Health

, Alexandra Mae Jones | CBC News | Posted: October 17, 2026 8:00 AM | Last Updated: 2 hours agoWith more than 9,200 confirmed cases and 4,400 deaths, children are vulnerable 'on so many levels'Image | DR Congo Ebola ChildrenCaption: Congolese medical workers dressed in personal protective equipment carry children tested for Ebola inside a secured Ebola response zone in Bunia, D. R. C., on June 9. An estimated 1,900 children have been separated from their caregivers because of the disease. (Gradel Muyisa Mumbere/Reuters)Outside of a treatment centre for Ebola in a northeastern corner of the Democratic Republic of Congo, as the country battles its worst outbreak on record, Neema Nyaloka bounces a baby on her lap. Nyaloka survived Ebola herself. Now, she works with UNICEF to take care of the droves of children isolating from their parents who are being treated for it. UNICEF is operating 12 other child-care centres next to treatment centres full of Ebola patients. Some kids are waiting for their parents to recover, but others have been left stranded after family members passed away.

RSV vaccination was associated with substantially lower all-cause mortality among older adults with heart failure in a multicenter, propensity-matched analysis of U. S. electronic health records. Researchers identified adults aged 60 years or older with heart failure and compared outcomes according to respiratory syncytial virus vaccination status. After propensity score matching, 777 vaccinated patients and 777 unvaccinated patients had well-balanced baseline demographic characteristics, comorbidities, and medication use.

We’re sharing this article early to provide faster access to peer-reviewed, accepted research. It is citable and carries a permanent DOI. This version is subject to further edits and will be replaced automatically by the final Version of Record. All legal disclaimers apply. AbstractAlthough retinal fundus imaging is a non-invasive tool to assess systemic and fundus pathology, current deep learning algorithms are mostly single-task, lack clinical interpretability and are unable to handle acquisition variation between different domains. These constraints limit their clinical utility: when a patient comes to the clinic for fundus screening, they could also be diabetic, have glaucoma, AMD, and increased cardiovascular risk, with each disease having retinal vascular biomarkers that require a patient to be tested for in the clinic, which must be managed within a framework of common, interpretable, and generalizable models rather than a pipeline of independent models.

Fibrosis, the dense scar tissue that can entangle peritoneal tumors and the healthy organs around them, is one reason cytoreduction surgery is denied to a portion of patients with appendiceal and other abdominal cancers. Allegheny Health Network Cancer Center’s newly launched RANDY’S Trial is built on a direct answer to that problem: test whether FDA-approved drugs already on the market can remodel that scar tissue and bring more patients into surgical eligibility. The trial did not emerge from a pharma pipeline or an NIH grant. A single community gala, the La Sera d’Oro event, raised $44,000 in 2025 to fund it. The acronym stands for Repurposed And Naturally-Derived Drugs for the Treatment of Fibrosis in Peritoneal Carcinomatosis. Principal investigator Patrick Wagner, a surgical oncologist at AHN, is leading a multidisciplinary team that will evaluate existing medications for their ability to break down or remodel abdominal scar tissue. The mechanism matters because fibrosis does two things that complicate surgery: it obscures the boundary between healthy and diseased tissue, and it can trap cancer cells that are then left behind when a surgeon separates planes.

Online event offers support for menopause and pain2 hours agoHannah Mitchell, North East and CumbriaandStephanie Finnon, BBC Radio CumbriaPA MediaSouth Cumbria support group Menopause Matters is inviting people from across the county to share their experiencesA support group is holding a county-wide event for women coping with pain associated with menopause and perimenopause. South Cumbria support group Menopause Matters is holding an online forum for World Menopause Day, inviting people to share their experiences and ask questions. World Menopause Day is an annual event started by the International Menopause Society (IMS), with this year's theme Chronic Pain At Midlife. Facilitator Leigh Williams said she hoped Sunday's free online event, being held between 19:00 and 20:00 BST, would "open up the conversation" around pain and menopause. Menopause Matters also holds a monthly cafe-style drop-in in Barrow-in-Furness, offering women the opportunity to meet up in an informal environment. Williams was inspired to become a facilitator because of her own experience with perimenopause and chronic pain. "I know what it feels like when pain starts to shrink your world," she said.

