Dear Reader,

On July 20th, Andy Burnham, the newly elected leader of the Labour Party, became the United Kingdom's new Prime Minister — the seventh in the past decade. If Britain's weather is famously unpredictable, its recent political leadership has been even more so. 

His government inherits the National Health Service (NHS) — the publicly funded healthcare system of the United Kingdom — under immense pressure. 

People living in England's most deprived areas can expect to spend about 20 fewer years in good health than those in the least deprived areas, according to the Office for National Statistics.

I reached out to Zoe Beketova, our editorial intern who has led the organization and reporting of 2 NHS-funded counselling projects for young people affected by homelessness, refugees and care leavers when she lived in London; Camilla Horrox, a Global Health and Medicine senior producer at the BBC; and Chrysie Alexiou, a Ph.D. student in Clinical Psychology at King's College London, to ask what Britain's new PM should prioritize on public health.

Their responses have been lightly edited for clarity:

• Zoe: “… I'm hoping to see a shift from short-term crisis management to long-term investment into the NHS. The ideal new healthcare strategy should address the UK’s chronic staffing shortages, improve retention, and reduce burnout among staff. Focusing on this will allow patients to receive faster and higher-quality care.

  I'd also like to see greater attention paid to prevention care to alleviate the stress on the NHS. Many of the biggest pressures on the NHS stem from preventable illnesses driven by systemic factors like poverty, poor housing, and food insecurity. Investing in public health, mental health services, and early intervention would improve health outcomes while easing demand on hospitals over time.”

• Camilla: “So, in terms of health, and an issue that needs more attention than it currently gets, I would say my top two would be:

  1. Women's sexual health: the way that they're dealt with and spoken to, the focus on developments around treatment for women's sexual health conditions that don't get enough science and research and development, and the way that they're treated when they're going to hospitals here and talking about symptoms of polycystic ovaries; of PMDD, which is where you have behavioural changes or severe depression around your period; and other things. They're just dismissed a lot.

  2. Maternity care before, during, and after having babies. There's a really massive issue in this country, and there's been a lot of babies who are dying.”

• Chrysie: “Burnham has made big claims about changing the landscape of adult social care, and with his homelessness pledge, it will theoretically mean some degree of NHS policy change or reform. I personally think better supports for adult mental health are important, as this will likely relieve pressure from both the homelessness and adult social care challenges.

  But beyond this, I think the NHS is slowly dying for a number of reasons, from funding to organisation and management, that need to be addressed for one of the most important institutions for the people of the UK.”

Warmly,
Laasya Shekhar
Managing Editor

✨ NEWS BEHIND THE NEWS

• 📷 KC contributed photos to this important Bloomberg story “The US Left a Water Project Unfinished. Then the Floods Came”:

  The extreme flooding in Mwazighe’s village, Kimorigo, about 200 miles southeast of Nairobi, resulted from US President Donald Trump’s decision to shut down the US Agency for International Development with little notice or preparation, according to interviews with local officials, engineering experts, US government records and a Bloomberg analysis of a decade’s worth of satellite data.

  By abandoning a project to upgrade the local irrigation system before it was finished, the Trump administration left crucial structures for directing water among individual farms dismantled. In other years, water was spread evenly across the irrigation system. But satellite data show that in March 2026, flooding occurred in a pattern that tracks with those distribution points. The compromised irrigation system sent large volumes of water rushing toward Kimorigo, turning a relatively normal rainy season into a disaster.

• 🌊 Congrats to our contributor Crystal Chow, who has been named an Ocean Nexus International Journalism Fellow! In this Fellowship, developed in collaboration with The Uproot Project, Crystal is examining with us how tourism, social media, scientific research, and commercial interest affect traditional Philippine shipworm harvesting and the coastal and Indigenous communities sustaining these foodways and mangrove ecosystems.

  • You should also check out this fact-checking report “Misleading claim misuses US heat wave index to downplay worsening heat waves”, by Crystal and her colleagues at the Annie Lab.

    “Climate change doesn’t create heatwaves out of thin air. It turns ordinary heatwaves into extraordinary ones,” says Professor Amos Tai from the Department of Earth and Environment Sciences at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

🗞️ ICYMI: ‘Who Thinks of Pads in the Middle of Airstrikes?’: Myanmar Women Fight for Menstrual Dignity

Myanmar's civil war has made essential items — including menstrual products — increasingly out of reach for women in conflict-affected areas.

"I use the same cloth shared by around six girls here and hide that in a small box. Privacy is nowhere now," says Shwe Sin, a 23-year-old displaced student. Read more here.

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