There is an old joke about a man who goes through a customs post with a wheelbarrow of sand every day. The increasingly frustrated customs officers make intensive searches of the contents, but never find any contraband. After many years, all are retired and meet by chance in a pub. When prevailed upon to reveal […]
Áine Markham: Dismantling gains in global health?
This month signals a critical moment for the future of global health financing as high-level political representatives meet in Addis Ababa for the Third International Conference on Financing for Development to discuss how the new Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) will be funded. Current trends in stagnating spending on aid and a finance-driven rhetoric risk abandoning […]
The BMJ Today: Hiking the price of fizz
• Getting busy with the fizzy The BMA is the latest voice to call for a 20% tax on sugary drinks in the UK. The tax, if introduced, could reduce the prevalence of obesity by around 180 000 people in the UK, says the doctor’s union. The target would be all non-alcoholic drinks with added […]
Richard Lehman’s journal review—13 July 2015
NEJM 9 July 2015 Vol 373 111 First they defined a new disease category. Then they promoted a mechanistic explanation. Then they made everyone focus on the pathway that matched the latest drugs. Then they made billions of dollars selling the drugs. By the time the whole edifice started to look shaky, everybody was complicit […]
Jeffrey Aronson: When I use a word . . . Breaking worse
There is a bewildering number of ways to break a word. In metanalysis you reinterpret the form of a word, creating a new one. An umpire, for example, was originally a noumpere, from the old French word nonper, peerless, although one batsman suggested, when I gave him out, that it was from non père, fatherless […]
Defining child poverty
The government’s plan to repeal the 2010 Child Poverty Act, which committed it to eradicating child poverty in the UK by 2020, and dispense with the current definition of child poverty is highly concerning. Especially when you consider this plan in the context of a recent report by the four UK children’s commissioners, which stated that […]
The BMJ Today: Cleaning up corruption in medicine
• Can Gurinder Singh Grewal, the new president of the Punjab Medical Council, clean up medicine in Punjab? He is being praised for his anticorruption stance by the media, and his supporters say that he is blazing a new trail in the enforcement of medical ethics. However his critics point out that these assertions are impossible […]
Tom Jefferson: EMA confidential—the EMA continues consultation on its 0070 policy and concerns appear
Following on from its recent webinar I blogged about, the European Medicines Agency (EMA) held a consultation meeting with industry and selected stakeholders to discuss specific aspects of its policy 0070 on prospective access to regulatory data. Readers should refer to my previous posts for the salient points of policy 0070. The latest meeting (like […]
Veena Rao: India’s welfare woes
There’s been a huge amount of criticism in India following budgetary cuts imposed on social sector programmes in this year’s budget, the most prominent being the 50% cut in the Ministry of Women and Child Development, custodian of the Integrated Child Development (ICDS) programme, and supposed guardian of India’s nutritional wellbeing. To compensate for this […]
Shiva Raj Mishra and Dinesh Neupane: How small local NGOs responded to Nepal’s earthquake
Nepal’s earthquake affected 30 of its 75 districts taking the lives of nearly 8,604 people. 16,808 people were injured. About 3 million were displaced during two major earthquakes less than two week apart and hundreds of aftershocks. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) says that it destroyed 285 000 houses. Immediately after the […]