The Melbourne grandmother is among hundreds to lose support for complex mental health issues due to the closure of the program

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One pile for boxes, another for lamps. Then there’s the tower of yellowing newspapers, the top one dated 2003, alongside mounds of clothes, children’s toys, letters and bills that were paid years ago.

The stacks of objects littering Julie’s* home in Point Cook in Melbourne’s western suburbs are neat – there are just a lot of them.

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Analysis of over-50s who engage with phones, tablets and other devices challenges fears of ‘digital dementia’

Fears that smartphones, tablets and other devices could drive dementia in later life have been challenged by research that found lower rates of cognitive decline in older people who used the technology.

An analysis of published studies that looked at technology use and mental skills in more than 400,000 older adults found that over-50s who routinely used digital devices had lower rates of cognitive decline than those who used them less.

Researchers say gepotidacin could be delivered via a pill and help combat strains resistant to standard treatment

Scientists have hailed a new antibiotic treatment for gonorrhoea, the first in three decades, which they said could help combat the global rise of drug-resistant infections.

The sexually transmitted infection can result in serious complications if it is not treated promptly, especially for women, for whom it can lead to increased risks of ectopic pregnancy and infertility.

A recent study shows the benefit of being a middle-aged ‘weekend warrior’ who only exercises once or twice a week

In these bleak times, glimmers of hope often seem to come out of the pages of scientific research. Take what we know about exercise. Just in the past few months, we’ve learned that moderate exercise may almost halve the risk of postpartum depression for new mothers, and that even five minutes of exercise a day could help lower blood pressure.

But what really caught my eye recently was a study from Latin America that included roughly 10,000 people who were assessed over two decades using the Mexico City prospective study. The research, published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, examined cognitive function with the aim of understanding the impact of exercise on mental ability, including mild dementia. The researchers took account of confounding variables such as age, diet, smoking and alcohol intake, nightly sleep and educational attainment, which have all been shown to affect overall health and wellbeing. By controlling for these factors, the contribution of physical activity towards mild cognitive impairment was estimated.

Prof Devi Sridhar is chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh, and the author of How Not to Die (Too Soon)

Karolina Domagalska’s film follows the tireless work of an activist group founded to battle the country’s legislation against reproductive rights

Under Poland’s near-total abortion ban, a group of courageous activists step up for women’s autonomy. Deploying a fly-on-the-wall approach, Karolina Domagalska’s dynamic film closely follows the tireless efforts of Abortion Dream Team (ADT), an advocacy group founded in 2016. Forming a staunch resistance to oppressive legislation, they provide medical consultancy and assistance to tens of thousands of women who can no longer access abortion services legally.

The hotline never stops ringing. Abandoned by the healthcare system, women from all over Poland reach out to the ADT volunteers, who guide them through these moments of uncertainty and confusion with extraordinary care. In addition to abortion pills and emergency contraceptives, the group also provides logistics support to those who need to travel to other countries for critical procedures. Every day comes not only with this flood of cries for help, but also an onslaught of threats and abuse from anti-abortion supporters. In one harrowing scene, the activists confront a group of policemen about a moving bus plastered with the faces of ADT associates, branding them as so-called murderers. The law, however, is not on their side. Justyna, one of their core members, was put on trial and convicted for distributing abortion pills.

Holding the receipts for 10 seconds absorbs enough bisphenol S to break California’s safety rule, research finds

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Paper receipts from major retailers in the US are so laden with bisphenol S that holding one for 10 seconds can cause the skin to absorb enough of the highly toxic chemical to violate California’s safety threshold, new research has found.

The findings are being used as evidence in legal action aimed at pressuring retailers to stop using receipt paper treated with bisphenol S, or BPS, which is linked to cancer and reproductive problems.

Often dismissed as summertime sniffles, the condition that affects a quarter of UK adults can lead to serious and life-limiting health problems

Read more: Pollen peril: how heat, thunder and smog are creating deadly hay fever seasons

Sometimes the season starts as early as mid-April; other times it’s slower to get going. But for Lisa Ventura, June is consistently the cruellest month. “I might get lulled into a false sense of security: ‘Oh, it’s the end of May, it hasn’t started yet’,” she says in a heavy tone. “Then, as if on cue, it’s June the first – and bang.”

