Latest healthcare news

Stomach Cancer This mostly affects older people.  The average age of people when they are diagnosed is 68.  About six out of every ten persons diagnosed with stomach cancer each year are 65 or older.  The risk that a man will develop stomach cancer in...

Upper Gastrointestinal Tract Screening At present, screening for these cancers only exists for those with symptoms.  Oesophageal Cancer Oesophageal cancer is more common among men than among women. The lifetime risk of oesophageal cancer in the United States is...

Colorectal Cancer Screening This is the third most common cancer diagnosed in both men and women in the United States.  The overall lifetime risk of developing colorectal cancer is about 1:23, that is 4.4% for men and 1:25, that is 4.1% for women. Many lifestyle...

Most screening programmes evaluate patients with a high short term risk of developing cardiovascular disease. Clearly though, cardiovascular disease begins in early life and with the exposure to risk factors determines a lifetime risk for clinical cardiovascular...

Cancer, COVID and Screening; Where do we go from here? It is reported in the papers this weekend that thousands of lives may be lost to cancer because 250,000 patients were not referred to hospital for urgent checks. Apparently, there was a 43% drop in referrals...

Elimination of COVID-19 - Is This Possible and What Would It Look Like? An interesting article published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases August 6, 2020 by Anita Heywood and Macintyre looks at this in detail.  In countries that have achieved a low incidence of...

SARS-CoV-2 Viral Load - Can it predict COVID-19 mortality? An interesting letter in The Lancet Respiratory Medicine published August 6, 2020 by Pujadas and others reports on the association of viral load and COVID-19 mortality. Currently SARS-CoV-2 PCR swabs do not...

Wendy Armstrong in the Journal of the American Medical Association of July revealed that 87% of patients hospitalised with COVID-19 had persistent symptoms more than two months after the onset of the disease despite resolution of viral infection. Investigators in...

An article by Baker and others published in Science July 2020 used climate-dependent epidemic modelling to simulate the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic by proving different scenarios based on known coronavirus biology. Studies using a regression framework have found a role for...

An interesting article highlighted by Professor Justin Stebbing in his science update this week highlighted the fact that over 150 students at an Israeli secondary school were infected by SARS-CoV-2 after students were allowed to remove their masks during a heat wave....

Is the heart affected by Coronavirus? This is looked at by Valentina Puntmann and others in the Journal of American Medical Association Cardiology published July 22, 2020. They pose the question “What are the cardiovascular effects in unselected patients with recent...

Social Distancing and Animal Life Lobsters, birds and primates use quarantine to avoid infections. An interesting article published in the Scientific American August 2020 by Hawley and Buck. Despite how unnatural social distancing may feel to the human population, it...

COVID-19 and the Heart Is it affected? This is looked at by Valentina Puntmann and others in the Journal of American Medical Association Cardiology published July 22, 2020. They pose the question “What are the cardiovascular effects in unselected patients with recent...

Does Hydroxychloroquine, as President Trump has indicated, actually improve outcome in mild to moderate COVID-19 disease? Finally, a trial which looks at treatment for COVID-19 in mild to moderate COVID-19 patients.  It was published in the New England Journal of...

Can Animals Catch SARS-CoV-2 and get COVID-19 Infection? An interesting article published by Patterson and others as a pre-print looked at 817 companion animals living in Northern Italy who were sampled at the same time there was frequent human infection....

Why does the SARS-CoV-2 virus seem to affect Black and South Asian Ethnic Groups more in the UK? An interesting correspondence by Marion Cook in The Lancet July 17 suggests that this could be related to sickle cell and thalassaemia. Sickle cell anaemia is an inherited...

COVID 19 in Children and How it Occurs or Does Not Occur in Families An interesting article published in Paediatrics by Klara, M. and others looked at the dynamics of family infection. It is known that children have been less affected than adults in terms of severity...

Diabetes and COVID-19 Disease; Why do Diabetics have Worse Outcomes? This is carefully looked at in The Lancet Diabetes and Endocrinology by Matteo Apicella and others and they suggest that the reason for worse prognosis in people with diabetes is likely to be...

SARS-CoV-2 Vaccine An interesting update from Professor Justin Stebbing provids his own insight into the current vaccine progress.  Professor Stebbing feels that there is a 75% probability that there will be enough vaccine for the entire United States population...

Coronavirus Disease Exposure and Spread from Nightclubs An interesting article in the emerging infectious diseases Journal of the CDC showed that 246 cases of COVID-19 were linked to nightclubs in Seoul, South Korea.  During the April 30 to May 5 bank holiday,...

Diarrhoea as a Feature of COVID-19 Disease A study in China published as a letter in the BMJ suggests that the most common symptoms in patients infected by SARS-CoV-2 are fever and cough.  They suggested that the incidence of other clinical features was often...

What is the Actual Prevalence of SARS-CoV-2 in any population and country? An interesting study published in The Lancet by Marina Pollán, Beatriz Pérez-Gómez and others performed a nationwide population-based study to estimate the seroprevalence of SARS-CoV-2...

How to Boost your Immunity During This Pandemic A review article in the Scientific American looked at the myths and facts around immunity boosting.  They suggested that there were no revolutionary ideas. However, there are some evidence-based steps in order to...

The Fear of COVID-19 for Those Patients Living with Obesity This is reviewed by Le Brocq and others in The Lancet published July 9.  Data from France and The United Kingdom show a disproportionately high prevalence of obesity in patients with COVID-19 admitted to...