The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that 1.24 million road traffic deaths occur every year globally. Of those, the majority (80%) of deaths occur only in middle income countries. Yet the irony is that only 35% of low and middle income countries (LMICs) have policies to protect road users. In the entire world, only 28 countries […]
The BMJ Today: Drug company payments, compassion, and patient centredness
• Should doctors be forced to disclose payments and hospitality from drug companies? The Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry plans to bring in a system where healthcare professionals voluntarily declare payments and hospitality received from drug companies. The issue is the subject of our latest online poll, which, at the time of writing, has […]
Jeffrey Aronson: When I use a word . . . Get shorty
Abbreviation of a word or phrase to a letter or two is the most extreme form of breakage that it can undergo. The process has variants: initialisms, contractions, and acronyms. An initialism is a single letter standing for a whole word, or a string of such letters. B, for instance, stands for bachelor, baron, and […]
The BMJ Today: Food for thought, brain injury, and ovarian cancer
• Nutritional epidemiology As we learned this week that eating chillies could make us live longer, The BMJ’s acting head of research, Elizabeth Loder, discusses the pitfalls of nutritional epidemiology. High quality trials are scarce, and the many observational studies are prone to recall bias, as explained by John Ioannidis in a recent editorial. As now […]
Zosia Kmietowicz: One policy to reduce sugar intake—what would you do?
The anti-sugar crusader Robert Lustig blew through town this week to film a documentary with chef Jamie Oliver, but stopped off on the way to take part in a panel discussion on the white stuff, which he launched with a talk entitled “Processed Food: An experiment that failed.” Lustig, who is professor of paediatrics at […]
Alex Langford: Tips for new doctors
It’s been six years since I qualified from medical school and over a week since my final shift as an SHO. Between those points, I learnt a thing or two about being a junior doctor. Before I ascend to the heady heights of registardom and forget it all, I want to pass along a few […]
Arthy Santhakumar: Accelerating health equity through equitable access to health information
As we await consensus on the new sustainable development goals (SDGs), we are reminded of what united the international community in the years approaching the millennium—the need to reduce inequality globally. Universal health coverage (UHC) – as put forward by the World Health Organization—was identified as “the single most powerful concept that public health has […]
The BMJ Today: An NHS in dire financial straits, sex workers, and changing attitudes to vaccines
• NHS needs urgent cash injection Barely a day seems to go by without yet another story or report spelling fresh financial doom for the NHS. Today it’s the turn of the Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy (CIPFA), which has issued a stark warning that the NHS is unlikely to achieve the government’s 2020 target […]
The BMJ Today: Chillies and mortality, informed consent, and healthcare for Syrian refugees
• Is chilli good for your health? Jun Lv and colleagues report a large cohort study assessing the associations between the regular consumption of spicy foods and total and cause specific mortality. They found that the habitual consumption of spicy foods was inversely associated with total and certain cause specific mortality (cancer, ischemic heart diseases, and […]
Daniel Cooper: On the frontline at the Kerry Town treatment unit
At a time when public and media interest is waning, the Ebola epidemic in west Africa shows no signs of ending. With Guinea and Sierra Leone still reporting new cases on a weekly basis, hopes of Liberia being declared Ebola free have also been dashed with six new cases reported since the end of June. […]