2513 Apart from the threat posed by a new strain of pandemic influenza, there’s the irksome fact of antigenic drift in existing subtypes of influenza A, which means that most circulating viruses are now dissimilar to those included in the vaccines. […]
Time was when a new report about the future of medical research in the UK would have had me all agog. But here comes the Cooksey Report written by a “distinguished venture capitalist […]
This week’s Lancet is a bit thin on articles of general interest but here is a superb book review by Michael Marmot about Julian Tudor Hart’s The political economy of health care. Worth getting to celebrate the birth in a stable of the main proponent of the idea that all human beings are of equal […]
This study of alcohol intake and total mortality in men and women is written by a team of Italians, and rightly so, because the Italians know how to drink. Tempting sorts of alcohol are cheaply available everywhere and all day long in Italy, but you rarely see a drunk Italian. […]
Just a collection of straggling bare branches carrying pom-poms of pink flowers: but what a fragrance! In fact dear Reg Farrer, its discoverer, named it Viburnum fragrans, and the name was only changed to his after he had died. […]
A few years ago, our local community mental health team decided on a strategy called “aggressive outreach […]
If you haven’t managed to open up an occluded coronary artery within 3 days of a myocardial infarction, should you go ahead and stent it anyway? Don’t bother, is the message of this multinational study: you may even harm the patient by trying. […]
‘Tis the season to be sending in patients with chest infections, known as community acquired pneumonia in today’s parlance. Unless the patient is worryingly ill, we’ve usually tried oral antibiotics for some time before we send them to hospital, but it isn’t clear that whether this was the case in this Dutch trial comparing short […]
There is still plenty of room for debate about the usefulness of screening mammography over the age of 50, but after this study, I hope we will hear no more about lowering the starting age to 40. In 55,000 British women aged 39-41 who were randomised to receive it, it failed to show a significant […]
We have a lethal virus carried by 0.2% of the community. It is sexually transmissible and the only preventive measures are behavioural; it is treatable but not curable. Should we screen for it, and if so, how often? No prizes for guessing that this a real question about HIV in the UK. […]