Ever thought the BMJ would be competing in the same publishing awards as Nuts magazine? To be fair, some of you probably did - not least because of the extensive coverage of anatomy. (more…)
Email and mobile phones are certainly the bane of most people’s lives, but the generation of students who have never known life without the internet seem to be managing fine without them. (more…)
If you open your newspaper in the next few weeks to read a feature entitled “Ten things you should ask a scientist,” chances are the idea came from a debate held in London this week about whether we can trust what they say about food.
A survey published by the UK Food Standards Agency (FSA) suggests people trust what their mothers tell them more than they trust what scientists tell them. A microbiologist can tell us till they’re blue in the face that eating cooked chicken from a factory contaminated in bird flu is safe, but 90% of us would still be worried about doing do. (more…)
The TED conference runs for three days each February in Monterey, California. The acronym stands for technology, entertainment, and design. (more…)
” I believe that you do not measure the health of a society by GNP, but by the condition of its worst off. ”
Zygmunt Bauman
Equitable access to health care was the theme of this years meeting of the Global Forum of Health Research in Beijing and Margaret Chan, director general of WHO set the scene. (more…)
By 0900 on the 3 Oct the hills of the picturesque Gastein valley in Austria were alive with the sound of some 600 politicians, policy makers, academics, industry leaders, and NGO’s, exchanging views on the future of health care in Europe. Eight hours earlier it had been silent and chilly, as three of us prowled around a dimly lit and firmly locked hotel. Fortunately my companions, who work in DG Sanco (more…)
Back in Athens. Much cooler than a month ago and the fires on the Peleponese are out. This meeting, arranged by Ian Gilmore and George Kitas of the Royal College of Physicians and Elias Mossialos, director of LSE Health, has an ambitious inter-professional scope but a smallish group of delegates, more than half from the UK. (more…)
Monday 10 September 2007
I walked into Edinburgh’s impressive international conference centre just as a couple of minibuses pulled up outside, spilling a gaggle of protesters armed with cigarettes, Scottish flags, and placards decrying “junk science”. (more…)
“The older I get the greater power I seem to have to help the world; I am like a snowball the further I am rolled the more I gain” Susan Anthony (suffragist) 1890-1906.
On the airport bus en route to the conference I eavesdrop on a conversation which contains the words “patient” and “the NHS.” Emboldened, I accost my two travelling companions … only to find that they are heading to a meeting on spinal injury. (more…)
To Athens for the 25th International Congress of Pediatrics. Very hot indeed – over 40 degrees. Smoke from the fires raging on the hills of the Peloponnese was clearly visible from the plane as we landed. A pall of ash hung over the south east of the city. All television news channels were fixed on images of the flames encroaching on houses and people fleeing on foot. A woman and her four children had been burned alive in their car as they tried to escape.
This tragedy, unfolding against claims of government incompetence, gave local edge to the conference theme - global child health. With only eight years until 2015, speakers at the plenary sessions veered from the impossibility of reaching the millennium development goals to optimism at how much is being achieved. (more…)
