thought.Listen to this article, read by James Patrick Cronin“Initially, the idea was, OK, we’ve got a problem that’s not new but is obviously affecting lots of us, and that is now more visible than ever — it’s more present than ever,” Weissbourd told me. “What I really wanted was to get under the hood. Like, what does loneliness feel like to the lonely? What are the potential consequences? And what’s causing it?”Finding answers to these types of questions is a notoriously difficult proposition. Loneliness is a compound or multidimensional emotion: It contains elements of sadness and anxiety, fear and heartache. The experience of it is inherently, intensely subjective, as any chronically lonely person can tell you. A clerk at a crowded grocery store can be wildly lonely, just as a wizened hermit living in a cave can weather solitude in perfect bliss. (If you want to infuriate an expert in loneliness, try confusing the word “isolation” with “loneliness.”) For convenience’ sake, most researchers still use the definition coined nearly three decades ago, in the early 1980s, by the social psychologists Daniel Perlman and Letitia Anne Peplau, who described loneliness as “a discrepancy between one’s desired and achieved levels of social relations.” Unfortunately, that definition is pretty subjective, too.In order to understand the current crisis, Weissbourd, who serves as the faculty director of Making Caring Common — a Harvard Graduate School of Education project that collects and disseminates research on health and well-being — created a 66-question survey, which would be mailed to approximately 950 recipients around the United States. With the exception of a couple of straightforwardly phrased items — “In the past four weeks, how often have you felt lonely?” — a majority of the queries devised by Weissbourd and the project’s director of research and evaluation, Milena Batanova, approached the issue elliptically, from a variety of angles: “Do you feel like you reach out more to people than they reach out to you?” “Are there people in your life who ask you about your views on things that are important to you?” Or: “Has someone taken more than just a few minutes to ask how you are doing in a way that made you feel they genuinely cared?”Several weeks later, the raw results were sent back to Weissbourd. “Frankly, I was knocked back,” he told me. “People were obviously really, really suffering,” and at a scale that dwarfed other findings on the topic. Thirty-six percent of the respondents reported feeling chronic loneliness in the previous month, with another 37 percent saying they experienced occasional or sporadic loneliness. As Weissbourd and Batanova had hoped, the answers to subsequent questions helped clarify why. Among the cohort identifying as lonely, 46 percent said they reached out to people more than people reached out to them. Nineteen percent said no one outside their family cared about them at all.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.

BBCPeople in crisis with mental health problems can now access services through NHS 111, giving them another way to get urgent help.

Polio vaccines arrived in Gaza on Monday, kicking off an expansive effort to vaccinate more than 640,000 Palestinian children and curb a potential outbreak, the United Nations, Israel and health authorities in Gaza said, after the first confirmed case of the disease in the territory in 25 years.The U.N. children’s fund, UNICEF, said it was bringing in 1.2 million doses of polio vaccine for children in Gaza in cooperation with the World Health Organization, the main U.N. agency that aids Palestinians, known as UNRWA, and other groups.The Gaza Health Ministry confirmed on Monday that the vaccines had reached Gaza and that preparations to launch the vaccination campaign for children under 10 were underway. It was not immediately clear how quickly the vaccines could be distributed to vaccination centers in Gaza, particularly after the U.N. said on Monday that Israeli evacuation orders had brought its already hamstrung humanitarian operations to a halt.UNRWA officials are hoping to deliver the first vaccines to children in Gaza starting Saturday, but the campaign will be “a very difficult operation and its success will depend very much on the conditions on the ground at the time,” Sam Rose, a senior official from the agency, told reporters at a news briefing on Monday.Speaking from Zawaida, in central Gaza, Mr. Rose said that more than 3,000 people would be involved in the vaccination campaign, about a third of them from UNRWA. Mobile health teams would help deliver the vaccines to shelters, clinics and schools, but a humanitarian pause was needed for parents and children to safely meet aid workers at those sites, he said.Aid workers “will do our absolute utmost to deliver the campaign, because without it, we know that the conditions will just be worse someday,” Mr. Rose said. “But yeah, it is not guaranteed that it will be a success.”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.

