Bristol tops measles cases for 2025 as South West figures rise
A steep rise in measles has been revealed in the latest health data which also shows a low uptake for vaccines for children.Bristol has recorded the most measles cases outside London so far this year, with 47 confirmed infections - 11% of the national total. Between 1 January and 2 June, there were 420 confirmed measles cases across England, according to new figures from the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA). The South West region, which includes Bristol, has reported 58 of these cases (14%), meaning it has the highest number of cases outside London.
Measles cases have been on the rise throughout 2025, peaking in April with 109 before falling slightly May.More than two-thirds (66%) of confirmed cases were in children aged 10 or younger, with 29% in people aged 15 and over. No deaths have been reported to date, but public health officials have warned measles can cause serious complications, especially in younger children and unvaccinated adults.Approximately 14.9% of five-year-olds in Bristol have not had the MMR (measles, mumps, and rubella) vaccine, according to figures from the UKHSA.London has 162 reported cases, the most overall.
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The Independent
37 minutes ago
- The Independent
Measles outbreaks in Michigan and Pennsylvania end, while Texas logs just 4 new cases
The U.S. logged 122 more cases of measles last week — but only four of them in Texas — while the outbreaks in Pennsylvania and Michigan officially ended. There were 1,168 confirmed measles cases in the U.S., the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Friday. Health officials in Texas, where the nation's biggest outbreak raged during the late winter and spring, said they'll now post case counts only once a week — yet another sign the outbreak is slowing. There are three other major outbreaks in North America. The longest, in Ontario, Canada, has resulted in 2,009 cases from mid-October through June 3. The province logged its first death Thursday in a baby that got congenital measles but also had other preexisting conditions. Another outbreak in Alberta, Canada, has sickened 761 as of Thursday. And the Mexican state of Chihuahua had 1,940 measles cases and four deaths as of Friday, according to data from the state health ministry. Other U.S. states with active outbreaks — which the CDC defines as three or more related cases — include Colorado, Illinois, Kansas, Montana, New Mexico, North Dakota, Ohio and Oklahoma. In the U.S., two elementary school-aged children in the epicenter in West Texas and an adult in New Mexico have died of measles this year. All were unvaccinated. Measles is caused by a highly contagious virus that's airborne and spreads easily when an infected person breathes, sneezes or coughs. It is preventable through vaccines, and has been considered eliminated from the U.S. since 2000. How many measles cases are there in Texas? There were a total of 742 cases across 35 counties, most of them in West Texas, state health officials said Friday. Throughout the outbreak, 94 people have been hospitalized. State health officials estimated less than 1% of cases — fewer than 10 — are actively infectious. Fifty-five percent of Texas' cases are in Gaines County, where the virus started spreading in a close-knit, undervaccinated Mennonite community. The county has had 411 cases since late January — just under 2% of the county's residents. The April 3 death in Texas was an 8-year-old child, according to Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Local health officials said the child did not have underlying health conditions and died of 'what the child's doctor described as measles pulmonary failure.' A unvaccinated child with no underlying conditions died of measles in Texas in late February; Kennedy said the child was 6. How many measles cases are there in New Mexico? New Mexico added two cases in the last week for a total of 81. Seven people have been hospitalized since the outbreak started. Most of the state's cases are in Lea County. Sandoval County near Albuquerque has six cases, Eddy County has three, Doña Ana County has two. Chaves, Curry and San Juan counties have one each. An unvaccinated adult died of measles-related illness March 6. The person did not seek medical care. How many cases are there in Oklahoma? Oklahoma added one case last week for a total of 15 confirmed and three probable cases. The state health department is not releasing which counties have cases. How many cases are there in Colorado? Colorado has seen a total of 12 measles cases in 2025, which includes one outbreak of seven related cases. The outbreak is linked to a Turkish Airlines flight that landed at Denver International Airport in mid-May, and includes three cases each in Arapahoe and El Paso counties and one in Denver, plus a person who doesn't live in Colorado. Other counties that have seen measles this year include Archuleta and Pueblo. How