The audience falls deathly silent in the flamboyantly adorned grand hall where scientists from across Africa have congregated to hear the announcement. Meanwhile, in distant homelands people crowd around televisions and […]
Latest articles
Tom Nolan: assessing the swine flu pandemic
GPs, politicians, journalists, and practice managers met for the Pandemic Summit at the Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP) last Thursday to share their experiences on surviving the swine flu pandemic. […]
Philipp du Cros: A Momentous Day?
Mr S looked calm and somewhat bemused by the commotion. He had twice unsuccessfully undergone standard treatment for tuberculosis (TB) and had been taking antiretrovirals for HIV for over a […]
Jane O’Brien asks: What worries you most in your career?
Good Medical Practice (2006) and other GMC guidance is all motherhood and apple pie, right? You read it once and put it on a shelf, because it doesn’t really help […]
Richard Smith: Web 2.0 overtakes Web 1.0: get with it
Last week in the United States Facebook for the first time had more traffic than Google. This is hugely significant and shows how interacting is taking over from searching on […]
Emily Spry: Sierra Leone doctors still on strike
Despite my best efforts, I seem to have ended up with four sick babies and a mother with an infected Caesarian wound, all of us stranded in an unused wing […]
Richard Smith: Scrap peer review and beware of “top journals”
The neurologist and epidemiologist Cathie Sudlow has written a highly readable and important piece in the BMJ exposing Science magazine’s poor reporting of a paper on chronic fatigue syndrome, (1) […]
K. M. Venkat Narayan: Oozing With Confidence New India Takes On Education Challenges
In general, past trends may help to reliably predict the future of simple systems. Not so with complex dynamic systems, which are hard to predict, and when it comes to […]
Seye Abimbola on the scientific paper and commentary
I am at present conducting a systematic review and meta analysis that involves a detailed appraisal of the quality of studies. It has made me realise all over again how […]
Domhnall MacAuley: Illness hidden behind steel doors?
Ever thought about prisoners? Not those unfortunates banged up in a far away jail; misguided young drug couriers, misunderstood plane spotters, or those whose foolish misdemeanours have been magnified through […]