Ventura suffers from “debilitating” hay fever. For about three months from early May, she cannot be outside for more than a few minutes before she starts sniffing and sneezing. “When it’s really bad, my eyes look like I’ve gone 10 rounds with a boxer – they are that swollen,” says Ventura.

David Williams lost his mother, his marriage fell apart and he was diagnosed with a brain tumour. But it took one more blow to bring him to tears

David Williams was 17 when his mother died of cancer. But he didn’t cry when his mum’s friend knocked on the door in the dead of night to give him and his sisters the news. He was the eldest of three, “the adult male” as his father had left years earlier.

Instead, he bottled up his feelings and carried on working. Williams, now 61, says: “Something happens to you in that situation that isn’t your choice.” This was 1980, and the family lived on the Lache social housing estate in Chester, which was, he says, “a tough place. Lads didn’t go around crying.”

Tell us: has your life taken a new direction after the age of 60?

NHS Cancer Vaccine Launch Pad expanded to include trial for patients with advanced type of skin cancer

Patients with an advanced type of skin melanoma in England will be given fast-track access to a “revolutionary” new cancer vaccine as part of an NHS trial.

The vaccine, known as iSCIB1+ (ImmunoBody), helps the immune system recognise cancer cells and therefore better respond to immunotherapy treatment.

Report also shows president is up to date on recommended vaccines as health secretary sows doubts on their efficacy

Donald Trump – the oldest person to ever be elected US president – controls high cholesterol with medication and has elevated blood pressure but is “fully fit”, White House physician Sean Barbella said in a report released on Sunday.

The US navy captain’s report was published two days after Trump underwent a routine physical. It also said he was up to date on all recommended vaccines – despite his national health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr having spent years sowing doubt about the safety and efficacy of vaccination.

The journalist’s second book offers positivity in the face of the obstacles confronting disabled girls and women

When Frances Ryan began writing her second book she could hardly have guessed that it would acquire a supercharged degree of relevance by being published in the immediate wake of another programme of brutal cuts to disability benefits, this time by a Labour government. Ryan’s acclaimed 2019 debut, Crippled: Austerity and the Demonisation of Disabled People, was a piece of political reportage documenting the effects of austerity measures by coalition and Conservative governments, through a combination of research and first-hand interviews with disabled people whose experiences illustrated the human cost behind the statistics.

Who Wants Normal? takes a more conversational approach. A hybrid memoir-polemic-advice-manual, the book examines more personal topics such as body image, dating and relationships, specifically as these relate to disabled women. But if the personal is always political for women, this goes tenfold for women living with disabilities; as Ryan shows, even something as ordinary as going to the pub with friends can be a minefield for anyone who has limited mobility, sensory challenges or who uses a wheelchair. Almost every aspect of life for disabled women is affected by societal attitudes and basic infrastructure that can combine to deny access, from the intimate matters of sex and clothing, to more obviously structural issues of healthcare, education and representation, all of which she tackles here with robust analysis and wry humour.

Society would rather we stay out of sight, out of mind, says Karen Edmunds

Hurrah for Frances Ryan (‘I’m still sick. I’m still disabled. But I’m proud of my body’: Frances Ryan’s manifesto for disabled women, 9 April)! As a disabled woman of 60 who has lived with a visible disability since I was 12, seeing Frances’s article just made me want to shout “Hell, yes”.

I’ve spent my life sanitising my experience of disability and several long-term health conditions, hiding the less palatable aspects. Working twice as hard as my non-disabled peers. Achieving a senior position at the cost of my own health and wellbeing.

Ace allergy tips | Washing hair | Eye drops | Old in the tooth | Theme park tariff | Americano boycott

I have endured hay fever for decades and have two pieces of advice (Hay fever making your life a misery? Try these 20 tips from doctors and allergy experts, 10 April). First, if you work in an office, stay there five days a week. The air-conditioning filtering the pollen is a dream. And second, under no circumstances, even if they are not itching, touch your eyes. Untouched, I can get by with no drugs, even on the most irritating of days.
Laura Brittain
Hackney, London

• A friend who gets bad hay fever found that washing his hair before bed was most helpful for him.
Sharon Kampff
Penicuik, Midlothian

Specialists at Ramsay Clinic Thirroul have reportedly resigned against backdrop of larger shortage of psychiatrists across state

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In 2022 Ramsay Healthcare opened Australia’s first women’s-only hospital “dedicated” to trauma-related mental health issues in Wollongong.