many cases are there in Illinois? Illinois health officials confirmed a four-case outbreak on May 5 in the far southern part of the state, and it's grown to eight cases as of June 6, according to the Illinois Department of Public Health. The state's other two cases so far this year were in Cook County, and are unrelated to the southern Illinois outbreak. How many cases are there in Kansas? Kansas has a total of 71 cases across 11 counties in the southwestern part of the state, with three hospitalizations. All but two of the cases are connected, and most are in Gray County. How many cases are there in Montana? Montana had 17 measles cases as of Thursday. Ten were in Gallatin County, which is where the first cases showed up — Montana's first in 35 years. Flathead and Yellowstone counties had two cases each, and Hill County had three case. There are outbreaks in neighboring North Dakota and the Canadian provinces of Alberta, British Columbia and Saskatchewan. How many cases are there in North Dakota? North Dakota, which hadn't seen measles since 2011, was up to 34 cases as of Friday. Two of the people have been hospitalized, and all of the people with confirmed cases were not vaccinated. There were 16 cases in Williams County in western North Dakota on the Montana border. On the eastern side of the state on the Minnesota border, there were 10 cases in Grand Forks County and seven cases in Cass County. Burke County, in northwest North Dakota on the border of Saskatchewan, Canada, had one case. How many cases are there in Ohio? Ohio remained steady for a third week at 34 measles cases and one hospitalization, according to the Ohio Department of Health. That count includes only Ohio residents. The state has two outbreaks: Ashtabula County near Cleveland has 16 cases, and Knox County in east-central Ohio has 20 — 14 among Ohio residents and the rest among visitors. Allen, Cuyahoga, Holmes and Defiance counties have one case each. How many cases are there in Tennessee? Tennessee has had six measles cases since early May, but no change since. Tennessee's outbreak appears to be over, as health officials say there have not been any new cases in six weeks. Where else is measles showing up in the U.S.? Measles cases also have been reported in Alaska, Arkansas, California, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Vermont, Virginia and Washington. Earlier outbreaks in Indiana, Michigan and Pennsylvania were declared over by health officials after six weeks of no new cases. Cases and outbreaks in the U.S. are frequently traced to someone who caught the disease abroad. The CDC said in May that more than twice as many measles have come from outside of the U.S. compared to May of last year, and most of those are in unvaccinated Americans returning home. In 2019, the U.S. saw 1,274 cases and almost lost its status of having eliminated measles. What do you need to know about the MMR vaccine? The best way to avoid measles is to get the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine. The first shot is recommended for children between 12 and 15 months old and the second between 4 and 6 years old. Getting another MMR shot as an adult is harmless if there are concerns about waning immunity, the CDC says. People who have documentation of receiving a live measles vaccine in the 1960s don't need to be revaccinated, but people who were immunized before 1968 with an ineffective vaccine made from 'killed' virus should be revaccinated with at least one dose, the agency said. People who have documentation that they had measles are immune, and those born before 1957 generally don't need the shots because so many children got measles back then that they have 'presumptive immunity." Measles has a harder time spreading through communities with high vaccination rates — above 95% — due to 'herd immunity.' But childhood vaccination rates have declined nationwide since the pandemic and more parents are claiming religious or personal conscience waivers to exempt their kids from required shots. What are the symptoms of measles? Measles first infects the respiratory tract, then spreads throughout the body, causing a high fever, runny nose, cough, red, watery eyes and a rash. The rash generally appears three to five days after the first symptoms, beginning as flat red spots on the face and then spreading downward to the neck, trunk, arms, legs and feet. When the rash appears, the fever may spike over 104 degrees Fahrenheit, according to the CDC. Most kids will recover from measles, but infection can lead to dangerous complications such as pneumonia, blindness, brain swelling and death. How can you treat measles? There's no specific treatment for measles, so doctors generally try to alleviate symptoms, prevent complications and keep patients comfortable. ___ The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Science and Educational Media Group and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
Telegraph
44 minutes ago
- Telegraph
Just how psychopathic are surgeons?
