Quick follow on from the last blog post on the wonderful world of UN statistics. This time the Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation (IGME) has ploughed through country data. […]
Year: 2009
Louise Kenny: On-call in Guatemala
I thought I might be broken in gently to the new job, but I arrived last Friday in Santiago, and was thrown into a 24hr on-call in the ER on […]
Richard Smith: Remember “the disappeared”
The most interesting, and certainly the most chilling, experience I had in four days in Buenos Aires was to visit the memorial to “the disappeared.” […]
Vidhya Alakeson on President Obama’s healthcare speech
It is a peculiar trait of American politics: long presidential speeches broadcast at prime time. Just as Bill Clinton did thirteen years ago, yesterday, for an hour, President Obama tried […]
Domhnall MacAuley: Equity, human rights, and access to care
Often the only visible links between a conference and the host city are the presence of intense young researchers with carefully rolled posters and middle aged delegates with matching bags, […]
Síle Lane on keeping libel laws out of science
Good science depends on open, critical discussion. Where medical science is concerned, if doctors didn’t voice reservations and medical publishers don’t air disputes, many people might think them irresponsible. But […]
Tracey Koehlmoos: How zinc can save 400,000 lives annually
In the August 17th issue of Time magazine, there was an article that discussed the introduction of zinc as a treatment for childhood diarrhoea in Mali. The article has raised […]
Liz Wager: It’ll only take 5 minutes …
I’ve reached an age where various bits of my body don’t seeem to work as well as they used to (you’ll be able to find out which ones if you […]
Richard Smith: A crime against knowledge
Firsthand personal experience of a great crime can make it real in a way that full intellectual understanding will not. Spend two hours in close contact with an African AIDS […]
Joe Collier on the need for ‘oholisms’
From the outside, most people appear to conduct themselves in a normal, essentially humdrum, manner. However, in many (possibly most) of us there are odd, and often secret, compulsive behavioural […]