Ramsay Clinic Thirroul was supposed to be a “gamechanger” designed specifically to provide women – often survivors of family and sexual violence – the safe environment needed to be able to escape the flight or fight stress response and begin to recover through a program of therapies.

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Campaigners warn NHS rules are putting migrant mothers and babies at risk

A destitute asylum seeker who was billed more than £10,000 for having a baby could afford to pay just a penny a month, leading to calls for an urgent review of NHS maternity charging for migrants.

Kim, 34, whose name has been changed to protect her identity, was invoiced and then contacted by a debt collection agency after having an emergency caesarean section.

Wandering among historic buildings, cemeteries and winding back streets can lift your spirits as effectively as communing with nature, according to author Annabel Streets. Let’s put that to the test …

When I arrange to meet Annabel Streets, the appropriately named author of a new book, The Walking Cure, I’m presented with a challenge. She wants me to choose a London location I am unfamiliar with, so I can experience her ideas about the upsides of urban landscapes. In the book, Streets contemplates the powerful impact walking can have on our mood, thoughts and emotions, and how this can differ according to where and how we walk. While most people are aware of the benefits of walking in nature, Streets makes the case for urban environments, known as “brown spaces” by developers. Surprisingly, churches, convents and cemeteries, all of which are found in cities, often offer a superabundance of wildlife. A study in one Berlin cemetery found 604 species, 10 of which were rare or endangered.

Streets believes it is in cities that our collective ingenuity is most obvious. I haven’t exactly been basking in astonishment lately, unless you count feeling astonishingly grumpy.

Dr Peter Marks, forced to resign by Trump administration, sees no ‘possible way’ to determine cause by September

The US health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, should not offer “false hope” to families by boasting he can figure out what causes autism as soon as September, says the physician who resigned as the nation’s top vaccine official amid what he called anti-vaccination misinformation from the Trump administration cabinet member.

In an interview during which he alluded to his help helming Operation Warp Speed – the initiative that took only about nine months to develop, manufacture and distribute the vaccines protecting the public from Covid-19 – Dr Peter Marks warned that autism “is an incredibly complicated issue”.

Concerns that Kim Leadbeater’s proposed legislation is ‘flawed and dangerous’ are being overlooked

Last month, ITV News reported on the case of 51-year-old Anne, who travelled to a Swiss assisted suicide clinic to end her own life after her only son died. The first her family knew of it was when they received the goodbye letters Anne had posted them from Switzerland. It follows another case from 2023, when 47-year-old Alastair Hamilton went to the same Swiss clinic after telling his mother he was going on holiday. He had been suffering from stomach problems but had no diagnosed illness. There are similar cases of individuals being prescribed lethal drugs in Canada without the knowledge of their families, to their profound distress.

If MPs in Britain vote to legalise assisted dying next month, the same could happen. Eligibility would be more limited than in Switzerland or Canada, to people diagnosed with a terminal illness where a doctor believes they probably have fewer than six months to live. That’s more subjective than it might sound: in Oregon, for example, doctors have interpreted terminal illness to include malnutrition from eating disorders, and the assisted dying bill’s sponsor, Kim Leadbeater, rejected amendments backed by eating disorder charities to prevent this happening here. Having learning difficulties or a mental illness, feeling depressed or suicidal, or alcohol misuse that might impair judgment would not preclude someone from seeking a medically assisted death. There would be no obligation on assisted suicide providers to notify families their relative is about to die, and no route for relatives to raise concerns about coercion.

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a letter of up to 250 words to be considered for publication, email it to us at observer.letters@observer.co.uk

Researchers behind test using biomarkers say it could ‘revolutionise’ early diagnosis of disease

Researchers have developed a simple and “cost-effective” blood test capable of detecting Parkinson’s disease long before symptoms emerge, according to a study.

About 153,000 people live with Parkinson’s in the UK, and scientists who undertook the research said the test could “revolutionise” an early diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease, “paving the way for timely interventions and improved patient outcomes”.