Blog

(The Guardian) – Judge says people should not lose chance of parenthood ‘by the ticking of a clock’ after 10-year deadline missed

Lawyers for 15 groups affected by the errors – some of them former cancer patients – asked the court in London to declare it would be lawful for the embryos or cells to remain in storage, despite the consent expiring in June last year. In some cases this was because fertility clinics failed to notify those affected.

In an unusual situation, the move was unopposed, with no objections from the clinics, the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority or the health secretary. (Read More)

(New York Times) – Health workers in developing countries know that isolating tuberculosis patients is an outdated and potentially harmful practice, but lack the resources to move away from it.

The sanitarium model of TB treatment — confining people in isolation for a lengthy period — was declared obsolete in the United States and other high-income countries some 60 years ago. It lingered in Eastern Europe until 15 years ago, but it is still used in some low-income countries in Africa and Asia, where health systems lack the resources to update policy, retrain staff or deploy community health workers to help patients at home.

For the past 15 years, the World Health Organization has said that TB patients should not be isolated or confined, or hospitalized at all, unless they are acutely ill. Research shows that their TB treatment would be more successful if done at home, because patients would have better mental health and would be less exposed to other infections. (Read More)

(AP) – Puerto Rico’s governor on Thursday signed a bill that amends a law to recognize a fetus as a human being, a move doctors and legal experts warn will have deep ramifications for the U.S. Caribbean territory.

The amendment was approved without public hearings and amid concerns from opponents who warned it would unleash confusion and affect how doctors and pregnant or potentially pregnant women are treated. (Read More)

(Ars Technica) – The World Health Organization on Friday released a formal statement blasting a US-funded vaccine trial as “unethical,” because it would withhold an established, safe, and potentially lifesaving vaccine against hepatitis B from some newborns in Guinea-Bissau, Africa.

“In its current form, and based on publicly available information, the trial is inconsistent with established ethical and scientific principles,” the WHO concluded, after providing a bullet-point list of reasons the trial was harmful and low quality. (Read More)

(Wired) – EVA AI created a pop-up romantic date night at a Manhattan wine bar to help in making AI-human relationships a “new normal.”

If you’re the type of person who cares about Valentine’s Day, not having someone to spend it with can be a bummer.

While dating apps have been yielding diminishing returns for singles for years now, more people are finding companionship with AI partners.

But where do you take your AI lover for a night on the town?

Ahead of Valentine’s Day, EVA AI decided to try out an experiment. The app, where users can text or live video call (a new feature) with AI dates, set up a pop-up café at Same Same Wine Bar in Manhattan. (Read More)

(Wired) – The use of cryptocurrency in sales of human beings for prostitution and scam compounds nearly doubled in 2025, according to a conservative estimate. Many of the deals are happening in plain sight.

Cryptocurrency’s frictionless, transnational, low-regulation transactions have long promised the ability to pay anyone in the world for anything. More than ever before, that anything includes human beings: victims of human trafficking forced into scam compounds and the sex trade on an industrial scale, bought and sold in crypto deals carried out with impunity, often in full public view. (Read More)

(Independent) – France plans to send a letter to all 29-year-olds in the country encouraging them to have babies before it is “too late”.

Hundreds of thousands of young people will receive the letter, which aims to provide “targeted, balanced and scientifically based information on sexual and reproductive health” to “avoid the ‘if only I had known’ mentality”, the health ministry said.

But the measure, which is part of a 16-point plan to tackle France’s declining birth rate, has been criticised by those who say it will not have the desired effect. (Read More)

(New York Times) – A study reported that the conventional method of searching follicular fluid didn’t find all the eggs. The new technology found extra eggs more than half the time.

Using the conventional method, embryologists use high-powered microscopes to search the follicular fluid extracted from women in fertility clinics. The fluid is then discarded. The study, published in Nature Medicine on Thursday, reported that a device that uses microfluidic technology to sift through follicular fluid found additional eggs for more than half of the patients. (Read More)

(Nature) – Researchers identify genetic mutation in small group of people who developed the serious disorder after receiving the AstraZeneca or Johnson & Johnson vaccine.

About one in 200,000 people developed vaccine-induced immune thrombocytopenia and thrombosis (VITT), as the syndrome became known, after receiving a vaccine made by Johnson & Johnson in the United States. The rare condition was also reported in about three out of every 100,000 people who received the vaccine made by AstraZeneca in the United Kingdom. Both vaccines used a modified version of an adenovirus, a type of virus known to cause the common cold, to carry the gene for part of the SARS-CoV-2 virus into human cells. This triggered the immune system to create antibodies against SARS-CoV-2. (Read More)

(NPR) – A new report from Congress has raised the alarm about children with mental health conditions being held in juvenile detention, rather than getting treatment.

“Prolonged Incarceration of Children Due to Mental Health Care Shortages,” released Thursday by the staff of Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff and Republican Rep. Jen Kiggans, is based on a survey sent to administrators of public juvenile detention facilities around the country. About half of those who responded to the survey reported they had, at some point, kept children incarcerated when they could have been released into offsite mental health care. (Read More)

(The Guardian) – Cognitive health in later life is ‘strongly influenced’ by lifelong exposure to intellectually stimulating environments, say researchers

Reading, writing and learning a language or two can lower your risk of dementia by almost 40%, according to a study that suggests millions of people could prevent or delay the condition.

Dementia is one of the world’s biggest health threats. The number of people living with the condition is forecast to triple to more than 150 million globally by 2050, and experts say it presents a big and rapidly growing threat to future health and social care systems in every community, country and continent.

US researchers found that engaging in intellectually stimulating activities throughout life, such as reading, writing or learning a new language, was associated with a lower risk of Alzheimer’s disease, the most common form of dementia, and slower cognitive decline. (Read More)