When desperate measures to persuade women to have children fail, it’s time to think differently about demographics

• Devi Sridhar is chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh

For the past 75 years in global public health, one of the major priorities has been exponential population growth and Malthusian concerns that the supply of food on the planet won’t be able to keep up. In 1951, the world’s population was 2.5 billion, which increased to 4 billion by 1975, 6.1 billion by 2000, and 8 billion by 2023. Governments in the two most populous countries, India and China, even implemented, respectively, draconian policies such as forced sterilisation and a one-child restriction.

It now seems that many nations have switched to worrying about the opposite problem. Findings published last month from the Global Burden of Disease study, which examines epidemiological trends across the world, notes that fertility rates are falling in most countries. This can be seen as a public health success: lower fertility rates tend to reflect fewer children dying in the first 10 years of life, and an environment that protects women’s bodily autonomy and access to birth control, as well as girls’ education. Having mainly planned pregnancies is seen as societal progress.

Prof Devi Sridhar is chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh

IDF says it ‘completely rejects’ charge that its soldiers deliberately fired on any of the thousands of civilians killed in Israeli offensive

Dr Fozia Alvi was making her rounds of the intensive care unit on her final day at the battered European public hospital in southern Gaza when she stopped next to two young arrivals with facial injuries and breathing tubes in their windpipes.

“I asked the nurse, what’s the history? She said that they were brought in a couple of hours ago. They had sniper shots to the brain. They were seven or eight years old,” she said.

Tuberculosis remains the world’s most deadly infectious disease but change is coming that could cut the threat and consign the illness to the past

Electricity cables slung low across the roads mean that only small vehicles can make their way through the bustling neighbourhood around Manila’s Karuhatan health centre. The clinic, in the same unit as a fire station and nursery, serves a working-class population, many of whom work in the multiple factories of Valenzuela City, a suburb of the Philippine capital.

Here, in a crowded area of a busy city, cutting-edge medical technology is being used in an effort to end tuberculosis, a disease that has plagued humanity for millennia. Every year, 1.5 million people die from TB – making it the planet’s top infectious killer.

Ambition once came with a promise: a home, a salary, progress and fulfilment. What happens when that promise is broken? Meet the women who are turning their backs on consumerism, materialism and burnout

Rose Gardner did everything right. Straight As at school and college, a first-class degree from a top university, a master’s. She got a job in publishing and rose through the ranks of some of the industry’s most prestigious companies before getting a job with a media organisation. Eventually, she bought her own flat in London.

But each time she reached a new milestone, she didn’t feel any real joy.

Exclusive: Refusal to approve antibiotic prophylaxis for those at risk of infective endocarditis may have increased deaths

• How infective endocarditis deaths among UK dental patients can be avoided

Patients are dying needlessly every year due to vulnerable Britons with heart problems not being given antibiotics when they visit the dentist, doctors have said.

Almost 400,000 people in the UK are at high risk of developing life-threatening infective endocarditis any time they have dental treatment, the medics say. The condition kills 30% of sufferers within a year.

Being more flexible than the average person can have its advantages, from being great at games such as Limbo to feeling smug in yoga class.

But researchers are coming to understand that being hypermobile can also be linked to pain in later life, anxiety, and even long Covid.

Madeleine Finlay hears from the science correspondent Linda Geddes about her experience of hypermobility, and finds out what might be behind its link to mental and physical health

Read Linda Geddes’ article on hypermobility here

As rising sea levels and extreme weather contaminate drinking water sources, doctors are seeing alarming numbers of women with serious health problems including pre-eclampsia

• Photographs by Farzana Hossen

In the small, crowded ward of the Upazila Health Complex in Dacope, new and expecting mothers lie exhausted beneath fans that spin noisily above their heads. There are no dividers in the maternity room shared by more than 20 women, so visiting husbands are ushered out by nurses when someone needs attending to.

Sapriya Rai, 23, has pre-eclampsia and is being monitored at the Upazila Health Complex

Rishi Sunak promised speedier care, but specialists believe long waits for hospital beds are costing thousands of lives

On one half of Rishi Sunak’s NHS pledge to voters, there has been some modest progress in recent months. Waiting lists for pre-planned hospital treatment and outpatient appointments in England fell from 7.8m to 7.6m between September and December last year. Given the intense pressures on the health system from multiple directions, this improvement is a remarkable achievement by the trusts that brought it about – even while the overall situation remains dire, with waiting lists predicted to remain longer than before the pandemic until 2030 at the earliest.

But the prime minister’s commitment was not limited to waiting lists. The pledge he made in January last year, as one of five priorities on which he said voters should judge him, was that “NHS waiting lists will fall and people will get the care they need more quickly”. New calculations by the Royal College of Emergency Medicine (RCEM) show that, with regard to the broader aim of delivering speedier treatment, his government is falling shockingly short .

App-based cognitive tests found to be proficient at detecting frontotemporal dementia in those most at risk

A smartphone app could help detect a leading cause of early-onset dementia in people who are at high risk of developing it, data suggests.

Scientists have demonstrated that cognitive tests done via a smartphone app are at least as sensitive at detecting early signs of frontotemporal dementia in people with a genetic predisposition to the condition as medical evaluations performed in clinics.