Letter urges US company Gilead Sciences to ‘shape history’ by providing fair access

Former world leaders, celebrities and a Nobel prize-winning scientist who helped discover HIV have written to a leading pharmaceutical company to urge it to make a “gamechanger” HIV medicine available to people living outside wealthy countries.

The US company Gilead Sciences has been urged to “shape history” by avoiding a repeat of the “horror and shame” of the early years of the Aids pandemic, when 12 million lives were lost in poorer parts of the world after effective drugs became available, because the medicines were not affordable.

Amid baby boom reports linked to drugs such as Wegovy and Ozempic, experts say it would be ‘wise’ to take extra precautions

Claims that “skinny jabs” are fuelling an unexpected baby boom have led experts to warn women to pair their use with effective contraception.

Medications such as Wegovy and Ozempic, both of which contain semaglutide, have become hugely popular, not least because they can help people lose more than 10% of their body weight.

An ex-ENO artistic head and the director who staged War Horse working on a contemporary opera about drug addiction crisis

The opioid crisis is to be the subject of a new opera by a former artistic director of English National Opera (ENO) and the man behind the stage adaptation of War Horse.

The Galloping Cure would tell “a lurid tale of the greed surrounding the tragedy of the opioid crisis”, said Tom Morris, its director.

Obesity prevention is cheaper long-term option, says Cambridge professor, with focus on dietary advice and exercise plans

Skinny jabs risk being used as a cop-out by governments to avoid making hard policy choices to prevent obesity, a leading expert has warned.

Prof Giles Yeo, a geneticist at the University of Cambridge and expert on obesity and the brain control of food intake, said drugs such as semaglutide – the active ingredient in the weight-loss jab Wegovy – were remarkable and worked for a majority of people.

The former pharma laggard is in a race with Shell to be the first FTSE 100 stock to be valued at £200bn

The last time the AstraZeneca chief executive, Pascal Soriot, set long-term sales targets, he was greeted with a chorus of scepticism. It was 2014 and the company was fighting a takeover attempt by Pfizer of the US; Soriot seemed to be engaging in that age-old defence trick of throwing out a large number that he probably would not be around to deliver. A target to boost revenues by three-quarters over nine years looked wildly optimistic – a decade ago, the Anglo-Swedish firm was more laggard than leader in pharma-land.

In the event, of course, the milestone of $45bn was achieved ahead of time, which is why Tuesday’s latest long-term prediction of annual revenues of $80bn (£63bn) by 2030 will be treated as ultra-credible. Soriot is also still in post – and fit enough to do another five years, he said last year – so success or failure should be reasonably clear by the time he finally departs. As it is, growth was 19% in the last quarter, so a fast start is guaranteed.

Exclusive: Some pharmacies have turned away families because they have run out of the drug clarithromycin

Pharmacists are calling for fresh powers to provide patients with alternative prescriptions as they warned that drugs shortages are hampering their ability to tackle whooping cough.

More than 2,700 cases have been reported across England so far in 2024 – more than three times the number recorded in the whole of last year.

Our desires are an essential part of who we are – as I discovered when I lost my appetite for six months

Mostly, walking down New York streets in spring sunshine is the cinematic, euphoric ideal of what it is to be alive. It’s the thing I looked forward to for decades. It meant to me, back then as a kid in Ireland, listening to songs about Lexington and 14th Street, freedom: an almost deranged amount of freedom.

Sometimes, though, walking down New York streets in spring sunshine is agonising in both a physical and spiritual sense. This may be so, for instance, if you have no health insurance and are very stupid. Like me. That was in February 2023. I had been in increasingly acute pain for days, but because of a stubborn ability to ignore bodily breakdown and also a reluctance to spend money on healthcare in the US when I was only visiting, I kept going until I collapsed into an urgent care centre that I luckily passed one evening as I was dragging myself with manic good cheer to another dinner, despite being barely able to walk.

Patients are already dying as wonder drugs lose their effectiveness. International action is urgently needed

As apocalyptic horror stories go, it’s up there with the scariest. Yet it’s not fiction writers but top scientists who are warning of how the world could look once superbugs develop resistance to the remaining drugs against them in our hospital pharmacies. Patients will die who can currently be cured; routine surgery will become dangerous or impossible. Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) – it happens not only with bacteria but also viruses, fungi and parasites – is one of the top global public health threats facing humanity, says the World Health Organization (WHO). It kills 1.3 million people and contributes to 5 million deaths every year, predicted to be 10 million by 2050. In addition to the appalling human toll, it will increase the strain on and costs of health services. But is it high enough up the agenda? Covid-19 knocked it off, and the climate crisis gets more attention. AMR does not so often get top billing.

This week efforts have been made to change that, with talks at the UN triggering wider coverage chronicling the sorry plight we are in. From the pharmaceutical industry to the WHO to NHS England, the same tune is being played: we are not doing enough to avert disaster.