One evening last week I found myself alone in the restaurant of a large golfing hotel in a remote corner of Essex. Probably because it happens so infrequently, I quite like having dinner on my own, even in a large golfing hotel. It means I get to read while I eat, something I am not […]
While working in the orthopaedic department at Ngwelezana I spent a fair amount of time doing the clubfoot clinics. For those unfamiliar with clubfoot treatment, most cases can be corrected very successfully without needing any major foot surgery. […]
Every day one of our national newspapers publishes a piece reporting on “scientific research” and nearly every day the report is misleading, inaccurate, shows poor understanding of science and scientific research methods, and irritates the hell out of many a hardworking researcher. Often the original research is crap too. […]
It has been 25 years since HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, was isolated. Since that time, 25 million people have died of HIV related illnesses. In 2007 there were an estimated 33 million people (CI 30-36) living with the virus and three quarters of all related deaths and two thirds of incident cases were […]
“Judge not, lest you be judged,” so goes the popular Christian refrain. Less known, but equally striking is “Never trust a fat preacher.” Is it ok to judge if you’re a preacher? How can you guide your flock without making the judgement that they need guiding? If you do so judge, do you then have […]
As if “Baby P” wasn’t bad enough, now we hear about 2 women and 19 pregnancies resulting in 7 surviving children. The nearest we have to a name for this case is “the British Fritzl.” This somehow sums up the dehumanisation of abuse – these victims are without even the dignity of a public name; […]
We are well into the first term now, and we are starting to do some modules that are not just straight science. One of these is an epidemiology module. I was a little apprehensive about this, as someone had told me that epidemiology was “just health statistics”. But when we started, I realised it wasn’t […]
If, like me, you’re used to a parliamentary system where the party with a majority in Parliament runs the government and, if it has a big enough majority, pushes through its manifesto commitments without too much difficulty, policy making in American can seem utterly chaotic. […]
The plane didn’t crash. I was pretty sure I had turned it off, but there was no mistaking the message signal and vibration in my jacket pocket as we circled Miami, close to landing. It wasn’t just one message but five in quick succession. I had to do something. I switched it off, conscious of […]
Most of the delegates have managed to make it to Mali, despite a threatened strike by Air France’s pilots. In the end, by various routes, there are over 1000 of us from 75 countries. Our aim is to focus on efforts to strengthen the ability of developing countries to do research for health, but airlines […]