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The Independent
4 hours ago
- Climate
- The Independent
The deadly hidden dangers of heatwaves - and how to keep yourself safe
Nearly 600 deaths are expected across England and Wales due to the current heatwave, scientists have warned. Researchers from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and Imperial College London estimate around 570 excess deaths between Thursday and Sunday, based on historic mortality data. The new research follows a World Weather Attribution (WWA) research group study which found the heatwave has been made about 100 times more likely and 2-4C hotter due to climate change. Temperatures could reach 30C on Saturday, following highs of 29C in Coningsby, Lincolnshire, on Friday, according to the Met Office. It comes as a second amber heat health alert in two weeks came into force on Friday. The alert, which covers London, the East Midlands, South East, South West and East of England, will last until 6pm on Tuesday. Here, The Independent looks at how you can keep yourself safe during a heatwave: Prevent dehydration The government advises staying hydrated during hot weather by drinking fluids regularly throughout the day, particularly if you are active. Water, diluted squash and lower-fat milks are recommended. While fruit juice, smoothies and soft drinks can seem refreshing, they often contain high levels of sugar, which may contribute to dehydration. It's best to limit how much of these you consume and opt for diet, sugar-free or no-added-sugar alternatives instead. If you're heading out, take a refillable bottle of water with you, and carry extra if travelling by car or public transport. Alcohol can dehydrate the body, so choosing alcohol-free drinks or alternating alcoholic drinks with water is advised. Protect yourself from the sun The sun in the UK is strong enough to cause sunburn, with children especially vulnerable to skin damage. To reduce your risk, follow these sun safety measures: Stay in the shade between 11am and 3pm, when the sun is at its strongest Wear loose, light-coloured clothing made from tightly woven fabric, such as long-sleeved shirts, trousers or long skirts Protect your head, neck, face and ears with a wide-brimmed hat Use sunglasses to shield your eyes from the sun Apply sunscreen generously and top it up regularly, especially after swimming or using a towel. The NHS recommends using sunscreen with a sun protection factor (SPF) of at least 30 and a UVA rating of four or five stars. How to keep your home cool Homes can become uncomfortably warm during hot weather, especially at night when trying to sleep. To keep indoor temperatures down, consider the following steps: Keep blinds and curtains closed on windows that face direct sunlight during the day If your home has external shutters or shades, keep them closed too Try to sleep or rest in the coolest part of the house When it's cooler outside than indoors, typically during the night, open windows if it is safe, and create a cross-breeze to help air circulate Use electric fans if the indoor temperature is below 35C, but avoid directing airflow straight at your body, as this can contribute to dehydration Make sure heating systems are switched off Turn off any lights or electronic devices not being used, as they can generate extra heat If the temperature outside is cooler, especially in shaded areas, consider spending time outdoors Public spaces such as places of worship, libraries or supermarkets may be cooler than your home. If they are nearby, visiting one can offer a helpful break from the heat. Heat exhaustion happens when the body gets too hot and struggles to cool down. It's not usually serious if you cool down within 30 minutes, but if untreated, it can develop into heatstroke, according to the NHS. Signs of heat exhaustion include: Tiredness or weakness Dizziness or feeling faint Headache Muscle cramps Nausea or vomiting Heavy sweating Strong thirst Heatstroke is more serious and occurs when the body's temperature rises to dangerous levels and can no longer cool itself. Symptoms include: Confusion or disorientation Loss of coordination Rapid heartbeat Fast breathing or shortness of breath Hot, dry skin (not sweating) Seizures Heatstroke is a medical emergency. Call 999 immediately and try to cool the person down while waiting for help. Who is most at risk during hot weather? While anyone can feel unwell in the heat, some people are more vulnerable. These include:
Yahoo
5 hours ago
- Health
- Yahoo
Report forecasts tech-driven vision for NHS could add £40bn to annual UK GDP
With profound change in sight for the UK's National Health Service (NHS), a new report indicates that a technology-driven vision for the national health system could add £40bn ($54.8bn) to the nation's annual GDP. Co-authored by Boston Consulting Group (BCG), Siemens Healthineers, and Imperial College London, the report follows the UK Spending Review on 11 June, in which Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves announced that the NHS will receive a £29bn ($39.1bn) funding boost, reflecting a 3% annual rise on current levels over the next three years to reach £226bn by 2029. Reeves also revealed that the funding would increase the NHS's technology budget by almost 50%, with £10bn ($13.5bn) of the total funding earmarked to bring the 'analogue health system into the digital age'. Commissioned by the NHS as input to its 10-Year Plan, which is anticipated to be released in early July, the report foresees that innovation in diagnosis has the potential to impact population outcomes through risk stratification and intervention to 'prevent disease and alleviate burden on the broader healthcare system'. According to the research, by addressing health inequalities through predictive, personalised and preventative care, two to three million healthy life years could be added to the five most economically deprived groups among the UK population each year, thereby boosting the UK's GDP by around £40bn each year. Achieving this aim would primarily be driven by implementing technologies such as AI for the early diagnosis of diseases such as cancer, the report stated. Also, the report envisions the deployment of AI and technologies including remote patient monitoring tools, to take preventative action on conditions such as high blood pressure and hypertension that are well-established predicates of life-threatening conditions such as coronary artery disease (CAD), stroke, and cancer. In turn, the report forecasts that the impact of technologies' deployment in the NHS would deliver £12bn-£18bn ($16.4-$24.7bn) in productivity gains for NHS healthcare systems annually. By integrating diagnostic data into NHS R&D, the report also forecasts that drug development timelines could be reduced, resulting in new drugs being brought to patients up to twice as fast, with operational cost savings and commercial data revenue worth £10bn-£15bn ($13.7bn- $20.5bn) to the NHS annually. Ben Horner, managing director and partner at BCG and co-author of the report, said: 'As the UK Government prepares to set out its 10-Year Health Plan, this research highlights the scale of the opportunity ahead. 