National commitments to reducing global CO2 emissions are in the spotlight again after the recent United Nations talks. Earlier this year, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published their strongest statements yet about the possible health impacts of global warming. These impacts include increased vulnerability to disease and injury through a variety of mechanisms, including: climate and weather […]
Category: South Asia
Richard Lehman’s journal review—29 September 2014
NEJM 25 September 2014 Vol 371 1189 This week we start with mepolizumab. Before we know it, we encounter losmapimod. Enough is enough. I think the World Health Organization should convene an extraordinary meeting of the International Nonproprietary Names Committee with the sole purpose of Stopping Silly Names. Medical practitioners are serious people and they […]
The BMJ Today: Death talk in India
How viable is a system of “verbal autopsy” to determine future health policy in a country where most deaths occur outside hospitals, are not attended by doctors, and are not medically certified? Meera Kay finds out more about India’s recently completed Million Deaths Study and the training of non-medical field workers to record written narratives, from […]
The BMJ Today: Beyond doing no harm, helping can get tough
Medicine can do great things, but at today’s thebmj.com things look rather bleak. Nine out of 10 people who are transferred to hospital with cardiac arrest don’t survive to discharge. Some argue that most of these ambulance transfers should not happen at all; others disagree. It’s not about the cost, as Americans have calculated the savings […]
The BMJ Today: Time to engage with politics and policy
No sooner had I finished reading my colleague’s blog about taking a global view of health, than I found myself reading Jocalyn Clark’s analysis, which questions where the efforts for solutions to global health issues should be focussed. She states her case clearly: good health is interlinked with the economy and the “medicalisation of global health […]
The BMJ Today: Taking a global view of health
Listening to the news here in the UK this past week, you would find it easy to forget that there is a world outside this small island. But visit bmj.com and you get a different perspective, with a range of international stories. First, to the Netherlands, where Tessa Richards describes how Radboud University Medical Centre […]
Jocalyn Clark: Why has Bangladesh had such success in improving sanitation, but not neighboring India?
Much has been made recently about the appalling rates of open defecation in India, a country that has on other development indicators shown stunning successes. Almost 600 million people in India defecate in fields, forests, bodies of water, or other open spaces rather than in closed latrines or toilets—that’s more than 10 times the number […]
Richard Lehman’s journal review—22 September 2014
NEJM 18 September 2014 Vol 371 1100 The way I have ureteric colic is so classical that just watching me sweat and groan is enough for anyone to make the diagnosis, even without the haematuria on the dipstick. I see the same thing all the time in out of hours primary care patients, and generally […]
The BMJ Today: Medicines have a new competitor—gamification
Gamification is a theory, not just a trend. It is the use of game mechanics to solve real world problems, and that includes those that originate in the body. If the word instils in you a sense of fear and dread—as it did in me—look no further than this Feature by Stephen Armstrong to feel […]
Richard Lehman’s journal review—15 September 2014
NEJM 11 September 2014 Vol 371 1016 Ticagrelor has had mixed fortunes since it was introduced as a new thienopyridine platelet aggregation inhibitor a few years ago. The PLATO trial left lingering doubts whether it is better than the much cheaper clopidogrel when used in acute coronary syndromes. Rather than attempting to resolve these, the […]