Latest healthcare news
Guidance For Fasting in Ramadan
Ramadan 12th April to 12th May 2021 All able-bodied Muslims are expected to fast during the month of Ramadan from dawn until dusk. This is complete abstinence from food, drink and sexual relations. There are a number of exemptions to this, and in such cases the...
SARS-CoV-2 and Airplane Travel
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...
How Many Years of Life Have Been Lost to COVID-19?
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...
Is A Single Dose Of Vaccine Effective? And is it Sufficient For Those Who Have had Covid-19?
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...
COVID-19: Vaccine Questions and Answers
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...
Does Taking Vitamin C or Zinc or Both Reduce COVID-19 Symptoms?
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...
How do you Re-Programme the Vaccines?
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....
When should the UK lift its lockdown?
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...
SARS-CoV-2 Variants and the Ending of the COVID-19 Pandemic
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...
Does one need a second booster vaccination following the first if one has already had COVID-19?
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...