'By embracing technology and data-driven innovation, the NHS could add over £40bn to UK GDP annually. This would improve patient outcomes, easing pressure on frontline services and boosting productivity across the system. The foundations are already in place; now is the moment to shift from pilots to full-scale implementation.' "Report forecasts tech-driven vision for NHS could add £40bn to annual UK GDP" was originally created and published by Medical Device Network, a GlobalData owned brand. The information on this site has been included in good faith for general informational purposes only. It is not intended to amount to advice on which you should rely, and we give no representation, warranty or guarantee, whether express or implied as to its accuracy or completeness. You must obtain professional or specialist advice before taking, or refraining from, any action on the basis of the content on our site. Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Yahoo
16 hours ago
- Health
- Yahoo
Why bad dreams could be aging and prematurely killing you
Nightmares can literally scare the life out of people, new research suggests. Frequent unpleasant dreams and nightmares are being linked with accelerated biological aging and an untimely death. According to a British team, people who experience weekly distressing dreams are three times more likely to die before they reach age 70 than people who rarely or never report experiencing nightmares. Researchers said the finding held even after they accounted for smoking, obesity, unhealthy diets and other risk factors for an early death. The study can't prove causation — that nightmares are premature killers. However, one theory implicates the stress hormone cortisol. Higher levels of cortisol are associated with shorter telomeres, tiny caps at the end of chromosomes, like the tip of a shoelace. Telomeres get shorter every time a cell divides, and shorter telomeres are considered a sign of accelerated aging of the body's cells. Cortisol is present at high levels during nightmares. 'For those who frequently experience nightmares, this cumulative stress may significantly impact the aging process,' the study's lead author, Dr. Abidemi Otaiku, of the UK Dementia Research Institute and Imperial College London, said in a statement released this week. What's more, nightmares mess with how well and how long people sleep, 'impairing the body's essential overnight cellular restoration and repair,' Otaiku said. 'The combined effects of chronic stress and disrupted sleep likely contribute to the accelerated aging of our cells and bodies.' Nightmares are common, Otaiku reported in earlier work linking nightmares with an increased risk of dementia and cognitive decline in middle-aged adults. About five percent of adults experience nightmares weekly, and up to 40 percent monthly, percentages that are likely even higher if bad dreams are thrown in, he said. Considering how common a phenomenon nightmares are, 'it is surprising that their clinical significance remains largely unknown,' he wrote. In the latest study, presented this week at the European Academy of Neurology Congress in Helsinki, Otaiku and colleagues analyzed pooled data from 2,429 children aged eight to 10, and 183,012 adults aged 26 to 86 from six cohort studies following large groups of people over time. Adults reported how often they had nightmares at the start of the study, and were followed for up to 19 years. For kids, nightmare frequency was reported by parents. According to a release, adults reporting weekly nightmares were three times as likely to die prematurely than people who rarely or never experienced distressing dreams. 'Children and adults with more frequent nightmares also exhibited faster biological aging, which accounted for approximately 40 percent of the heightened mortality risk' among adults, according to the release. Even people who reported monthly nightmares showed signs of faster aging and a higher mortality, 'Our sleeping brains cannot distinguish dreams from reality,' Otaiku said. 'That's why nightmares often wake us up sweating, gasping for breath and with our hearts pounding — because our fight-or-flight response has been triggered. 'This stress reaction can be more intense than anything we experience while awake.' While it's all enough to lose sleep over, more research is needed to confirm the associations. Hormones are just one factor in accelerated cellular aging. In the meantime, nightmares are less likely if people avoid scary movies, manage stress and seek help for symptoms of anxiety or depression, Otaiku said. Stress can drive unpleasant dreams, University of Montreal psychologist and sleep scientist Antonio Zadra told National Post last year as part of a special series on sleep. But dreams also 'tend to embody our current concerns and preoccupations and much of what is on our minds is often negatively toned.' Worries 'get replayed in our dreams in metaphorical and disjointed ways, and the emotions underlying them get amplified,' Zadra said. Strategies to distract negative thoughts can help calm people down, he and other said, like reading a book or slowing breathing, which soothes the fight-or-flight response. National Post Millennial couples are sleeping apart to stay together. Why sleep divorce is surging Why more Canadians are landing in emergency departments with cannabis-induced vomiting Our website is the place for the latest breaking news, exclusive scoops, longreads and provocative commentary. Please bookmark and sign up for our daily newsletter, Posted, here.
