A civil court in Ankara has dismissed all 11 elected leaders of the central council of the Turkish Medical Association (Türk Tabipler Birliği; TTB) in a lawsuit brought by government lawyers after the group’s president criticised Turkish military operations in Syria.
The court’s decision was denounced by Turkish civil society groups, which said that the government was seeking to shut down a major voice in the country’s democratic debate, and by international doctors’ groups, including the World Medical Association, Physicians for Human Rights, the International Rehabilitation Council for Torture Victims, and the Standing Committee of European Doctors.
The case was brought after the TTB president, Şebnem Korur Fincancı, commented in October 2022 on a video circulated by Kurdish groups that they claimed showed chemical weapons being used by Turkish forces. Interviewed by the Kurdish aligned Medya Haber TV, Fincancı called for independent investigators to be allowed to ente
US life expectancy in 2022 was more than a year longer than in 2021, new provisional figures from the Centers for Disease Control show, but the expected post-pandemic rebound was smaller than that seen in European nations, making up less than half of the ground lost since 2019.1
A US citizen born in 2022 could expect to live 77.5 years if current death rates persisted, up from 76.4 in 2021, when life expectancy was the lowest since 1996. But last year’s rebound of 1.1 years still meant life expectancy among Americans was 1.3 years less than in 2019.
Numbers of overdose deaths and homicides, which have driven US life expectancy downwards in recent years, both fell in 2022, as did heart disease and cancer deaths. But the retreat of covid-19 drove most of the gain in life expectancy. SARS-CoV-2 claimed 460 000 lives in 2021 and 267 000 in 2022.
Influenza advanced as covid retreated and, with pneumonia, was the biggest factor holding down life expectancy. Close behind was rising p
New Zealand’s revolutionary anti-smoking law, which drew headlines around the world when it passed last year1 and was widely credited as the inspiration behind the UK’s recently announced smoking bill, will be repealed in its entirety by the incoming coalition government, new prime minister Christopher Luxon has said.
The law would have introduced a generational smoking ban starting next year, barring anyone born after 2008 from ever legally buying cigarettes. Plans for a similar measure were announced by the UK government last month.23
But New Zealand’s law went further, reducing the number of shops allowed to sell cigarettes from about 8000 to 600. It also aimed to dramatically reduce the level of nicotine permitted in cigarettes, making them unsatisfying to addicted smokers.
All of these measures must instead be repealed by March 2024, under the coalition agreement between the conservative National Party, led by Luxon, and the right wing populist New Zealand First party, le
US pharmaceutical giant Pfizer is going to court in an effort to force Poland to receive and pay for 60 million doses of coronavirus vaccine that the country agreed to buy under the terms of a contract negotiated by the European Commission.
The contract, first signed in April 2021 with the support of member states, committed EU nations to buy 650 million doses in 2022 and 450 million in 2023 from Pfizer’s subsidiary BioNTech. But after the winter covid surge of 2021-22 subsided, demand fell abruptly.
Governments in eastern and central Europe, where vaccine uptake was already low, began to complain that they were oversupplied and would have to buy millions of vaccines only to destroy them when they expired.
In April 2022, Poland said it had stopped taking deliveries, citing a force majeure clause in the contract. …
Twelve people were reported killed by tank fire as Gaza’s Indonesian hospital became the latest flashpoint in a campaign by the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) to force the evacuation of health facilities across the north of the area.
The hospital’s surgery department was hit early on 20 November, hospital director Marwan al-Sultan told the Washington Post , killing patients who had been under anaesthetic. “The department is completely destroyed,” he said. “There is shrapnel everywhere. There is shooting targeting all windows around the hospital.”
The IDF said that militants had opened fire from within the hospital. “In response, IDF troops directly targeted the specific source of enemy fire. No shells were fired toward the hospital.”
Israeli forces have repeatedly ordered staff to evacuate. The hospital, funded with donations from Indonesia, is sheltering about 700 people. The attack “was a clear violation of international humanitarian laws,” said Indonesia’s fore