Mairi Scott and Tom Love on pandemic flu training for retired health care professionals

Pressures on the workforce are going to be one of the big challenges for the NHS in a pandemic. One strategy which might help with this problem is to draw upon retired health professionals, who could fulfil a number of possible roles. This approach has been suggested in a number of pandemic influenza plans which we reviewed […]

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Julian Sheather on Bobby Baker’s diary drawings

Representations of mental illness are traditionally menaced by two kinds of distortion, distortions that seem to pull in opposing directions. The first, and far the most common, is that the mentally ill are asocial, chaotic and violent, their ungoverned minds unfitting them for ordinary human civility, their dangerous impulses requiring surveillance, confinement and control. […]

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Juliet Walker: BMJ in the news

The swine flu pandemic has dominated the news in the last few days. In a BMJ editorial, Richard Coker argues that, “as the virus is present in several countries, trying to contain it is probably not feasible any more. Efforts should now focus mainly on mitigation… Poorer countries are most vulnerable because they have underdeveloped […]

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Richard Smith: The polypill is about demedicalisation not medicalisation

One of the things I love about the polypill is that it upsets everybody. (Just in case there are still people who haven’t heard of the polypill, it’s one pill that contains a statin, several drugs to lower blood pressure, and possibly aspirin that if everybody over 55 started taking daily might prevent three quarters […]

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Adrian Gonzalez on swine flu in Mexico

In 2003 I was at the BMJ’s offices in Tavistock Square, London, when China’s SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) epidemic was at its peak. At that time the risk of infection seemed far away. Today is different; I’m living and working in Tlalpan, the district of Mexico City that holds the largest concentration of hospitals […]

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