BBCThe death of a nurse from North Lanarkshire has been linked to the use of a weight-loss drug recently approved for use on the NHS.

BBCA lung-cancer screening programme that sees mobile clinics visit local communities in England has detected the disease earlier in more than 5,000 people.

Dozens of rhesus macaques escaped a research facility in South Carolina. They’re still on the lam.A caretaker entered an enclosure at a research center in South Carolina on Wednesday, cleaning the space and feeding the 50 rhesus monkeys inside. But on leaving, she failed to latch the double doors behind her.Forty-three monkeys saw a rare chance at freedom and took it, racing out of the enclosure.“It’s kind of like follow-the-leader — one goes out and there’s, like, a mad dash,” said Greg Westergaard, the chief executive of Alpha Genesis, which runs the research center.Now officials in the surrounding town of Yemassee, roughly 60 miles west of Charleston, are urging residents to close their doors and windows, and to avoid interacting with the animals.Gregory Alexander, the town’s chief of police, said the monkeys were not likely to be aggressive toward humans — they are “very young females” who each weigh less than 10 pounds. The group is also too young to undergo clinical testing at the research center, so they don’t pose any infectious disease threat to humans, Mr. Westergaard said.Officials have laid out traps with fresh fruit and vegetables, which are typically effective since the domesticated animals struggle to find food in the wild, Mr. Alexander said.Mr. Westergaard said a group of escapees was discovered on Thursday at the very edge of the research center’s property, but workers have not been able to capture them.For the most part, nearby residents have been unfazed by the loose monkeys, said David Paul Murray, a town council member. This is not the first time animals have escaped the Alpha Genesis Primate Research Center, which sits on about 100 acres and houses about 7,000 monkeys for scientific research.But this is the largest group to break out in recent history. It has happened often enough, Mr. Murray said, that it has become a comical part of the town’s lore — some locals will even set food outside for the monkeys.“We’re not strangers to seeing monkeys randomly,” he said. “It’s something you don’t really think about until one runs across the road and you’re like, wait, what?”(Mr. Westergaard quibbled with that characterization, noting that many townspeople who believe they have seen a monkey have in fact seen a squirrel.)In 2014, 26 macaques escaped their enclosure and were recaptured within two days. A week later, a primate escaped while being moved to the medical clinic and “disappeared into the woods,” according to documents from federal regulators.The next year, two macaques broke out of their outdoor chain-link enclosure — one was lured back inside, and the other died shortly after its recapture.Nineteen monkeys scaled the 12-foot walls of their enclosure in 2016, using a protruding wall as a foothold, according to The State newspaper.The Department of Agriculture fined the company more than $12,000 in 2017 in part because of failures to contain the animals.

President-elect Donald J. Trump never revealed the “concepts” of the plan he said he had to replace the Affordable Care Act, the law that he tried unsuccessfully to kill during his first term.But the fact that Republicans have gained control of the Senate — and possibly the House — could give Mr. Trump an opening to try and transform the 2010 health law and remake the nation’s health care system.Key to that strategy, health policy experts said, is simple inaction. Major subsidies that lawmakers approved during President Biden’s term that have lowered the cost of plans are set to expire next year. Republicans could allow them to sunset, a move that could deprive roughly 20 million Americans of extra financial help for coverage on the Affordable Care Act’s marketplaces.The subsidies, which are estimated to cost more than $300 billion if extended for a decade, helped Obamacare enrollment almost double during President Biden’s term, shattering records. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that 3.4 million people will lose insurance if the subsidies expire and the cost of plans rises. Lower-income Americans would still receive some federal assistance, while higher-income people would lose it altogether.“Because premium payments would go up for so many people, you’re likely to see a lot of people dropping coverage,” said Cynthia Cox, an Obamacare expert at KFF, a nonprofit health policy research group. And since the marketplaces are a last resort for many Americans, she said, many of those with plans now would likely be uninsured.The future of the law has taken on new urgency, not just because of Mr. Trump’s record in office seeking to reverse it. Speaker Mike Johnson, who would likely continue in his role in a Republican majority, said last week at a campaign stop that his caucus would seek “massive reform” if Mr. Trump was elected again, with health care a top priority in the early months.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.