Sinar Daily
a day ago
- Science
- Sinar Daily
Warning signs on climate flashing bright red
PARIS - From carbon pollution to sea-level rise to global heating, the pace and level of key climate change indicators are all in unchartered territory, more than 60 top scientists warned recently. Greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels and deforestation hit a new high in 2024 and averaged, over the last decade, a record 53.6 billion tonnes per year -- that's 100,000 tonnes per minute -- of CO2 or its equivalent in other gases, they reported in a peer-reviewed update. A man fills bottles with water in New York City on June 24, 2025. A potentially life-threatening heat wave enveloped the eastern third of the United States on June 23 impacting nearly 160 million people, with temperatures this week expected to reach 102 degrees Fahrenheit (39 degrees Celsius) in the New York metropolitan area. Dangerously high temperatures are forecast through midweek in Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York City and Boston. (Photo by Leonardo Munoz / AFP) Earth's surface temperature last year breached 1.5 degrees Celsius for the first time, and the additional CO2 humanity can emit with a two-thirds chance of staying under that threshold long-term -- our 1.5C "carbon budget" -- will be exhausted in a couple of years, they calculated. Investment in clean energy outpaced investment in oil, gas and coal last year two-to-one, but fossil fuels account for more than 80 percent of global energy consumption, and growth in renewables still lags behind new demand. Included in the 2015 Paris climate treaty as an aspirational goal, the 1.5C limit has since been validated by science as necessary for avoiding a catastrophically climate-addled world. The hard cap on warming to which nearly 200 nations agreed was "well below" two degrees, commonly interpreted to mean 1.7C to 1.8C. "We are already in crunch time for these higher levels of warming," co-author Joeri Rogelj, a professor of climate science and policy at Imperial College London, told journalists in a briefing. "The next three or four decades is pretty much the timeline over which we expect a peak in warming to happen." 'The wrong direction' No less alarming than record heat and carbon emissions is the gathering pace at which these and other climate indicators are shifting, according to the study, published in Earth System Science Data. Human-induced warming increased over the last decade at a rate "unprecedented in the instrumental record", and well above the 2010-2019 average registered in the UN's most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, in 2021. The new findings -- led by the same scientists using essentially the same methods -- are intended as an authoritative albeit unofficial update of the benchmark IPCC reports underpinning global climate diplomacy. They should be taken as a reality check by policymakers, the authors suggested. "I tend to be an optimistic person," said lead author Piers Forster, head of the University of Leed's Priestley Centre for Climate Futures. "But if you look at this year's update, things are all moving in the wrong direction." The rate at which sea levels have shot up in recent years is also alarming, the scientists said. After creeping up, on average, well under two millimetres per year from 1901 to 2018, global oceans have risen 4.3 mm annually since 2019. What happens next? An increase in the ocean watermark of 23 centimetres -- the width of a letter-sized sheet of paper -- over the last 125 years has been enough to imperil many small island states and hugely amplify the destructive power of storm surges worldwide. An additional 20 centimetres of sea level rise by 2050 would cause one trillion dollars in flood damage annually in the world's 136 largest coastal cities, earlier research has shown. Another indicator underlying all the changes in the climate system is Earth's so-called energy imbalance, the difference between the amount of solar energy entering the atmosphere and the smaller amount leaving it. So far, 91 percent of human-caused warming has been absorbed by oceans, sparing life on land an unlivable hell-scape. But the planet's energy imbalance has nearly doubled in the last 20 years, and scientists do not know how long oceans will continue to massively soak up this excess heat. Dire future climate impacts worse than what the world has already experienced are already baked in over the next decade or two. But beyond that, the future is in our hands, the scientists made clear. "We will rapidly reach a level of global warming of 1.5C, but what happens next depends on the choices which will be made," said co-author and former IPCC co-chair Valerie Masson-Delmotte. The Paris Agreement's 1.5C target allows for the possibility of ratcheting down global temperatures below that threshold before century's end. Ahead of a critical year-end climate summit in Brazil, international cooperation has been weakened by the US withdrawal the Paris Agreement. President Donald Trump's dismantling of domestic climate policies means the US is likely to fall short on its emissions reduction targets, and could sap the resolve of other countries to deepen their own pledges, experts say. - AFP
