Mind & body, in brief

Protect Our Care, a US group that campaigns for health cover, counts 52 maternity wards closed since July 2025. Eight more have announced they will close. [1]

July 2025 is when the law known as HR1 was passed. It cuts federal spending on Medicaid, the US health cover for people on low incomes, by about $911 billion over ten years. [1][2] It adds a $50 billion rural health fund but is expected to cut $137 billion from rural health spending. [2]

Centra Southside Community Hospital in Virginia and St Mary's Sacred Heart in rural north-east Georgia both closed their birth wards. Both named the coming Medicaid changes as a reason. [1]

Medicaid pays for about 40% of US births. [1] A birth ward must be staffed day and night, because babies come at any hour, and that makes it costly to run. [3]

Small rural hospitals have fewer births and more patients on Medicaid, which pays hospitals less. So their birth wards rarely pay for themselves. [3] In a survey of rural hospitals that closed one, 62% named money losses and 67% a shortage of doctors. [4]

March of Dimes, a US charity for mothers and babies, names 31 rural hospitals whose birth wards are at risk. If they close, 96 counties will be left with no labour and delivery unit. [1]

More than half of US counties already have no hospital where a baby can be delivered, March of Dimes says. [5] When a rural ward closes, the trip to give birth grows by 29 miles on average. [12] In rural America a pregnant woman may have to drive two hours to reach one. [9]

In a study of 9.2 million US births, women in counties with almost no maternity care had 1.59 times the odds of a serious complication. [6] These included needing a blood transfusion or an unplanned removal of the womb. [6] Rural US mothers died 81% more often than city mothers from 2016 to 2019. [8]

When wards close, births move to emergency rooms. In Los Angeles County, 14% more women went to an emergency room for birth care in 2023 than in 2016, though births fell 26%. [7]

Benjamin Sommers, a Harvard health economist, says many pregnant women are covered through a route that does not tell the state they are pregnant. So they could lose cover under new work rules that are meant to exempt them. [1]

The CDC, the US public health agency, put the team running a major national survey of mothers on leave in early 2025. Researchers say they can no longer track recent trends in mothers' health. [1]

Some towns are fighting closures. In Troy, New York, Democrats and Republicans together kept the county's last birthing center open. [10] Maine has lost 11 birthing units in a decade, and one town fought to save the unit at its hospital in Damariscotta. [11]

Why it matters. The test comes in the new year, when the law takes full effect: watch whether any of the 31 at-risk rural wards that March of Dimes named announce closures. [1]

On 8 October the World Health Organization and its partners launched a plan, running to 2035, against high blood pressure in pregnancy. [13] These disorders affect 10 to 15% of pregnancies and kill about 42,000 women a year, along with more than 500,000 stillbirths and newborn deaths. [13] The most dangerous is pre-eclampsia: high blood pressure after 20 weeks of pregnancy that can lead to seizures. [14] No medicine has yet been developed and approved specifically to prevent or treat it. [13]

Why it matters. WHO says many women still cannot get a blood-pressure check, a urine test or magnesium sulfate, the drug given to prevent the seizures. [13][14] Whether a case turns fatal depends on whether emergency care is within reach, the same problem the US ward closures raise. [13]

The American Academy of Pediatrics, the main US body of children's doctors, called last week for a ban on selling unpasteurised milk. [15] Pasteurising means heating milk to kill germs, and US dairies took it up in the late 1800s. [15] Raw milk sales rose 17.6% in 2024. Doctors put that down to influencers and by Robert F Kennedy Jr, the US health secretary, who promoted it until recently. [15] This summer more than 100 people fell ill from raw milk, and 11 went to hospital. [15]

Why it matters. Children are most at risk, and most of those sickened in an E. coli outbreak linked to raw-milk cheese this year were aged three or under. [15] In a national survey in late 2025, about a third of Americans wanted raw milk sales made easier. [16]

Flu levels in England in September were higher than at the same point in any of the past four winters, the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) reported. [17] Cases are rising fastest among people aged 18 to 24. Two kinds of flu A, called H1N1 and H3N2, are both spreading. [17] Last winter also started early, with a changed H3N2 virus. [18] UKHSA estimates last winter's vaccines prevented about 100,000 hospital admissions and 7,000 deaths in England. [17]

Why it matters. An early start does not decide how bad a season gets, experts say. [17][18] The H1N1 virus has drifted a little from this year's vaccine, and it is too soon to say whether that weakens the jab. [17]

