How best to set the ways we communicate with each other, and so to establish our “rules of engagement”, can be difficult’. Moreover, any “rules” we establish may vary over […]
Year: 2009
Helen Macdonald on the calm, waves of flu, vaccines, and other stories
Calm settled over swine flu coverage this week as the northern hemisphere headed into the summer holidays; but much remains uncertain. Stories tracking the Health Protection Agency’s weekly flu figures […]
Grace Tan asks: “Are medical students being discouraged from attending scientific conferences?”
One of the top five reasons given by medical students for not regularly attending meetings is “discouraged to attend by department and university,” a survey by the American Association of […]
Julian Sheather on fat and human freedom
It was the White Queen who told Alice that she had at times thought six contradictory things before breakfast. We humans have a remarkable tolerance for incompatibility, happily living with […]
Tom Nolan: How much flu is out there?
Measuring the tip of the iceberg The Health Protection Agency estimates that there were 110,000 new cases of swine flu in England last week,10,000 more than the week before. But […]
James Raftery: Bypassing NICE for the sake of innovation?
Recent reports that NICE was to be bypassed by drugs which were “innovative,” with funding from a new separate budget, sent me in search of the source report – the […]
Anna Donald’s last blog
Anna Donald died on 1 February 2009. The blog below was found on her computer posthumously. At a memorial service for her at UCL on 26 April 2009, a six […]
Richard Smith on living funerals
As we begin to assimilate the reality of assisted suicide we should also take the next step to living funerals. I’ve never been to one, but a living funeral is […]
James Raftery on the Kennedy report
” Appraising the value of innovation and other benefits: a short study for NICE, ” the report by Sir Ian Kennedy contains one of the best critiques of the new […]
Helen Macdonald on side effects, Tamiflu, and the swine flu hotline
A hundred and five thousand people with flu symptoms were prescribed Tamiflu via the new hotline last week. But there are some unintended consequences. Although consultation rates for flu like […]