"Virtually all" councils in England and Wales could be forced to end home help for elderly and disabled people, the Local Government Association has said. The LGA, which represents 422 authorities, has warned MPs budget cuts may result in services being restricted to those with "critical" needs. A £3bn funding shortfall could affect people with dementia, Parkinson's disease and diabetes, it said.
People who volunteer to help the elderly or disabled could earn time credits which they could then redeem for their own care later in life.
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.
