In my early twenties I was felled by a bout of mental illness. It started with a panic attack. I was standing on the station at Leamington Spa waiting for a train and shivering slightly in the early autumnal chill when, without warning, a paralysing wave of fear broke over me. The terror that swept over me that afternoon was intense. Although an otherwise unremarkable day - I was waiting for the London train to visit my girlfriend - I might as well have been in line for my own annihilation, so strong and so plausible was the fear. more…

The number of laboratory confirmed cases of swine flu in England has shot up by nearly fifty percent since last Friday. 1604 new cases were confirmed between 27-29th June, bringing the total number to 4968. more…

I have just come back from a gathering of the “big dogs of British medicine” at Highclere Castle, home of Lord Carnarvon, who participated in the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun. The point of the meeting was to provide the Royal College of Physicians working party on future doctors with material for their deliberations.

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“We’re saying there have been at least a million cases of this new H1N1 virus in the United States so far this year. “

That’s according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) which held a press conference on Friday which shed some more light on the epidemiology and spread of the disease.
So how was this huge figure (over thirty times the number of confirmed cases) calculated?

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It is often said of military planners that they spend their time preparing to fight the last battle, not the next one. The same could be said of regulators. Take research ethics. Recently I was with the WHO in Geneva looking at the regulation of research during health emergencies. The question we were invited to consider was whether ordinary ethical standards could be modified in times of crisis. Pandemic flu was clearly in mind, although several spoke of viral haemorrhagic fevers in all their fear and drama. more…

So inevitably as a middle-aged family man with a home in the suburbs of North London I meet health professionals over dinner. ‘This is Peter, he’s a consultant anaesthetist…’ my host will say and I translate as ‘This is Peter he’s far more interesting than you and will hold court for the rest of the evening…’

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The pandemic continues to spread throughout all corners of the world, with Serbia and Iraq getting their first cases yesterday. In the UK the West Midlands still lead the way in new cases with 115 confirmed there yesterday. The actual prevalence in this area and other flu “hotspots” is probably much higher as guidelines on swabbing suspected cases have now changed. This was confirmed yesterday by Maureen Baker of the RCGP: more…

The recently released World Health Organisation statistics on progress to meeting the health-related Millennium Development Goals reveal little progress in some areas. But closer analysis reveals some huge achievements and underlines the need for greater evaluation of what works and what doesn’t, rather than cutting development aid. more…

The media’s interest in H1N1 may have declined, but the number of cases appears to be on the increase, and not just in the southern hemisphere where we’re told to look to. The World Health Organisation’s latest map of H1N1 cases gives an interesting if simplistic snapshot of the most affected areas globally. Countries with the most cases are painted a rusty red, meaning Spain with its 539 cases and the US with over 20,000 share the same colour, but you get the idea. more…

An audible gasp went around Washington last week when the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released its first estimate of the cost of healthcare reform: $1 trillion. The cost seemed all the more eye watering given that it would only cut the numbers of uninsured Americans by 16 million or around a third of the total uninsured population. more…