South Africa has confirmed four more mpox cases, and England’s health secretary has promised to end the treatment of children in hospital corridors. A study links positive childhood experiences to better adult mental health, doctors in Blenheim say their emergency department is near collapse and experts warn about the advice given at a wellness retreat.
South Africa confirms four more mpox cases, bringing this year’s total to 26
South Africa’s Department of Health has confirmed four new cases of mpox, taking the number of infections recorded in the country since the start of the year to 26, according to the latest update released this weekend. The Western Cape accounts for most of them, with 18 cases, followed by Gauteng with three, the Eastern Cape and the Free State with two each, and KwaZulu-Natal with one. According to the department, 16 of the Western Cape cases are the result of transmission within the country, while the other two involved foreign nationals who were visiting South Africa. The new figures follow earlier warnings from health officials urging South Africans to stay alert to the disease, and the department has previously said it obtained only a limited number of vaccine doses.
The department’s spokesperson, Foster Mohale, urged the public to remain vigilant and to seek medical care quickly if they develop symptoms such as a rash, fever, headache, muscle pain, swollen lymph nodes or tiredness. He said anyone who has been in close contact with a confirmed or suspected case should tell health workers and watch for symptoms for 21 days. If symptoms appear during that period, he said, people should avoid close contact with others and go to a health facility for assessment. All but one of the 26 people infected so far this year are men, and the ages of those affected range from 23 to 50. With 16 of the 18 Western Cape infections acquired inside the country rather than linked to visitors, the province accounts for the bulk of locally acquired infections, and officials have repeated their call for people with possible symptoms to come forward early.
Mpox, formerly known as monkeypox, is an infectious disease caused by the monkeypox virus, which belongs to the same group of viruses as the one that caused smallpox. It produces a rash that blisters and then crusts over, along with fever and swollen lymph nodes. Most people have a mild illness and recover within a few weeks without treatment, but it can be severe in children, pregnant women and people with weakened immune systems. Symptoms usually appear between three and 17 days after exposure and last two to four weeks. The virus spreads between people when people touch infected skin or bodily fluids, sexual contact among them, and people remain infectious until all their sores have scabbed and healed. Smallpox vaccines have proved effective against it, and vaccination is recommended for people at high risk. The disease is endemic in parts of Central and West Africa, and the first human cases were identified in 1970 in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
England’s health secretary promises urgent action to end corridor care for children
Yvette Cooper, the health secretary, has promised immediate action to stop children being treated in hospital corridors in England. Speaking in a Sunday television interview, she said she had asked the chief executive of NHS England to draw up urgent new standards for how children are treated in accident and emergency departments, including a plan to eliminate corridor care for children as a priority. She said the government had a plan covering the whole parliament to end corridor care more widely, but wanted to act faster for children, adding that no child should be treated in a corridor. Overall figures on corridor care began to be collected this summer, and Cooper said the government would now also track the numbers for children separately. Official figures show that 50,582 people waited more than 12 hours in emergency departments in September between a decision to admit them and their actual admission, up from 44,951 in August.
Those kept waiting four hours or longer between the admission decision and a bed numbered 129,199 in September from 118,550 in August. On average, 3,310 patients a day received corridor care in September, 2,549 of them in emergency departments and 761 in other parts of hospitals, compared with 2,865 a day in August. Cooper said child health must become a much greater priority for the health service, arguing that maternity care and child health had been treated as a sidecar. Asked whether that would mean moving money from other parts of the budget, she said investment follows priorities. Before the interview, she warned that the health service faced a harder winter than usual after a heavy summer and announced £140 million for urgent care in England, to be spent on 14 schemes covering fresh urgent care centres, more ambulances and improvements to emergency units, as part of early preparations.
Yvette Cooper, born in Inverness on March 20, 1969, has been secretary of state for health and social care since July 2026, under Prime Minister Andy Burnham. A member of the Labour Party, she has represented the constituency now called Pontefract, Castleford and Knottingley in the House of Commons since 1997. She served as home secretary from 2024 to 2025 and as foreign secretary from September 2025 to July 2026. Earlier, under the Labour governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, she held several ministerial posts between 1999 and 2010, including a junior health role, housing minister and chief secretary to the Treasury, and finally led the Department for Work and Pensions in the last year of the Brown government. Cooper studied philosophy, politics and economics at Balliol College, Oxford, won a scholarship to Harvard University in 1991 and completed a master’s degree in economics at the London School of Economics. She began her career as an economic policy researcher for the Labour politician John Smith.
Study links more positive childhood experiences to lower risk of mental illness at 24
A study that followed 3,499 people from a birth group in England from birth to the age of 24 has found that those who had a wider range of positive experiences in childhood were less likely to develop a psychiatric disorder as young adults. The researchers measured 10 kinds of positive experience between birth and age 17, such as having a parent or teacher who offered support, a sense of safety in the local area, liking school, close friendships and time spent with relatives and friends. Each participant received a score from zero to 10 according to how many of these experiences they had, without counting how often they occurred or how much each mattered to the child. At 24, the participants were assessed for depression, generalised anxiety disorder, which involves persistent and excessive worry, and psychotic disorders. Each extra point on the score was linked to 11 per cent lower odds of meeting the criteria for a psychiatric disorder at that age.
The strongest link was with depression: each additional point was associated with 16 per cent lower odds of moderate to severe depression by 24, and with 9 per cent lower odds of generalised anxiety disorder. The findings on psychotic disorders were inconclusive, partly because few participants developed them. The links held even after the researchers took account of childhood trauma, which points to such experiences having a protective value of their own, even though the study cannot show that they directly prevent psychiatric illness. Three experiences were among the least common in the group studied: strong support from peers, feeling connected to the neighbourhood and enjoying school. Writers discussing the findings suggested that helping children form friendships and find places where they feel included may be worth prioritising, and that listening to children, taking their worries seriously and keeping promises can help them feel safe and valued.