These are the people we trust to hold a sharpened knife above our bare bellies and press down until they see blood. We let them tinker with our hearts, brains and bowels while we lie unconscious beneath their gloved hands. Surgeons live in a world of terrifying margins, where the difference of a millimetre can be the difference between life and death. That level of precision demands an extraordinary calm, or what you could also call a cold detachment. But what happens when that same self-possession curdles into something darker? In recent weeks, two surgeons have made headlines for all the wrong reasons. In France, Joël Le Scouarnec was sentenced for abusing hundreds of children – some while they lay anaesthetised in his care. In the UK, plastic surgeon Peter Brooks was convicted of the attempted murder of fellow consultant Graeme Perks, whom he stabbed after breaking into his home in Nottinghamshire. Today, Brooks was sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum term of 22 years at Loughborough Courthouse. It would, of course, be absurd to taint an entire profession with the acts of two individuals. But it does resurface a long-standing, uncomfortable question: might the very traits that make a surgeon brilliant also mask something far more troubling? 'When people hear the word psychopath, they tend to think of serial killers and rapists,' says Dr Kevin Dutton, a psychologist and the author of The Wisdom of Psychopaths. 'But the truth is that certain psychopathic traits – focus, emotional dispassion, ruthlessness, self-confidence – can predispose you to success, and in an operating theatre, they really come to the fore.' Dutton has spent much of his career trying to prove that 'bad psychopaths' – people who have these characteristics but who can't regulate them – are the ones who commit crimes. A 'good psychopath', by contrast, is someone who can dial those qualities up and down at whim. He recalls one neurosurgeon who was regularly brought to tears by bits of classical music, but who also said, 'Emotion is entropy. I have hunted it to extinction over the years.' Similarly, a cardiothoracic surgeon told him that once a patient was under, he no longer saw them as a person – just a piece of meat. 'Once you care, you are walking an emotional tightrope,' says Dutton, 'but if you see the human body in front of you as a puzzle to solve, then you are more likely to save their life.' 'There's a ruthless part of me' Gabriel Weston, a London-based surgeon and the author of Direct Red: A Surgeon's Story, describes her profession as one that requires you to 'flick off a switch'. Sent to boarding school at a young age (much of British surgery is the product of elite schools), Weston learnt early how to detach emotionally – a skill she found served her well in the theatre. 'If you asked my family, they'd say I'm very emotional in that I cry in films or at art or literature,' she says. 'But there's a ruthless part of me. I use that in surgery – and in other parts of life where emotion just gets in the way.' Over time, Weston learnt to distinguish between two kinds of surgeons: those who switch their feelings back on once they leave the operating room, and those who never do. 'They don't just have psychopathic traits,' she says. 'They live in that space permanently.' They can also come with a reputation for being not just difficult, but dangerous. Harry Thompson*, a British abdominal surgeon, describes a world of towering egos and simmering aggression. 'If you think about it, all surgeons were in the top five of their class,' he says. 'They are all very competitive, and many play sports: they want to prove they are better than everyone. And if you are at the forefront of major surgery, you think you are invincible. It's a boiling-house environment of jealousy, envy and hatred.' He recalls one consultant who stabbed a plain-clothes policeman with a disposable scalpel after being stopped for speeding en route to the theatre. Another smashed a ward office clock when a nurse arrived five minutes late. Physical assaults were, he says, more common than you would think. 'I was in one operation when a student, John, was an hour and a half late, because he overslept. The surgeon thumped the student's head against the theatre wall until he was unconscious, screamed, 'Nobody move!' then started kicking him. No one ever saw John again.' Nor is the patient always spared. 'When I was training, I saw one surgeon thump a patient for removing a drain from his own bottom after an operation because it had become painful,' says Thompson. 'The patient only admitted this (in tears) after the surgeon had made the nurses and junior doctors line up and interrogated each one in turn about who had done it.' Thompson used to work with Simon Bramhall – the liver surgeon who made headlines and was later struck off for branding his initials onto patients' livers using a laser. 'Simon had always been a bit mad,' says Thompson. 'He was fascinated by the programme Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) and he always wore a white suit [like the character Hopkirk], tie, shoes and socks.' As for tattooing his patients' organs: the initials were discovered by his colleagues only during a second surgery when his once-subtle etching was now grotesquely enlarged by liver damage. While Bramhall's actions sparked public outrage, some in the medical community were nonplussed. Perhaps because this is a far more commonplace occurrence than we realise: an article in Harper's Magazine cited examples of anonymous ophthalmic surgeons who had lasered their initials onto retinas, and orthopaedic surgeons who had etched theirs into bone cement. 'Why would you do that? Ego, of course,' says Dutton, 'and it isn't incidental in surgery. It's selected for. From the moment you start training, you have to fight – quite literally – for your space at the operating table.' 