Latest healthcare news

Aucott and Redman discuss this in their letter in The Lancet published March 5th 2021.  115 million people worldwide have been infected with SARS-CoV-2 during the COVID-19 pandemic, with extensive implications for morbidity and mortality.   Description...

Matt Hancock announced at the press conference on Friday 5th March that there was no evidence of onward transmission of the Brazil Coronavirus variant of concern.  He informed that the mystery person infected with it had been found. Apparently, officials had been...

A preprint published in MedRxiv by Ward and others on 26th February 2021 reviews this. The vaccination programme which began in England in December 2020 gave priority to administering the first dose to the largest number of older individuals, health care and care home...

An interesting article published by Owusu in the Journal of Infectious Diseases 27th February 2021 looked at this issue.   They collected serial nasopharyngeal specimens at various time points from 109 individuals with PCR confirmed COVID-19.  They...

An interesting article published in the Scientific American by William Haseltine looks at this issue.  With declining rates of new infections and the rollout of vaccines, some are beginning to speak of an end to COVID-19.  But that rhetoric in Haseltine's...

An accepted manuscript published in the Journal of Travel Medicine by Wang and others on 19th February 2021 looked at this question. Clearly an issue of concern to anyone travelling is the possibility of in-flight transmission of COVID-19 during long and short haul...

A review article in PubMed.gov published 18th February 2021 by Arolas and others looked at this issue   They analysed the premature mortality impact of COVID-19 by calculating the amount of life years lost across 81 countries covering over 1.279866 million...

An interesting article published by Jabbal and others in Eurosurveillance, Europe's journal on infectious disease surveillance, epidemiology, prevention and control looked at whether a single dose of the Pfizer vaccine was effective.   They found that a...

An article in the Scientific American asked some questions and gave some answers. Yes, if you are currently eligible to get a vaccine, you should have it. In order to build herd immunity and slow the spread of disease, it is important to get as many people vaccinated...

This was looked at in a randomised study published 12th February 2021 in the Journal of the American Medical Association's Network Open. The randomised clinical trial by Thomas and others examined whether high dose zinc and/or high dose vitamin C reduced the severity...

Wudan Yan, a freelance journalist, elegantly explains this in his New York Magazine Intelligentsia on 17th February 2021.   In December 2020, as quickly as excitement grew over the new COVID-19 vaccines that have been approved for use, worry took over....

An interesting comment in The Lancet respiratory medicine by Tony Kirby dated February 19th 2021 discusses this issue. The United Kingdom has been one of the world's countries hardest hit by the COVID-19 pandemic.   As of February 15th 2021, there have been...

A fascinating comment by Fontanet and others published in The Lancet February 11th 2021 discusses this issue. COVID-19 pandemic has devastated healthcare systems, shutdown schools and communities, and plunged the world into an economic recession.   While...

An interesting preprint by Bradley and others in MedRxiv looked at this issue.  Current guidelines recommend that individuals who have had COVID-19 should receive the identical vaccine regime as those who have not had infection.  This includes two doses of...

The editorial published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases dated February 11th 2021 looks at this issue and asks when the global pandemic end will?    The question on everyone's mind is; when will this end? Much of the narrative around the pandemic last...

As Matt Hancock said in a webinar to me, if you have four grandparents and only four vaccines, do you vaccinate all four or do you just vaccinate two?  This is a question which we have all been asking and the government appear to have answered.  However, the...

An interesting report by Talha Burki published in The Lancet February 6, 2021 discusses this topic.   A new consortium is trying to find out whether the variants of SARS-CoV-2 which are emerging will have different clinical effects.  All viruses mutate but the...

An interesting report published in The Lancet 6 February 2020 by John Zarocostas reports on the investigation.   With new infections of COVID-19 still spreading rapidly, and health systems stretched to their limits, public Interest is now focused on the WHO...

An interesting preprint in medRxiv by Tardif and others published on 26th January 2021 reports new medical research which has yet to be evaluated.  Evidence suggests the role of an inflammatory storm in COVID-19 patients.  Colchicine is an orally administered,...