Last month some 500 of us gathered in Bologna to remember Alessandro Liberati, founder of the Italian Cochrane Centre, a great thinker about health, and a personal friend to most of the 500. As I’ve described in a previous blog, the day was built around Italo Calvino’s Six Memos for the Next Millennium, which discussed […]
How many of us can expect a year after we die to have some 500 people attend a meeting to celebrate our life, discuss our work, and think about the future agenda that flows from our work? “Almost none of us” is the answer, but it happened for Alessandro Liberati in Bologna in December. Most […]
It is the 13th leading cause of death, between liver cirrhosis and renal failure. There are more and more frequent outbreaks—a record seven in 2012 with over 140 deaths. The agent responsible is known, and has largely been eradicated in many other developed countries. But in the USA, federal money is not used to investigate […]
“No single law—no set of laws can eliminate evil from the world, or prevent every senseless act of violence in our society. But that can’t be an excuse for inaction. Surely, we can do better than this.” These were President Obama’s words to the people of Newtown, Connecticut, where last week 20 […]
My wife and I arrived in Zambia in August 2012 for a six month placement as surgical registrars in a busy rural hospital in the Eastern Province. This was my first experience of hospital care in the developing world and I was soon working all hours of the day and night, operating on everything from […]
JAMA 19 Dec 2012 Vol 308 2469 Most healthy people don’t take aspirin, so if you look at a long-term study of aspirin in relation to some clinical event, such as macular degeneration, you have to be very careful to allow for confounding by indication. And what is the main indication for aspirin? Why, it […]
The 14 December 2012 marked the end of a year long pentavalent vaccine study in Kerala, India. Kerala is a small state in the south with some of the best healthcare indicators in the country. The pentavalent vaccine is to replace the diphtheria, pertussis, and tetanus (DPT) vaccine and combines H influenza B and Hepatitis B […]
This blog reports on a workshop held by the Department of Health on 28 November 2012 under Chatham House rules, that is the discussion can be reported but not attributed. This workshop aimed to provide a framework for “a part of the government exploring use of QALY weights” in value based pricing (VBP), specifically: Burden […]
As a brutal rape attack in Delhi has outraged masses and spurred the demand for urgent action, my thoughts turn to to the thousands of cases every year that suffer in silence. I do hope this spirit of intolerance for violence sustains. While calls for the death penalty, chemical castration, faster court trials, and heightened […]
I am willing it not to snow anymore. It has snowed for the past two days as I walked to the settlement of Simikot. There is an airstrip here, but the flights out of this remote north west corner of Nepal are even more weather dependent than our donkeys have been and I am keen […]