'I find it very freeing not to be pleasant' Dutton researched which of the various disciplines within the profession had the highest rates of psychopathy, and the results are revealing. Number one is neurosurgery (which is bad luck for any fans of Grey's Anatomy), followed by cardiothoracic or heart surgery and then orthopaedic. 'The last one is brutal as you have to smash people's bones,' says Dutton. 'Cardio more than anything is about life and death, but neurosurgery is particularly interesting to me. I think it's because this is the only branch of surgery where, if something goes wrong, you leave the patient permanently crippled or blinded or incapacitated, so only very few people can take such a calculated risk under pressure.' And though these traits are often seen as typically male, women are by no means exempt. Weston says the most difficult surgeon she ever worked under was a woman. 'She was very attractive and well-liked – mostly for being gorgeous and good at her job – but privately she made my life hell. Maybe she didn't like another woman being on the team but she did that horrible thing that women do of presenting this incredibly benign face while being very cruel in private. For months, she blamed me for mistakes that weren't mine, stole credit for my diagnoses, and made me feel like my surgical skills were terrible. She was truly villainous.' And yet, Weston admits, the operating theatre offers her a rare freedom: 'If you are a woman who is quite tough and unsentimental, surgery is a really amazing environment in which you can be yourself. There are many areas of my life – mainly motherhood, but also writing – where there is an expectation that I will be softer than I am. Like Simone de Beauvoir, I find it very freeing not to be pleasant.' Perhaps there is something in all of this (criminal and violent behaviour aside) that we, as patients, secretly find reassuring. We don't want our surgeons to hesitate. We don't want them to be emotional or anxious. We want them to be brilliant: laser-focused, supremely confident, even terrifying if that's what it takes to save us. In life, we dislike arrogance. On the operating table, many of us yearn for it. 'I had one boss,' says Thompson, 'a French surgeon. He used to say: 'There are the porters, the nurses, the managers – and then there are the surgeons. Above them, God. And above God? Me.''
The Guardian
2 hours ago
- The Guardian
The Guardian view on fitness: evidence of the benefits of exercise keeps growing, but who is listening?
The role of exercise in promoting good general health, and helping to prevent heart disease, strokes and diabetes is well established. No wonder, then, that long‑distance running keeps growing in popularity. Popular tracks and parks have never been busier, with groups in stretchy Lycra and fitness trackers on their wrists. The internet is awash with exercise videos, while figures earlier this year showed that gym memberships have climbed to a record 11.5m. The 16.9% of people aged 16 or over in Britain who belong to a gym is one of the highest proportions in Europe. The older teenagers and young adults of generation Z are a key demographic behind this social trend. And recent news from the world's biggest cancer conference, in Chicago, shows how right they are to take the health benefits of fitness seriously. A landmark trial compared the outcomes of patients in several countries who were placed on a programme of structured exercise – assisted by a personal trainer – with those offered standard health advice. The results showing that exercise could be as effective as drugs, without the side-effects, in preventing the recurrence of colon cancer, were described by Prof Sir Stephen Powis, the national medical director of NHS England, as 'really exciting'. The expectation is that the study will influence treatment guidelines worldwide – including in the increasingly fitness-conscious UK. But there is another narrative about exercise in Britain that is hard to reconcile with the one above. This is that we are a chronically unwell, overweight and sedentary population, whose health problems are only partly linked to the Europe-wide demographic challenge of ageing. These difficulties are widely recognised to be psychological as well as physical, with particular concerns around the worsening mental health of children and young people, which is widely linked to the rise in smartphone use. Which of these accounts of British fitness habits is more accurate depends which segment of the population is being scrutinised. Government figures show that the age gap – with 16- to 24-year-olds the most physically active age group – is not the only one. There is also a significant socioeconomic disparity. Students and adults in managerial and professional jobs are much more likely to keep active than manual workers or people who are long-term unemployed. As with other indicators of health, such as weight or smoking, there is a clear correlation with income. Richer people with more education and higher social status are more likely to be well. Could gen Z buck this trend with its more general embrace of fitness, which some point out is far cheaper than pub-going? It is too soon to be sure. Some young people believe their gym-going habits are as much about economic insecurity and status anxiety as they are about commitment to health. But as ministers finalise their 10-year plan for the NHS, which is expected to place a strong emphasis on prevention, they have an opportunity to build on, and shape, the way that exercise is offered and experienced. That being physically active is good for you is reinforced by the latest cancer study. But a preoccupation with personal appearance can be debilitating. A public health approach to exercise should seek to maximise the gains and minimise the harms associated with fitness culture.
