More than half of Wales' rail stations are not fully accessible to disabled people, according to a report. The Welsh assembly equality of opportunity committee issued the findings, highlighting "significant shortcomings", and calling for action. Arriva Trains Wales, which runs most of Wales' stations, said it was committed to improving access.
Many councils are struggling with moves to give individual people their own budgets to spend on social care, a watchdog claims.
The discovery of "taste receptors" in the lungs rather than on the tongue could point the way to new medicines for asthma, it is suggested. Experiments in mice revealed that bombarding the receptors with bitter-tasting compounds helped open the airways, which could ease breathing. The University of Maryland study, published in Nature Medicine, may have implications for other lung diseases.
Heavy smokers with a 40-a-day habit face a much higher risk of two common forms of dementia, a large study shows. The risk of Alzheimer's is more than doubled in people smoking at least two packs of cigarettes a day in their mid-life. The risk of vascular dementia, linked to problems in blood vessels supplying the brain, also rose significantly. The US study, looking at over 21,000 people's records, is published in the journal Archives of Internal Medicine.
Hospital beds in England may fill up with the elderly and vulnerable because of cuts to local authority social care funding, a top NHS figure has warned. The claim came from the head of the NHS Confederation, Nigel Edwards, in a letter to the Daily Telegraph. Mr Edwards said people who needed medical treatment may be denied a hospital bed as a result of the cuts.
A TEESSIDE taxi driver has been fined after he refused to take a 24- year-old woman in a wheelchair home - even though his vehicle was wheelchair accessible. Rafiq Latif, of Cambridge Road, Middlesbrough, was working in his hackney carriage taxi in Corporation Road in the town on the night of Friday, February 5 ,this year.
