One thing you can do this week
If you heat with oil, look at the gauge on your tank this week and write the level and the date on a card taped next to it. Do it again in a fortnight. Two readings tell you how many litres a cold week really costs your house, and with deliveries running at about 26 days, that is the number you need before you call anyone.
A habit, not advice.
What went right
People with bladder cancer who cannot have the standard chemotherapy have one more option that works. In the VOLGA trial of 695 people in 25 countries, adding two medicines, durvalumab and enfortumab vedotin, around bladder-removal surgery meant an estimated 78 in every 100 were alive two years later, against 69 in every 100 offered surgery without them 1. The benefit came with more severe side effects, 71 in every 100 against 50, and it still needs regulatory approval before routine use 1. The results were published in the New England Journal of Medicine and announced at the ESMO congress; AstraZeneca sponsored the study 1. Nine more people in every hundred, counted carefully.
The day in one sentence
Heart failure is now found mostly in hospital beds, and the cheapest remedy for that is a doctor listening to a breathless patient's chest a few months sooner.
In euros at home
Heating oil cost a national average of €173 per 100 litres in Germany on Wednesday, against €92 at the same time last year, agrarheute reported; prices ranged from about €167 in Brandenburg, Berlin and Schleswig-Holstein to €177–179 in Hesse and Rhineland-Palatinate, and deliveries take about 26 days 2. Desk arithmetic: a typical bridging order of 2,000 litres costs about €3,460 at today's average, against about €1,840 a year ago, roughly €1,620 more. Between the cheapest and dearest states, the same order differs by about €240 2.
Desk arithmetic on reported national and state averages, before delivery surcharges. Nothing here is advice.
Small words
Event-free survival
A way trials count how long patients live without something bad happening: the cancer growing or returning, death, or, in VOLGA, not getting the planned surgery while cancer remained 1. It moves sooner than overall survival, which is why trials report it first; overall survival is the slower, firmer number 1.
