A mother who faced a “nightmare” in the workplace during the menopause hopes new research will help women be treated more fairly.

GettyThe body responsible for regulating NHS and care services in England is not fit for purpose, the health secretary says.

BBCA midwife who makes popular videos on TikTok advising women about giving birth claims she was bullied out of her job by “jealous” colleagues.

BBCA disabled man has spent nearly 10 months in a busy general hospital because no suitable home has been found for him in the community.

The outbreak may be the first ever documented in marine mammals.For the last three years, scientists in South Africa have been trying to unravel a grim marine mystery: What was happening to the Cape fur seals?The boisterous marine mammals, which are common along the nation’s shores, began washing up dead in enormous numbers. Pregnant females delivered dead premature pups. And some seals began displaying unusually aggressive behavior, attacking humans, dogs and each other.Some scientists suspected that a neurotoxin produced by algae might be to blame. In recent weeks, however, another specter has come into focus: rabies.So far, 17 seals have tested positive for the virus, said Tess Gridley, a founding director of Sea Search Research and Conservation, who has been investigating the seal deaths. The cases, which date back to at least August 2022 and span hundreds of miles of coastline, may be the first sustained rabies outbreak ever documented in marine mammals.“What I’m doing here is sitting here and putting together all the reports of aggressive interactions between seals and dogs and seals and people in the past few years,” Dr. Gridley said. “And it’s telling quite a scary story.”Rabies, which is nearly always fatal once symptoms occur, spreads through the saliva of infected animals. So far, no human cases have been reported, but, according to Dr. Gridley’s tally, at least 72 people in South Africa have been bitten or scratched by Cape fur seals since 2021; eight have been bitten by seals since confirmed to have rabies.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.

Wildfire smoke from the Western United States and Canada is blowing across the Northeast, lowering air quality and endangering vulnerable populations.Wildfire smoke from hundreds of fires burning in the West reached New England on Thursday afternoon. A long tendril of haze could lower air quality in cities along the coast, including in Delaware, New Jersey, Cape Cod, New Hampshire, New York City and even parts of Maine.Last summer, Canada’s record wildfires at times blanketed smoke across the United States as far south as Florida, and the current fires have raised fears that this year could see a similar intensity.Where are most of the fires?Wildfires are burning across Western Canada and the Western United States, where 89 active wildfires had burned more than 1.6 million acres as of Thursday morning, with the most extreme fires concentrated in Oregon and Washington.In Canada’s westernmost provinces of Alberta and British Columbia, more than 600 wildfires were actively burning and tens of thousands of people had been evacuated from their homes, including in Jasper, a popular tourist destination.Officials in both British Columbia, and Calgary, Alberta’s largest city, warned of deteriorating air quality levels this week. Some forecasts were so low that Mike Flannigan, a professor of wildland fire at Thompson Rivers University in British Columbia, called them “horrific.”“A warmer world means more fire,” Dr. Flannigan said. “These fires are consistent with what we expect with climate change.”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.

A large study showed that for most patients, having both breasts removed after cancer was detected in one made no difference.For the more than 310,000 women diagnosed with breast cancer every year, no matter how well the treatment goes, there is always a lingering fear. Could the disease come back, even years later? And what if it comes back in the other breast? Could they protect themselves today by having a double mastectomy?A study has concluded that there is no survival advantage to having the other breast removed. Women who had a lumpectomy or a mastectomy and kept their other breast did just as well as women who had a double mastectomy, Dr. Steven Narod of Women’s College Hospital in Toronto and his colleagues reported, using U.S. data from more than 661,000 women with breast cancer on one side.In the study, published in JAMA Oncology on Thursday, the researchers added that most women did very well — the chance of cancer in the other breast was about 7 percent over 20 years.But the study’s results may not apply to women who have a gene variant, BRCA1 or BRCA2, which greatly increases their cancer risk. For the 1 in 500 American women with this variant, cancer researchers agree that it’s worth considering a double mastectomy.The finding that a double mastectomy is not protective against death for many breast cancers seems counterintuitive, Dr. Narod admitted. An accompanying editorial, by Dr. Seema Ahsan Khan, a breast cancer surgeon at Northwestern University, and Masha Kocherginsky, a biostatistician also at Northwestern, called it a conundrum.Previous smaller studies have come to the same conclusion. But, Dr. Narod said, some doctors have questioned the methods in earlier research. 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.

Being vaccinated against shingles may also help delay getting a dementia diagnosis – a study in the journal

Getty ImagesThe NHS is appealing for people with O-type blood to urgently come forward and donate, after blood stocks dropped to “unprecedently low” levels in England.

BBCIt would take more than eight years for the NHS to see all adult patients waiting for ADHD assessments in many parts of the UK, a BBC investigation has found.