A moment that changed me: I had a panic attack on public transport – and it led me to a horrifying secret

You could be walking around symptom-free and not know you’re pre-diabetic, living with hypertension or at a high risk of a heart attack Prof Devi Sridhar is chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure,” Benjamin Franklin’s adage goes. Yet that simple prescription has been hard to follow in the current NHS. As has been frequently highlighted, one of the biggest challenges for the health system is not just how much we spend per capita, but where and when it is spent. In England, there has been an ongoing shift within the NHS budget towards acute hospital care – treating people in hospitals, often after they are already quite ill – while funding for primary care such as GPs has fallen. The consequence is that the NHS is increasingly paying for serious and expensive disease treatment, rather than investing upstream to prevent disease in the first place. We spend heavily on dealing with heart attacks, strokes and other life-threatening conditions, rather than identifying those who are at higher risk and intervening earlier to reduce their chances of getting ill. Prof Devi Sridhar is chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh..

Top medical groups band together to ease confusion from Trump administration’s changing immunization advice Leading US medical groups are urging people to get updated flu and Covid-19 vaccinations this fall, banding together on Wednesday to issue shot guidelines – and highlight the science behind them – saying they hope to ease confusion caused by the Trump administration’s changing advice. Flu vaccinations are beginning and the latest coronavirus shots are starting to arrive after the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved this year’s updated versions last week. Winter also brings another vaccine-preventable risk called RSV...

In Nepal, the hope of finding survivors is fading daily. Bodies are piling up in morgues, and storage capacity is reaching its limit. For the relatives of the missing, the wait is unbearable. They go from one hospital to another, consult the lists of survivors and scrutinise the photos of unidentified bodies. FRANCE 24's special correspondents met with several of these families at the morgue of Kathmandu University Hospital.