Top officials in the Chinese territory have defended new sex education guidance that critics call regressive. Young people are amused.A 15-year-old girl and her boyfriend are studying alone together on a hot summer day when she removes her jacket and clings to his shoulder. What should he do?In Hong Kong, the authorities advise the young man to continue studying or to seek a diversion, including badminton — to avoid premarital sex and other “intimate behaviors.”Critics, including lawmakers and sex educators, say that the Chinese territory’s new sex education materials are regressive. But top officials are not backing down, and the standoff is getting kind of awkward.“Is badminton the Hong Kong answer to sexual impulses in schoolchildren?” the South China Morning Post newspaper asked in a headline over the weekend.Hong Kong teenagers find it all pretty amusing. A few said on social media that the officials behind the policy have their “heads in the clouds.” Others have worked it into sexual slang, talking about “friends with badminton” instead of “friends with benefits.”The sex ed materials were published last week by the Education Bureau in a 70-page document that includes worksheets for adolescents and guidance for their teachers. The document emphasizes that the lessons are not designed to encourage students to “start dating or having sexual behaviors early in life.” It also advises people in a “love relationship” to fill out a form setting the limits of their intimacy.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 former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases had been hospitalized and was expected to make a full recovery, a spokeswoman said.Dr. Anthony Fauci, the former government scientist who was both lauded and criticized for his work on Covid-19, was recently hospitalized with a case of West Nile virus and is recovering at home, according to a spokeswoman for the doctor.“A full recovery is expected,” the spokeswoman, Jenn Kuzmuk, said in a statement on Sunday on behalf of Dr. Fauci, 83, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.She did not elaborate on where he was hospitalized or for how long.Dr. Jonathan LaPook, the chief medical correspondent for CBS News, shared on social media that Dr. Fauci had told him that he had fever, chills and severe fatigue and that he was hospitalized this month. Dr. Fauci said he was most likely infected by a mosquito bite that he got in his backyard, Dr. LaPook said.West Nile virus is most commonly spread through the bite of an infected mosquito and is the leading cause of mosquito-borne disease in the continental United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.People become infected with the virus after mosquitoes feed on infected birds and then bite people, according to the C.D.C.“People are considered dead-end hosts because, unlike birds, they do not develop high enough levels of virus in their bloodstream and cannot pass the virus on to other biting mosquitoes,” the agency says on its website.West Nile cases primarily occur during mosquito season, which starts in the summer and continues through the fall. Symptoms may include fever, headache, body aches, vomiting, diarrhea or rash.At least 216 cases of West Nile virus have been detected in 33 states this year, according to the C.D.C. There are no vaccines to prevent or medicines to treat West Nile virus in people. The best prevention against the virus is to avoid mosquito bites.Lauded as the nation’s top infectious disease expert, Dr. Fauci, President Biden’s former chief medical adviser, retired in December 2022 as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, part of the National Institutes of Health, after 38 years.As the public face of American science for decades, Dr. Fauci advised seven presidents and guided the country’s response to infectious disease outbreaks from the AIDS epidemic to Covid-19.Dr. Fauci joined the faculty at Georgetown University last year as a distinguished university professor at its medical school.In June, testifying before a House panel investigating Covid’s origins, he denied Republican allegations that he had helped fund research that led to the pandemic or that he had covered up the possibility of its origins in a laboratory.

Drugmakers have supplies ready to ship that are necessary to stop a potential pandemic. But W.H.O. regulations have slowed access.There are no vaccines for mpox available in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the epicenter of a global health emergency declared last week, even though the country first asked for the shots two years ago and the manufacturers say they have supplies.“The most important thing we need right now are the vaccines,” said Dr. Samuel-Roger Kamba, health minister of Congo.So where are the shots? They are trapped in a byzantine drug regulatory process at the World Health Organization.Three years after the last worldwide mpox outbreak, the W.H.O. still has neither officially approved the vaccines — although the United States and Europe have — nor has it issued an emergency use license that would speed access.One of these two approvals is necessary for UNICEF and Gavi, the organization that helps facilitate immunizations in developing nations, to buy and distribute mpox vaccines in low-income countries like Congo.While high-income nations rely on their own drug regulators, such as the Food and Drug Administration in the United States, many low- and middle-income countries depend on the W.H.O. to judge what vaccines and treatments are safe and effective, a process called prequalification.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 NHS has said it will not pay for the first drug shown to slow the destruction of the brain in Alzheimer’s disease.

A 67-year-old man has become the first person in the UK to try what doctors hope will be a revolutionary new treatment for lung cancer – a vaccine that tells the body how to fight and kill the disease.

BBCThe parents of a young woman who died after being given an AstraZeneca Covid jab have accused the NHS of failing to pass on known safety warnings about the vaccine.

Many older Americans, including those in nursing homes, aren’t getting booster shots.The Food and Drug Administration on Thursday approved the latest slate of annual Covid vaccines, clearing the way for Americans 6 months and older to receive updated shots in the midst of a prolonged summer surge of the virus.Pfizer and Moderna, the vaccine makers, are expected to begin shipping vaccines to pharmacies and doctors’ offices within days. The shots are tailored to a version of the virus that took off this spring before giving way to closely related variants, all of which appear to spread faster.For the frailest Americans, who have been dying of Covid in growing numbers this summer, the shots could offer a reprieve from a virus that disproportionately endangers those whose vaccinations are out of date.But the approval is occurring months after wily new variants began driving up infections, a matter of consternation for some scientists who have urged faster turnarounds for updated shots.In recent weeks, people have been hospitalized with Covid at a rate nearly twice as high as during the same time last summer. By late July, Covid was killing roughly 600 Americans each week, a substantial drop from this winter but double the number from this spring.The availability of boosters has not translated into actual vaccinations. By spring, only one in five adults had received last year’s updated Covid vaccine. Even older Americans, who are at far greater risk of being severely sickened, largely spurned the shots, with only 40 percent of people 75 and older taking last year’s vaccine.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.