Infection with the human papillomavirus (HPV) is extremely common and, in the vast majority of cases, clears up on its own. However, in some people, the infection persists and can develop into precancerous lesions or even cancer. How can these high-risk situations be identified at an early stage? This is the central question of a study conducted by Michael Herfs’s team at the Interdisciplinary Biomedical Research Center GIGA’s Laboratory of Experimental Pathology at the University of Liège, published in Trends in Molecular Medicine. For several decades, researchers have sought to identify biomarkers capable of accurately predicting the outcome of an infection with a high-risk oncogenic HPV type. Despite significant advances, no viral, immune-related, or molecular marker can currently and reliably predict which infections will regress spontaneously and which will progress to more severe disease.

A good night's sleep does much more than leave you feeling refreshed. During deep sleep, the body releases growth hormone, a powerful chemical messenger that helps build muscle, strengthen bones, and regulate fat metabolism. For teenagers, getting enough sleep is especially important because growth hormone plays a major role in reaching their full height potential. Scientists have long known that insufficient sleep can interfere with growth hormone production. What remained unclear was exactly how the brain controls this process, particularly during non-REM sleep, the deep, restorative stage that typically dominates the earlier part of the night.

A good night's sleep does much more than leave you feeling refreshed. During deep sleep, the body releases growth hormone, a powerful chemical messenger that helps build muscle, strengthen bones, and regulate fat metabolism. For teenagers, getting enough sleep is especially important because growth hormone plays a major role in reaching their full height potential. Scientists have long known that insufficient sleep can interfere with growth hormone production. What remained unclear was exactly how the brain controls this process, particularly during non-REM sleep, the deep, restorative stage that typically dominates the earlier part of the night.

IntroductionClimate change is resulting in an increasing frequency of heatwaves, which leads to a substantial increase in deaths and hospitalizations in the summer1. Besides heat, cold continues to be a major health threat and accounts for substantial proportions of deaths2 and hospitalizations3,4. Current evidence suggests heat to be associated with more hospitalizations due to infectious diseases, respiratory, cardiovascular, and neurological outcomes5,6,7, while cold temperatures were primarily associated with cardiovascular and respiratory conditions8. Compared to mortality, hospitalizations reflect a more sensitive indicator of temperature-related health effects, including also less severe cases. Moreover, temperature-related (emergency) hospitalizations are of central public health importance since they naturally reflect unplanned admissions, reveal vulnerabilities in the population, and thus represent a source of uncertainty and potential strain on existing hospital capacity.

We’re sharing this article early to provide faster access to peer-reviewed, accepted research. It is citable and carries a permanent DOI. This version is subject to further edits and will be replaced automatically by the final Version of Record. All legal disclaimers apply. AbstractQuantum magnetic sensing is a new paradigm for detecting ultra-weak magnetic fields. Its protocol design concerns the devise of optimal sensing parameters to estimate the underlying signals of interest (SoI). Existing studies mainly rely on adaptive algorithms based on black-box AI models or formula-driven principled searches. However, when the SoI spans a wide range and the quantum sensor has physical constraints, these methods may fail to converge efficiently or optimally, causing prolonged interrogation times and reduced accuracy. This work presents a new protocol using a two-stage optimization method, consisting of a Bayesian neural network to first narrow the SoI range and a federated reinforcement learning agent to subsequently calibrate the SoI.

Will you get the job? What will the medical test results show? And what’s with that ominously vague email your boss sent? Uncertainty and change have always been challenging to handle, for some people more than others, said Michel Dugas, a psychology professor at the University of Québec in Outaouais. There’s also today’s rapid changes in politics, technology and more.

Is simply letting nature take its course enough to stay healthy as we age? In this episode of CGTN's Health Talk, Prof. Andrea Maier, Dr. Camillo Ricordi and Dr. Tim Shi share practical advice on healthy longevity and discuss the shared challenges facing global healthcare. The experts explain how modern lifestyles disrupt the body's internal balance and suggest proactive daily habits, including intermittent fasting, cutting back on high-carb breakfasts and combining exercise with cognitive tasks. Beyond individual habits, they stress that shifting healthcare from reactive treatment to proactive disease prevention remains a major global challenge – one that requires cross-border collaboration and resource sharing to overcome. Supervisor: Zhang JingwenProducer: Yang ShaDirectors: Chen Chen and Lu WeiVideo Editors: Zhong Xia, Chen Chen, Wang YuxinCopy Editors: Wu Gang, Shanaaz Prince, Xu WenCover Image Designers: Huang Ruiqi, Zhu Shangfan