For most of us, it’s textbook – chills, fever, and phlegm. We know the impending list of causes and antibiotic management regimes off by heart, but what we don’t know recognise is that it is still the number one killer of children in the world. Pneumonia – we’ve yet to conquer the battle. It is […]
Neil Graham on the dangers of advertising abortion advice
In May Channel 4 broadcast a television advertisement for the sexual and reproductive health charity Marie Stopes. The charity says that its aim is to prevent unintended pregnancies and unwanted births. The advert, the first of its kind in the United Kingdom, has been criticised, largely by campaigners opposed to abortion. Indeed the Advertising Standards […]
Helen Jaques: Reporting from the front line of research
Monday morning. Wake up, drag yourself into town . . . and spend 45 minutes or so in a magnetic resonance imaging machine. That’s how I spent my Monday morning at least. I was volunteering as a research subject at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging, just round the corner from the BMJ offices in […]
Richard Hurley: Private financing of hospitals
Doctors should demand publication of the details of deals made between the UK government and private investors to build hospitals under private finance initiatives (PFIs), Professor Allyson Pollock told a meeting of the Medical Journalists’ Association at the Royal College of General Practitioners on 3 June. She showed new evidence that these schemes are more […]
Sally Carter on the Council of Science Editors conference
I went to the Council of Science Editors conference in Atlanta, which was snazzily entitled “The Changing Climate of Scientific Publishing: The Heat is On.” Atlanta was indeed hot. I had to get over the guilt of flying to a conference with climate change at its heart, then arriving at a completely air-conditioned hotel, wasting […]
Birte Twisselmann on new techologies
Day 2 of the SSP (Society for Scholarly Publishing) meeting started with what was probably the best attended session of the whole event. “Geoff and Kent redux” featured the always entertaining duo of Kent Anderson (Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery) and CrossRef’s Geoff Bilder, who, in their own inimitable fashion, presented their take on […]
Richard Smith: Do I belong to a “failed generation?”
Baby boomers—those of us born between the end of the war and the early 60s—are a failed generation,” said Alex Jadad, chief innovator and founder, Centre for Global eHeath Innovation (and much else), at a conference on last week. I’m a baby boomer. Am I the member of a failed generation? Sadly I think that […]
Birte Twisselmann: Is there an app for that?
This year’s SSP (Society for Scholarly Publishing) annual meeting, “A Golden Opportunity,” started on Wednesday, 2 June 2010. The evening’s “networking reception” in the exhibition space was buzzing, creating great expectations for the next couple of days’ actual sessions. And although librarians, assorted publishing types, web hosts, and providers of all manner of publishing related services may […]
Richard Feinmann: Fear of HIV lessening and incidence rising
There is increasing evidence that for cultural reasons, women are unlikely to use condoms if their family planning method was satisfied through a long acting reversible contraceptive (LARC) and that women were more likely to have concurrent partners if the risk of pregnancy was so effectively removed with a LARC. […]
Domhnall Macauley on Regina Benjamin, the Surgeon General of the US
One of her ambitions is to climb Kilimanjaro. It’s a tough climb even for a determined and committed woman like Regina Benjamin, Surgeon General of the United States. And, if the Surgeon General sets a target, people will remember. We met, appropriately, at the American College of Sports Medicine meeting in Baltimore after she had […]