Yahoo
a day ago
- Health
- Yahoo
Why bad dreams could be aging and prematurely killing you
Nightmares can literally scare the life out of people, new research suggests. Frequent unpleasant dreams and nightmares are being linked with accelerated biological aging and an untimely death. According to a British team, people who experience weekly distressing dreams are three times more likely to die before they reach age 70 than people who rarely or never report experiencing nightmares. Researchers said the finding held even after they accounted for smoking, obesity, unhealthy diets and other risk factors for an early death. The study can't prove causation — that nightmares are premature killers. However, one theory implicates the stress hormone cortisol. Higher levels of cortisol are associated with shorter telomeres, tiny caps at the end of chromosomes, like the tip of a shoelace. Telomeres get shorter every time a cell divides, and shorter telomeres are considered a sign of accelerated aging of the body's cells. Cortisol is present at high levels during nightmares. 'For those who frequently experience nightmares, this cumulative stress may significantly impact the aging process,' the study's lead author, Dr. Abidemi Otaiku, of the UK Dementia Research Institute and Imperial College London, said in a statement released this week. What's more, nightmares mess with how well and how long people sleep, 'impairing the body's essential overnight cellular restoration and repair,' Otaiku said. 'The combined effects of chronic stress and disrupted sleep likely contribute to the accelerated aging of our cells and bodies.' Nightmares are common, Otaiku reported in earlier work linking nightmares with an increased risk of dementia and cognitive decline in middle-aged adults. About five percent of adults experience nightmares weekly, and up to 40 percent monthly, percentages that are likely even higher if bad dreams are thrown in, he said. Considering how common a phenomenon nightmares are, 'it is surprising that their clinical significance remains largely unknown,' he wrote. In the latest study, presented this week at the European Academy of Neurology Congress in Helsinki, Otaiku and colleagues analyzed pooled data from 2,429 children aged eight to 10, and 183,012 adults aged 26 to 86 from six cohort studies following large groups of people over time. Adults reported how often they had nightmares at the start of the study, and were followed for up to 19 years. For kids, nightmare frequency was reported by parents. According to a release, adults reporting weekly nightmares were three times as likely to die prematurely than people who rarely or never experienced distressing dreams. 'Children and adults with more frequent nightmares also exhibited faster biological aging, which accounted for approximately 40 percent of the heightened mortality risk' among adults, according to the release. Even people who reported monthly nightmares showed signs of faster aging and a higher mortality, 'Our sleeping brains cannot distinguish dreams from reality,' Otaiku said. 'That's why nightmares often wake us up sweating, gasping for breath and with our hearts pounding — because our fight-or-flight response has been triggered. 'This stress reaction can be more intense than anything we experience while awake.' While it's all enough to lose sleep over, more research is needed to confirm the associations. Hormones are just one factor in accelerated cellular aging. In the meantime, nightmares are less likely if people avoid scary movies, manage stress and seek help for symptoms of anxiety or depression, Otaiku said. Stress can drive unpleasant dreams, University of Montreal psychologist and sleep scientist Antonio Zadra told National Post last year as part of a special series on sleep. But dreams also 'tend to embody our current concerns and preoccupations and much of what is on our minds is often negatively toned.' Worries 'get replayed in our dreams in metaphorical and disjointed ways, and the emotions underlying them get amplified,' Zadra said. Strategies to distract negative thoughts can help calm people down, he and other said, like reading a book or slowing breathing, which soothes the fight-or-flight response. National Post Millennial couples are sleeping apart to stay together. Why sleep divorce is surging Why more Canadians are landing in emergency departments with cannabis-induced vomiting Our website is the place for the latest breaking news, exclusive scoops, longreads and provocative commentary. Please bookmark and sign up for our daily newsletter, Posted, here.
