Nottinghamshire PoliceThe critical report into the mental healthcare given to Valdo Calocane – a paranoid schizophrenic who fatally stabbed three people in Nottingham last year – is damning.

The World Health Organization (WHO) has declared the mpox outbreak in parts of Africa a public health emergency of international concern.

The epidemic is concentrated in the Democratic Republic of Congo, but the virus has now appeared in a dozen other African countries.The rapid spread of mpox, formerly called monkeypox, in African countries constitutes a global health emergency, the World Health Organization declared on Wednesday.This is the second time in three years that the W.H.O. has designated an mpox epidemic as a global emergency. It previously did so in July 2022. That outbreak went on to affect nearly 100,000 people, primarily gay and bisexual men, in 116 countries, and killed about 200 people.The threat this time is deadlier. Since the beginning of this year, the Democratic Republic of Congo alone has reported more than 14,000 mpox cases and 524 deaths. Those most at risk include women and children under 15.“The detection and rapid spread of a new clade of mpox in eastern D.R.C., its detection in neighboring countries that had not previously reported mpox, and the potential for further spread within Africa and beyond is very worrying,” said Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the W.H.O.’s director general.The outbreak has spread through 13 countries in Africa, including a few that had never reported mpox cases before. On Tuesday, the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention declared a “public health emergency of continental security,” the first time the organization has taken that step since the African Union granted it the power to do so last year.“It’s in the interests of the countries, of the continent and of the world to get our arms around us and stop transmission as soon as we can,” said Dr. Nicole Lurie, the executive director for preparedness and response at the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, a nonprofit that finances vaccine development.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.

In late 2018, after an otherwise-normal Christmas holiday, Laurie Beatty started acting strange. An 81-year-old retired contractor, he grew unnaturally quiet and began poring over old accounting logs from a construction business he sold decades earlier, convinced that he had been bilked in the deal. Listen to this article, read by Robert PetkoffOver the course of several days, Beatty slipped further into unreality. He told his wife the year was 1992 and wondered aloud why his hair had turned white. Then he started having seizures. His arms began to move in uncontrollable jerks and twitches. By the end of May, he was dead. Doctors at the Georges-L.-Dumont University Hospital Center in Moncton, the largest city in the province of New Brunswick, Canada, zeroed in on an exceedingly rare condition — Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, caused by prions, misfolding proteins in the brain — as the most likely culprit. The doctors explained this to Beatty’s children, Tim and Jill, and said they would run additional tests to confirm the post-mortem diagnosis. Three months later, when the siblings returned to the office of their father’s neurologist, Dr. Alier Marrero, that’s what they were expecting to hear. Instead, Marrero told them that Laurie’s Creutzfeldt-Jakob test had come back negative. “We were all looking at one another,” Tim says, “because we were all very confused.” If Creutzfeldt-Jakob hadn’t killed their father, then what had? What Marrero said next was even more unsettling.“There’s something going on,” they recall him saying. “And I don’t know what it is.”Dr. Alier Marrero, a neurologist, reported more than 20 cases to a national monitoring program in Canada early in the outbreak.Brendan George Ko for The New York TimesIt turned out that Laurie Beatty was just one of many local residents who had gone to Marrero’s office exhibiting similar, inexplicable symptoms of neurological decline — more than 20 in the previous four years. The first signs were often behavioral. One patient fell asleep for nearly 20 hours straight before a friend took her to the hospital; another found himself afraid to disturb the stranger who had sat down in his living room, only to realize hours later that the stranger was his wife. 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.

Matt McBriar, one half of dance music duo Bicep, has announced he is receiving treatment for a “large and pretty rare” brain tumour.

Global trends in economics, climate and technology are weighing on young adults, a report finds. It recommends overhauling how we approach mental health care.Chloé Johnson, 22, has been feeling hopeless lately.She’s struggling to focus on classes at her local community college in Dallas while also working full-time, making $18 an hour as a receptionist.Her car broke down, so the $500 that she had managed to save will now go toward a down payment for a used vehicle.And she was recently passed over for a promotion.“Right now it just feels, like, very suffocating to be in this position,” said Ms. Johnson, who was diagnosed last year with bipolar II disorder, depression and A.D.H.D. “I’m not getting anywhere or making any progress.”It’s an endless loop: Ms. Johnson’s mental health has worsened because of her financial difficulties and her financial problems have grown, partly because of the cost of mental health treatment but also because her disorders have made it more difficult to earn a college degree that could lead to a more lucrative job.“I’ve failed several classes,” she said. “I burn out really easily, so I just give up.”The mental health of adolescents and young adults has been on the decline and it’s partly because of “harmful megatrends” like financial inequality, according to a new report published on Tuesday in the scientific journal The Lancet Psychiatry. The global trends affecting younger generations also include wage theft, unregulated social media, job insecurity and climate change, all of which are creating “a bleak present and future for young people in many countries,” according to the authors.Why focus on global trends?The report was produced over the course of five years by a commission of more than 50 people, including mental health and economic policy experts from several continents and young people who have experienced mental illness.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.