Research on childhood and later health has long focused on adverse childhood experiences, a term covering abuse and household difficulties during childhood. The categories usually listed include verbal, physical and sexual abuse, domestic violence between parents, substance misuse or mental illness in the household, a household member in prison, and parental separation or divorce. Neglect is counted too, whether a child goes without physical necessities like food, clothing and a home, or without emotional ones like love and affection. The subject became an important public health framework after the publication in 1998 of the Adverse Childhood Experiences Study by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the health organisation Kaiser Permanente. The new study looked at positive experiences alongside these adverse ones, and its main finding held even after childhood trauma had been taken into account by the researchers.
Senior doctors warn Blenheim’s Wairau Hospital emergency department is close to collapse
Half of the senior doctors in the emergency department at Wairau Hospital in Blenheim, New Zealand, have spoken out publicly, warning that the department is on the brink of collapse after five years of being promised more staff and told there was no money. The hospital serves the whole Marlborough region, home to just under 50,000 people and an ageing population. The department’s roster is designed for the equivalent of 11.4 full-time senior doctors, but only eight are working there. Dr Nikki Rolton said that unless something changed, patients might die. Shifts that cannot be filled are often left uncovered most weeks, she said, which is dangerous. The department relies heavily on locums, temporary doctors who fly in, but they are not always available and cost more once flights, accommodation and rental cars are added. Rolton asked how there could be no funding for permanent positions when the hospital could afford locums.
Dr Kay Hall said the doctors were crying out and nobody was listening, and that she could see the department collapsing. The neighbouring urgent care clinic has had its own staffing problems and often shortens its hours, sending more patients to the emergency department, which sometimes sees more than 100 people a day. Dr Ian Munro said patients who should be seen within 10 minutes were likely to wait about half an hour. Usually only two senior doctors work each shift, and about half are considering retirement. Dr Stuart Watchman, who has worked there for almost 29 years, said doctors try to work faster and harder, which raises the risk of mistakes. Phil Wheble, who was recently put in charge of operations for the national health service in Nelson and Marlborough, agreed more permanent doctors would be hired and said the department should not rely so heavily on locums, but denied that it was on the brink of collapse.
Wairau Hospital is a public hospital in Witherlea, a suburb of Blenheim in the Marlborough District, with 100 beds, providing surgical, maternity, children’s health and medical services. A small private surgical hospital and a hospice stand next to it. Unlike larger hospitals, it has no intensive care unit, cardiologist or ear, nose and throat service, so its emergency department often has to handle a wide range of cases itself. Until 2022 the hospital was run by the Nelson Marlborough District Health Board, which was created on January 1, 2001, under the New Zealand Public Health and Disability Act 2000 to provide health care to the Nelson, Tasman and Marlborough districts. On July 1, 2022, the board was dissolved and its responsibilities passed to Te Whatu Ora, or Health New Zealand, the new national health service, whose division covering the whole South Island took over its functions.
Experts warn advice at Barbara O’Neill’s wellness retreat in England could kill
Barbara O’Neill, an Australian promoter of natural remedies who was banned from providing health services in her home country, has told people at a five-day wellness conference in Cheshire, England, to stay away from doctors, according to a journalist who attended undercover. At the event, held at a hotel where residential tickets cost up to £1,300, O’Neill dismissed antibiotics, vaccines and proven cancer treatments. When a woman asked about her lupus, O’Neill told her to keep away from the doctor, prompting laughter from the audience. She advised a woman with a stomach tumour, whom two specialists had told to have surgery, to use a castor oil compress, suggested castor oil with cayenne pepper in the eye for glaucoma, advised a pregnant woman against folic acid and told a woman without a working thyroid to slowly stop taking thyroxine. She told a woman with diabetes to stop testing her blood sugar.
Medical experts said there was no evidence for the castor oil treatments. Gus Gazzard, a glaucoma specialist, said the claims had no support and might cause harm. Martin Whyte, a metabolic medicine professor at the University of Surrey, said stopping thyroxine without a functioning thyroid risked serious and possibly life-threatening illness, and Gill Livingston of University College London called the diabetes advice very dangerous. Liam Smeeth, director of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said many of the claims, if followed, would cause substantial harm, possibly including death. O’Neill, who is 73, has 3.6 million followers on Instagram and 1.7 million on Facebook. Before her latest tour, senior doctors wrote to some venues urging them to reconsider hosting her events. Her husband, Michael, who runs her tours, said the complaints were speculative and described the criticism as a witch-hunt supporting the pharmaceutical industry.
O’Neill promotes health practices that the Health Care Complaints Commission of New South Wales has described as misinformation and a risk to health and safety. She has no recognised qualifications and did not complete nursing training, yet for more than two decades, since 2004 or earlier, she has described herself as a naturopath, a nutritionist and an educator on health, speaking at alternative medicine organisations, wellness retreats and Seventh-day Adventist churches. In 2019 the commission ruled that she was prohibited from providing any health-related services after complaints from members of the public and health professionals. Its investigation found that she had given dangerous advice to vulnerable people, such as telling cancer patients to replace prescribed chemotherapy with bicarbonate of soda and recommending unpasteurised goat’s milk for babies. When asked by the commission, she was unable to provide evidence for her claims. Her husband founded a political party that opposes vaccination and fluoride, now known as the HEART Party.