Since 2020 England has treated every adult as a willing organ donor unless they opt out, but the families still decide. [19] Family consent across the UK fell from 67% in 2020-21 to 57% last year, and donations after death are running 9% below last year. [20] NHS Blood and Transplant, which runs donation, launched its first-ever urgent response plan in September. [20] Families agree 87% of the time when the person had signed up, and 46% when consent was only presumed. [19]

Why it matters. More than 8,700 people in the UK are waiting for a transplant, and nine die each week. [20] A specialist nurse in Gloucestershire says families often tell her they are not sure what their relative would have wanted. [21]

After a kidney transplant, patients take tacrolimus, a drug that stops the body rejecting the new kidney. [22] A review of 10 studies covering 11,647 adults, published on 12 October, looked at how much each patient's blood level of the drug swung up and down. [22] Those whose levels swung most were about twice as likely to lose the kidney, and about twice as likely to have a rejection episode. [22] The studies watched patients; none tested changing the dose. [22]

Why it matters. Donated kidneys are scarce, as the fall in UK donation shows. [20] The review treats wide swings as a warning sign that ordinary blood tests can pick up. [22]

In 2022 San Francisco began recommending doxy-PEP: one dose of the antibiotic doxycycline, taken a day or two after sex without a condom. [23] It was first offered to gay men and trans women who had had a sexual infection in the past year, and the CDC later took up the same approach. [23] Last year syphilis in the city fell 24% and chlamydia 18%, but gonorrhoea only 5%. [23]

Why it matters. Gonorrhoea already resists this family of antibiotics, and doctors worry wide use will breed harder-to-treat germs. [23] A US study estimated about 37 extra week-long courses of the antibiotic for each gonorrhoea case the pill prevents. [24]

A University of Glasgow team followed 167,447 children born in Wales between 2009 and 2016, to see who needed extra help at school by about age six. [25] When the mother had neither depression nor antidepressants on record, 20 children in 100 needed it. [25] The figure was 23.6 when she had untreated depression, and 26.5 when she had depression and took antidepressants. [25] The study appeared in the journal PLOS Medicine. [25]

Why it matters. Some pregnant women stop their medicine out of fear for the baby, which leaves the depression untreated. [25] The team could not rule out that the small extra rise reflects more severe depression rather than the drug. [25]

Researchers followed 13,184 Chinese adults aged 45 and over for nine years, using a national survey of older people. [26] In that time 2,834 of them developed heart disease or had a stroke. [26] Compared with people who had neither, the risk was 23% higher for those with signs of depression, 33% higher for those reporting pain, and 59% higher for those with both. [26] The study was published in Scientific Reports on 12 October. [26]

Why it matters. Pain and low mood each went with more heart disease, and together they added up to more than either alone. [26] The study watched people over time and cannot show that easing either one would lower the risk. [26]

Etomidate is a fast-acting drug that works on GABA, the brain's main calming signal, and its misuse outside medicine is rising, researchers write. [27] Psychiatrists at the Second Xiangya Hospital in Changsha, China, compared 152 people addicted to it with 67 people who were not. [27] The users had stronger cravings, acted more on impulse, and did worse at stopping an action or switching to a new rule. [27] Their brain-wave patterns at rest also differed. [27]

Why it matters. It is the first full description of etomidate addiction, published on 12 October in Scientific Reports. [27] The groups were compared at one moment, so the study cannot show whether the drug caused the differences. [27]

A popular saying in yoga classes and on TikTok holds that the hips store tension from old trauma. [28] Experts told the Guardian there is no evidence for it. [28] The links between stress and muscle tension are strongest in the shoulders, the jaw and the pelvic floor. [28] People who lived through trauma, especially as children, are more likely to have long-term pain, but not more in the hips than anywhere else. [28]

Why it matters. Hip discomfort has ordinary causes, such as the shape of the hip socket or irritated tendons. [28] And how tight a muscle feels does not reliably show how tight it is. [28]

Doctors at Uppsala University Hospital in Sweden studied 164 adults treated in intensive care after a spinal cord injury between 2008 and 2022. [29] For the first seven days they recorded the heart and blood pressure without a break. [29] They measured how much the time between heartbeats varied, a sign of how well the nervous system steers the heart. [29] These readings differed with where the spine was hurt and how badly. [29]

Why it matters. But the readings did little to predict who would recover or who would die within six months. [29] The authors say forecasting recovery may need measurements taken inside the spine itself. [29]