‘Stand up to food industry’ after decades of failure to tackle obesity epidemic, MPs tell government - UK Parliament

IntroductionEarly warning has long been regarded as a cornerstone of infectious disease surveillance and epidemic preparedness1,2. Substantial advances in epidemiological modeling, statistical inference, and data integration have improved outbreak detection and disease forecasting across diverse settings over recent decades3. Major public health emergencies, including SARS, influenza pandemics, COVID-19, and more recent emerging infectious diseases, have benefited from these developments in situational awareness4,5,6. Recent global health crises have, however, revealed a persistent limitation that we term the decision gap: technically sophisticated forecasts and risk indicators frequently fail to translate into timely, coordinated, context-sensitive action7,8,9. This gap has two linked faces: (1) Forecasts are often not decision-ready: they do not encode operational constraints, competing objectives, or uncertainty in usable form. (2) Institutions must still convert uncertain, evolving evidence into action through deliberation under legal and organizational constraints, a process current systems leave largely unsupported. This gap is not hypothetical.

Bioengineer.org news storyFor millions of people living with HIV, antiretroviral therapy has transformed a once-fatal infection into a manageable chronic condition. Yet the very drugs that suppress the virus can carry quiet costs, and one of the most insidious is bone loss. Tenofovir disoproxil fumarate, or TDF, has been a cornerstone of HIV treatment worldwide for two decades, prized for its potency, durability, and low cost. But a growing body of evidence has linked TDF exposure to measurable reductions in bone mineral density, raising an increasingly urgent clinical question: once bone has been lost on a TDF-based regimen, can it be recovered? A new prospective cohort study, published in BMC Infectious Diseases, offers some of the most detailed longitudinal evidence to date that the answer, for many patients, is yes. The research team enrolled 223 virologically suppressed men living with HIV who had low bone mineral density while taking TDF-based antiretroviral therapy.

The new treatment kills off a sub-group of fat cells. (Jian Fan/iStockphoto/Getty Images) Early clinical trials into a new fat reduction treatment have reported promising results, and the treatment takes a more unusual approach: Rather than shrinking fat cells, as most weight loss strategies do, it safely and naturally kills them off. The drug here is CBL-514, which is administered via injection. As well as proving effective at reducing subcutaneous fat (just below the skin), there's evidence it can also reduce visceral fat (stored deeper around the organs). According to the team behind the trials, CBL-514 and its unconventional strategy have the potential to reduce fat in key areas of the body – with further benefits that come with weight loss likely to follow. "We expect that patients will be pleased by the cosmetic effects, such as the flatter stomach that can come with subcutaneous fat loss," says endocrinologist Timothy Garvey, from the University of Alabama at Birmingham, who headed up the trial.