President Biden has had a deep personal interest in cancer research since his son Beau died of an aggressive brain cancer in 2015.Freed from the campaign trail and the grinding pursuit of another term, President Biden traveled to New Orleans on Tuesday to focus on a project close to his heart: the “moonshot” effort to sharply cut cancer deaths in the United States that he carried over from his time as vice president and has become a hallmark of his presidency.Speaking at Tulane University, Mr. Biden and the first lady, Jill Biden, announced eight research centers, including one at Tulane, that will collectively receive $150 million in research awards aimed at pioneering new methods of precision cancer surgery.Before addressing a crowd on campus, the president and the first lady met with a team of researchers who demonstrated the technology under development at Tulane. It uses imaging of cells on tumor sites to verify for surgeons that cancer cells have been fully removed and to reduce the need for follow-up surgeries.Standing in front of a sign reading “curing cancer faster,” Mr. Biden described touring cancer centers in Australia and Ireland, and being frustrated by a lack of international collaboration.“We don’t want to keep information — we want to share it,” he said.The awards announced on Tuesday are to be made through the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, or ARPA-H, which was founded in 2022 and is aimed at driving biomedical innovation.The other award recipients were Dartmouth College; Johns Hopkins University; Rice University; the University of California, San Francisco; the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign; the University of Washington; and Cision Vision in Mountain View, Calif.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.

Mpox, the high infectious disease that used to be called monkeypox, has been declared a public health emergency in Africa by the continent’s top health body.

High temperatures and humidity can alter the components in many home-delivery medications, rendering them less effective. Here’s what to look for.Every day, millions of Americans get prescription medications delivered to their homes. It’s a convenient option, but rising temperatures can make safe transport challenging and put the drugs at risk.Temperature and humidity levels can affect drugs all year round, but the likelihood of a problem is highest during the summer. Whether you are enrolled in a mail-order pharmacy program or are ordering over-the-counter pills from Amazon, it’s important to consider how compounds could be affected on their way to your doorstep.Are my medications really being exposed to extreme heat?For many oral medications, the United States Pharmacopeia, an independent organization that sets standards for the nation’s drug supply, recommends keeping medications at temperatures of 68 to 77 degrees Fahrenheit. It allows for an expanded temperature range of 59 to 86 degrees to accommodate for mild “excursions,” as long as the average temperature does not exceed 77 degrees.Most mail-order pharmacies say that their packaging is weather resistant. But research has shown that packages sometimes spend more than two-thirds of transit time outside the appropriate temperature range.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 temperatures inside delivery trucks can reach twice the recommended threshold, but federal rules on drug storage conditions do not apply to the booming world of mail-order delivery.Melted capsules. Cloudy insulin. Pills that may no longer work.Doctors and pharmacists say the scorching temperatures enveloping the country could be endangering people’s health in an unexpected way: by overheating their medications.Millions of Americans now receive their prescription medications through mail-order shipments, either for convenience or because their health plans require it. But the temperatures inside the cargo areas of delivery trucks can reach 150 degrees Fahrenheit in the summer, according to drivers — far exceeding the range of 68 to 77 degrees recommended by the national organization that sets standards for drug handling.Mail-order pharmacies say that their packaging is weather resistant and that they take special precautions when medication “requires specific temperature control.” But in a study published last year, independent pharmaceutical researchers who embedded data-logging thermometers inside simulated shipments found that the packages had spent more than two-thirds of their transit time outside the appropriate temperature range, “regardless of the shipping method, carrier, or season.”Extreme temperatures can alter the components in many medications, from pancreatic enzymes to the thyroid replacement drug levothyroxine to oral contraceptives, medical experts say.Dr. Mike Ren, a primary care physician and an assistant professor in the department of family and community medicine at the Baylor College of Medicine, said that liquid medications like insulin or AUVI-Q, the epinephrine injection for allergic reactions, are often at heightened risk of degradation because excessive heat exposure can cause the evaporation of liquid components that were compounded at precise ratios. Aerosolized medications, too, are uniquely vulnerable because of the risk of pressure changes in the canister.A summertime delivery route in Brooklyn. Temperatures inside the cargo areas of delivery trucks can reach 150 degrees Fahrenheit in the summer, according to drivers.Johnny Milano for The New York TimesWe 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.