Scott Routley – a man who has appeared to be in a persistent vegetative state for 10 years – has answered questions using a functional MRI scan. Canadian researchers asked him to think of playing tennis to answer ‘yes’ and to think of walking around his house to answer ‘no’. These thoughts stimulate different parts […]
Category: Cases in the news
Crimean-Congo Viral Haemorrhagic Fever (CCVHF)
A case of Crimean-Congo Viral Haemorrhagic Fever (CCVHF) has been diagnosed for the first time in the UK. The 38-year-old man had visited Afghanistan and fell ill a few days after he returned to Glasgow on a flight from Dubai. He has now been admitted to a specialist unit in the Royal Free Hospital in […]
Goodbye world tweet from ‘locked-in’ patient
Tony Nicklinson who campaigned for the right to die and recently lost his High Court battle for euthanasia has died. He had asked his family to tweet “Goodbye world the time has come, I had some fun“. He had suffered a stroke in 2005 which left him with quadriplegia and loss of speech. Following the […]
The ‘Berlin Patient’ ‘cured’ of HIV
The so-called ‘Berlin Patient’ has been in the news again as he has now reached 5 years of being clear of Human Immunodeficiency Virus Type 1 (HIV). Timothy Ray Brown has been interviewed on vaious media outlets giving his remarkable story. http://cnnpressroom.blogs.cnn.com/2012/07/24/timothy-ray-brown-to-sanjay-gupta-hiv-completely-gone/ He was HIV positive but later developed acute myeloid leukaemia which hematopoietic stem-cell […]
Botulism cases in Scotland linked to jars of curry sauce
Botulism, due to food contaminated with Clostridium botulinum, is rare in the UK but two cases in one family in Scotland have led to the withdrawal of a particular batch of ‘Loyd Grossman Korma sauce’ by the Health Protection Agency over the weekend. http://www.hpa.org.uk/NewsCentre/NationalPressReleases/2011PressReleases/111113botulism/ […]
Video gamer’s DVT
A man whose son recently died of a pulmonary embolus has starting campaigning for increased awareness of the risks of deep vein thrombosis (DVT) from the inactivity brought on by playing computer games. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-south-yorkshire-14350216 “After my research I saw there was no difference to Chris sitting at a desk on his Xbox and someone on […]
Weaving case reports into Ishikawa diagrams
Ishikawa diagrams are named after Professor Kaoru Ishikawa of Tokyo University, a highly regarded Japanese expert in quality management. “He first used it in 1943 to help explain to a group of engineers at Kawasaki Steel Works how a complex set of factors could be related to help understand a problem. [Cause and Effect] CE […]
Media labels – Three-parent IVF
The alarmingly labelled ‘three-parent IVF’ treatment has been discussed in the media over the last week following the publication of research in Nature by researchers from Newcastle. (1) The technique they studied used abnormally fertilised embryos (1 or 3 pronuclear zygotes that are not usually used in IVF) to see if the pronuclei could be […]
Man with vCJD dies after a long and public illness
Jonathan Simms from Belfast has died of variant CJD. He had survived 10 years with the disease and his case has been widely discussed in the media. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-12667709 Initially, doctors thought he had multiple sclerosis. But Jonathan’s illness was later confirmed as vCJD. He was given just months to live. After a court battle, the […]
A very public neurosurgery case report
An account of the early management, prompt surgical intervention and subsequent care of a person with severe trauma from a bullet wound to the head is unfolding in the world’s press. The news of the tragic shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and the killing and injury of several others by a gunman in Arizona has […]