It was added to cold and flu remedies in the 1990s when another ingredient went behind the counter over illicit meth lab concerns.The Food and Drug Administration on Thursday proposed removing a common ingredient in over-the-counter cold medicines that was found to have no effect on nasal congestion, despite its widespread use for decades.The proposal stems from a recommendation issued just over a year ago by a panel of experts who agreed unanimously that the ingredient, called phenylephrine, did not work when taken in liquid or pill form. It is still considered to be effective in nasal sprays.The ingredient has been used alone and in combination with other pain killers, cough suppressants and other agents meant to ease cold and flu symptoms in medications like Tylenol, Mucinex and Benadryl.“It is the F.D.A.’s role to ensure that drugs are safe and effective,” said Patrizia Cavazzoni, the director of the F.D.A.’s drug division. “Based on our review of available data, and consistent with the advice of the advisory committee, we are taking this next step in the process to propose removing oral phenylephrine because it is not effective as a nasal decongestant.”The agency emphasized that the ingredient was not considered unsafe.The move brings the agency one step closer to getting products containing the ingredient pulled from store shelves. In issuing the proposal, the F.D.A. also began seeking public comments. The F.D.A. said it would give companies additional time to reformulate their products if the proposal was finalized.Medical experts have said that patients who discover the ingredient in items in their medicine cabinet need not be concerned. They can safely take the rest of a combination product that includes phenylephrine if it contains other ingredients that are effective. Or they could throw out items that contain only phenylephrine.Getting the medication off the shelves has been a decades-long effort for Dr. Leslie Hendeles, a pharmacy professor emeritus at the University of Florida. He began raising concerns about the efficacy of the ingredient in the 1990s. It was added to cold and flu treatments as a stand-in for a more effective decongestant, pseudoephedrine, which was moved behind the counter after its use was noted in homegrown methamphetamine labs manufacturing illicit drugs.In 2007, Dr. Hendeles and a colleague filed an official petition with the F.D.A. asking them to remove the ingredient. Seventeen years later, on Thursday, Dr. Hendeles said that he was excited to see the process move forward.“It is amazing to me that it took this long, but it’s better than never,” he said.

Covid inquiryThe most senior doctor in NHS England has said he was “personally terrified” that hospitals could have been overwhelmed in the early stages of the pandemic.

Australia’s government says it will introduce “world-leading” legislation to ban children under 16 from social media.

Getty ImagesHormone replacement therapy (HRT) does not shorten or lengthen the life expectancy of those taking it to ease menopause symptoms, says the health assessment body NICE in

President-elect Donald Trump has encouraged him to “go wild on health” but has not made clear what role Mr. Kennedy will play.When 12,000 public health professionals gathered in Minneapolis last week for the annual meeting of the American Public Health Association, Dr. Jerome Adams, who served as surgeon general in the first administration of President-elect Donald J. Trump, issued a pointed warning about Robert F. Kennedy Jr.“If R.F.K. has a significant influence on the next administration, that could further erode people’s willingness to get up to date with recommended vaccines,” Dr. Adams said. “I am worried about the impact that could have on our nation’s health, on our nation’s economy, on our global security.”Now, Mr. Kennedy, a vocal skeptic of vaccines, is in a position to have significant influence, and over a broad range of policy. Mr. Trump’s sweeping electoral victory, with Mr. Kennedy at his side, is — in the eyes of their supporters — not only a mandate but also a repudiation of the public health establishment that has long kept Mr. Kennedy at bay.As an independent presidential candidate and as a surrogate for Mr. Trump, Mr. Kennedy pledged to upend the nation’s agriculture system and public health bureaucracy, effectively gutting whole swaths of the regulatory state, under the rubric of rooting out “cronyism” and corruption.After Mr. Trump was first elected in 2016, Mr. Kennedy told reporters that Mr. Trump promised to let him chair a vaccine commission, but it never came to pass. Now, Mr. Kennedy has a much stronger hand, having rallied his followers behind Mr. Trump. The president-elect has indicated that Mr. Kennedy will play a role in his new administration and recently said he would let Mr. Kennedy “go wild on health,” but he has not been specific about what that means.Some have speculated that Mr. Trump will make him a “health czar” inside the White House, to guide the president on public health matters; a person familiar with the transition said Mr. Kennedy was at Mar-a-Lago on Wednesday and spoke with Trump insiders about the public health agenda.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 ImagesPolice will no longer be able to hold people who are being detained for mental health reasons in police cells, under government plans for England and Wales.