I had the honor of being the first case reported officially from the United Arab Emirates (UAE). It was 3 am on Sunday, 17th May when I arrived at Dubai […]
Year: 2009
Stephen Ginn on US health care reform
I was out for dinner with a New Yorker friend of mine recently. She’s British, but she’d brought along an American friend and I happened to mention to him how […]
Stephen Ginn on “sexting”
There was a new moral panic last week. Teenagers are “sexting” each other and, using magic new distribution channels, sometimes these images are distributed way beyond their original recipients. There’s concern […]
Richard Smith asks: Is it unpatriotic to criticise the NHS?
I’m worried that in the highly charged atmosphere created by the extraordinary US debate on health care my published anxieties about the NHS might brand me as unpatriotic. Perhaps Fox […]
Helen Macdonald on figures, jabs, scaling back, and sewage
The number of swine flu cases fell across the UK again, according to the weekly figures from the Health Protection Agency, although they caution their interpretation. Sir Liam Donaldson, England’s […]
Carl Heneghan and Matthew Thompson on Tamiflu in children: what’s all the fuss?
Carl Heneghan The last few days has been hectic since the publication of our systematic review in the BMJ on the use of antivirals in children. By now, you are […]
Mark Cobain on understanding cardiovascular risk
Amidst all the debate regarding CVD risk scores, Rod Jackson’s recent editorial ‘QRISK or Framingham for predicting cardiovascular risk?’ evaluated the usefulness of two risk scores: QRISK and Framingham. It […]
Time to ignore all surveys, says Richard Smith
Recently in Bangladesh I had breakfast with a Harvard professor of economics who told me: “Economists pay no attention to what people say, only to what they do.” Now I […]
Tom Nolan: Is Tamiflu useful in children or not?
Why did the operator at the National Pandemic Flu Service give the child Tamiflu? The cynics will say because the algorithm told him to, but the real answer, according to […]
Richard Smith asks “Am I going to hell?”
The other night, as is my wont, I imagined myself dying, and I wondered as I came near the end whether I would suddenly fear that I might be going […]