Health Matters, August 2026.
Britain’s hottest year on record
If it feels like this summer has barely let up, that’s because it hasn’t. 2026 is the first year on record with UK temperatures hitting 35°C in three separate months — a record 35.1°C at Kew Gardens back in May, a UK record 37.7°C at Lingwood, Norfolk in June (complete with a rare Met Office Red Extreme Heat Warning running for three consecutive days), 35.5°C at Wisley in early July, and a fourth heatwave peaking at 35°C in late July. And, as I write this, another heatwave is developing.
The medical consequences of excess heat include heat exhaustion, dehydration, decompensation of cardiovascular and renal disease. But heat mortality and morbidity do not affect a population evenly; deprived areas suffer more than affluent ones. Poor insulation keeps a flat stifling long after the sun’s gone down, and top-floor properties, overcrowded housing, and limited means to relocate or take time off all increase the risk. “Drink more water and stay in the shade” is good advice as far as it goes, but on its own it’s a thin response to what’s becoming a regular feature of the British summer rather than a freak event.
Cities and towns suffer from the “urban heat island” effect. Road, pavements and buildings absorb the sun’s heat and re-radiate it, increasing city daytime temperatures by between 0.5oC and 4oC, and nighttime temperatures by 1oC and 3oC. Heatwaves can be devastating for the countryside, damaging crops, wildfires, shrinking reservoirs and drying rivers, but the greatest direct danger to people is found in the cities and towns.
We need urgently to provide more shade, plant more urban trees, and review building standards so that people are protected from the extremes of climate damage. And we need to stop burning fossil fuels… and eating meat.
Doesn't seem to be a shadow in the city
All around, people looking half-dead
Walkin' on the sidewalk, hotter than a match head
Working through a heat wave.
It’s a fact that surprises a lot of people, but Britain has no legal maximum working temperature. Unlike many other countries, employer obligations are rather indirect, through safety and welfare regulations, rather than from a hard temperature cap. Many people are unable to choose whether they’re outside in the sun, or inside near the furnaces. Construction workers are particularly exposed, the work is physically demanding, frequently outdoors or in poorly ventilated spaces, and often requires PPE that gets in the way of the body’s own cooling. Migrant and ethnic-minority outdoor workers are often more exposed.
And spare a thought for the self-employed: tradespeople make up the largest self-employed workforce in the UK, and none of them have an employer around to mandate a break or enforce a heat policy on their behalf.
Heat stress is becoming as much an occupational medicine problem as an emergency medicine one, and affecting disproportionately the people with the least power.
It’s a wee bit ironic that every year families spend a small fortune flying to distant places seeking sun and scorching temperatures; at the same time increasing climate damage.
Banned: the disposable barbecue
As tinder-dry parks and grassland burst into flames, Co-op and Tesco announced disposable barbecues would be banned from sale from 12 August, with Wilko and The Range pulling them from shelves days earlier. Aldi, Lidl, Waitrose and M&S stopped selling these barbecues in 2022,o this is very much the rest of the field catching up.
The national disposable-barbecue supply is being quietly throttled by supermarket policy rather than legislation. A lot of climate adaptation doesn’t come from an Act of Parliament - waiting for government to act before it is too late is a pointless exercise, given the influences of big oil. It might be up to ordinary people to act; the contents of the charcoal aisle, the small print on a park noticeboard, a retailer’s risk committee deciding enough is enough. Or is that too much to hope for?
Don't you know it's a pity
The days can't be like the nights
In the summer, in the city
Chewing gum, 93%, and a large pinch of salt
A small trial has reported that a specially engineered chewing gum cut HPV (Human PapillomaVirus) levels by up to 93% and nearly eliminated two bacteria linked to head and neck cancer, while apparently preserving the mouth’s beneficial bacteria. On the face of it, that’s remarkable for something you can buy and chew.
However, this is early, small, uncontrolled work, and a genuinely promising headline figure is a long way from a validated clinical intervention, let alone anything that improves head and neck cancer incidence. The mechanism is plausible and the concept is worth watching, but a 93% headline figure and a validated treatment are two very different things.
Box sets and brain health, decades later
Slightly less cheering for anyone who’s spent this heatwave indoors with the curtains shut, the aircon on high and the telly on is a study of around 1,700 adults which found that frequent television viewing in midlife was linked to smaller brain regions involved in memory, decision-making, and visual processing, measured decades later.
Before anyone cancels their evening plans in a panic, this is observational data, and describes association rather than mechanism. Sedentary behaviour, social isolation, disrupted sleep, and plain old lack of exercise are all plausible fellow-travellers bundled in with “hours of TV,” and untangling which of them is actually doing the damage is genuinely hard.
That said, it does agree with a growing and reasonably consistent literature on sedentary time as its own risk factor for cognitive decline, distinct from how much formal exercise someone gets elsewhere. Nobody needs to feel guilty about a well-earned box set. But “get up and move about during the ad break” turns out to have a bit more evidence behind it than it sounds.
A once-a-week case for exercise “snacking”
Now, for those of us who do like watching all eight seasons of “House MD” in one, uninterrupted binge, it seems you might not need nearly as much exercise as the guidelines imply to see real benefit. A four-month trial in 315 adults with central obesity found that a surprisingly small dose of exercise - brisk interval training done just once a week - delivered major benefits for people carrying excess weight around the middle.
This fits a broader and genuinely useful shift happening in exercise science: away from the all-or-nothing “150 minutes a week or don’t bother” framing, and toward recognising that shorter, more concentrated, lower-frequency bouts of activity can still bring benefits. “I don’t have the time” is one of the most common and most honest reasons people give for not exercising, but once a week exercise sessions should not eat significantly into your binge-watching.
(Usual caveat: check with your GP before starting an exercise regime.)
COVID’s uninvited house-guests: what reactivation might explain
A major new Nature study has taken the most systematic look yet at something clinicians have anecdotally suspected for a while: that COVID-19 reactivates dormant viruses that most of us are already quietly carrying around.
The team measured actively replicating viral RNA directly, and found reactivation of herpes simplex 1 and 2, HHV-6, CMV, EBV, anelloviruses, and enteroviruses, with Anelloviridae and Herpesviridae reactivating during acute infection and viral activity persisting into convalescence. The scale is impressive: nearly half of participants experienced reactivation of at least one common bystander virus, including CMV and EBV; more than 90% of the global adult population is already carrying at least one of these. Reactivation of these viruses was associated with more severe COVID-19 during the early weeks, and the researchers also looked at whether reactivation tracked with longer-term symptoms like fatigue and brain fog.
The researchers emphasise that this doesn’t establish causation or a precise mechanism linking reactivation to outcomes, but reactivation of Anelloviridae specifically was strongly associated with long COVID and long-term physical disability.
This isn’t proof that a dormant herpesvirus is “driving” long COVID symptoms; it’s a much stronger correlational signal than anything we’ve had before, in a dataset an order of magnitude larger than prior work. Given how often EBV and CMV reactivation are already implicated in autoimmune disease more broadly, this deserves further exploration, both for understanding long COVID and for the wider question of what viral reactivation might contribute to chronic inflammatory conditions generally.