Every two minutes a woman dies of cervical cancer. Not surprisingly, 90 percent of these deaths occur in the poorest countries where women often do not have access to screening tests and treatment, or they are simply too expensive. Because of the lack of these services, vaccines against the human papillomavirus (HPV) that causes 70 percent […]
Chris Cox: Eva Michalak wins £4.5 million over discrimination
Expressions of disbelief in some newspapers about the size of the award of compensation for Dr Eva Michalak, who will apparently receive almost £4.5 million from the Mid Yorkshire Hospitals NHS Trust following her successful employment tribunal case, are rarely combined with equivalent expressions of outrage at the way in which she was treated by […]
David Payne: bmj.com redesign feedback week 6
The redesigned bmj.com is now more than a month old and this last blog before Christmas is to update readers about the latest feedback and what we are doing about it. First, citations. A colleague spotted that some older articles were missing page numbers in the citation line. This is now fixed. Second, section pdfs. […]
David Kerr: Consumerism and the lost tribe in diabetes
Bad news makes good press. Last week the main medical news item was the release of the National Diabetes Audit figures for England and it made grim reading. The audit collected data from 152 Primary Care Trusts covering almost 70% of the population of people living with diabetes. The bottom line was that there are an […]
Douglas Noble and Felix Greaves: stealth attack on public health
Last month we drew attention to three critical pieces of data that painted a picture of the piece by piece dismantling of the public health specialist workforce. Consultant appointment processes have dropped considerably in the last three years, registrars at end of training are failing to get substantive full time consultant posts, and academic public […]
Vasiliy Vlassov: Russia’s new healthcare law
President Medvedev recently signed a new healthcare law. This is the final step of enacting the legislation in Russia. It has taken 13 months to get from the first draft of the bill to it being signed in—a record length of time in Putin’s Russia, where laws usually run through the legislators’ house in a […]
Richard Lehman’s journal review – 19 December 2011
JAMA 14 Dec 2011 Vol 306 2459 The topic of stillbirth got a thorough airing in The Lancet last April, when the British press seized on the fact that our figures were as bad as Estonia and therefore a disgrace to the civilized world. In fact they are much better than those in the USA, […]
Robin Stott: How to avoid an 18th COP out
Three separate images from the recent 17th conference of the parties (COP 17) in Durban, where I was as an observer on behalf of the climate and health council, frame my view of how we can rescue the COP process from its terminal decline. We might then have a better chance of rescuing the globe from […]
Research highlights – 16 December 2011
” “Research highlights” is a weekly round-up of research papers appearing in the print BMJ. We start off with this week’s research questions, before providing more detail on some individual research papers and accompanying articles. […]
Richard Smith: Death becomes fashionable
Death is becoming fashionable. London’s Southbank is planning a two day festival of death, the BMJ has a Christmas editorial urging us to think of death as a friend rather than an enemy, and last week the Centre for Humanities and Health at King’s College London held a death workshop where philosophers and doctors worked […]