As Sally Gainsbury (Nuffield Trust) says at the heart of the budget part of the NHS crisis is a simple fact:
'While technological advance elsewhere tends to reduce costs, in healthcare it increases them by expanding what treatments are possible. As a consequence, it also expands what the public expects to receive.... [And so] healthcare consumption tends to grow at more than twice the rate of population growth'.
Managing that is, of course, the political challenge
Patients have been bearing the brunt of infection control in hospitals, having to go to great lengths to protect themselves and their loved ones.
They’re unfairly judged, psychologized and mistreated for masking and/or requesting staff mask.
Covid is still here. It’s still killing and disabling people. We’re also seeing outbreaks of tuberculosis, measles and the worst flu season in over a decade.
Public health is being systematically dismantled and gagged by the Trump administration, allowing misinformation and disinformation to flourish and putting even more lives at risk.
Why don’t we have mandatory masking in healthcare? Why are we killing and disabling patients who go there for help? Who can’t ‘just stay home’?
The second article in my Masks in Healthcare series looks at patient stories, retaliation, and what we can do to make hospitals safer for everyone.
https://www.disabledginger.com/p/we-need-mandatory-masking-in-healthcare
#covidisairborne #covidisnotover #longcovid #sarscov2 #chronicillness #healthcare #keepmasksinhealthcare #wearamask #ableism #eugenics #disability
The Department of Education Threatens to Pull the Plug on Colleges
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/26/opinion/education-department-dei.html?utm_source=flipboard&utm_medium=activitypub
Posted into Home Page @home-page-newyorktimes
People in industrial societies get more sleep than hunter-gatherers.
New Scientist reports "an analysis of 54 sleep studies conducted around the world has found that people in small, non-industrialised societies actually get less sleep than those in more industrialised regions."
Plants losing appetite for carbon dioxide amid effects of warming climate
#Plants and #trees have had it good for the last century or so. Rising levels of #carbon dioxide helped to spur growth and warmer temperatures gave rise to a longer growing season. But at some point these benefits start to be outweighed by the negatives of a warming #climate: wildfires, drought, storms, floods, the spread of new pests and diseases and plant heat stress all reduce the amount of carbon dioxide that plants absorb.
I posted this on Twitter this morning: https://twitter.com/RichardJMurphy/status/1942861045426516103 My point is serious. The CBI is saying that the situation with regard to the UK stock exchange is getting desperate, because it is losing out to overseas markets and not attracting sufficient business. The question that needs to be asked is, why is that?...
If Rafeal Behr is right Labour is embarking on 'a gruelling mission of rearmament & renewed national focus on security, in a dangerous world where the US is an unreliable source of protection & its president can’t be counted as a friend' then 'national security' will become a bigger part of policy discussion.
As I've said: if Labour also keeps with its 'growth' mantra, the only way real option is explicitly adopting a form of Military Keynsianism!
Emeritus Prof Christopher May
Broadwaybabyto
The New York Times
The Conversation U.S.
Ron
Flipboard Science Desk
Brian Stelter
Jürgen
Richard Murphy