A Dugyot in the U.S.A.: How is the Fellowship Going?: Going into fellowship has been one of the most humbling things i've experienced in my life. It stripped all the facades i had built up ...
Friday, December 5, 2014
Solving Ebola
The press have been discussing the current outbreak of Ebola in West
Africa. They stress that it is an awful way to die, that there is no
cure, and that health workers are dying despite apparently taking all
necessary precautions. More learned writers have been explaining that
Ebola is quite hard to catch unless you come into direct contact with
contaminated bodily fluids, and that simple precautions should be enough
to contain it. Yet other commentators are pointing out that the death
rate is very low compared to other well known diseases,...
Ebola in 2040: will stigma save us?
One of the few perks of being a psychologist in a medical school
(apart from occasionally running to a colleague to check a personal
health matter) was talking to researchers about the real state of
knowledge in any particular field.
The Middlesex Hospital Medical
School, which started in 1746 and was subsumed into UCL in 1987, had a
great talent for developing new services. In a very minor way I added to
that trend by setting up, with two other colleagues, a national
referral centre for post-traumatic stress disorder, which is still...
The flu is a virus!
It is winter and a lot of people are sick. Around here, and around the
country, there are two big kinds of sick – one is mainly gastrointestinal
disease with vomiting and diarrhea as the main symptoms, and the other upper
respiratory infections with congestion, cough, and sometimes shortness of
breath as the main symptoms. The first (GI) are mostly caused by norovirus in adults and adolescents and
rotavirus in small children (and, recent reported, the elderly). The
respiratory version is frequently influenza, or other viruses. Viruses. Not...
Medicine and Social Justice: Delmar Boulevard, Geo-mapping, and the Social Dete...
Medicine and Social Justice: Delmar Boulevard, Geo-mapping, and the Social Dete...: The social determinants of health are those factors that affect people’s health status that are the result of the social situation in whi...
Caribbean medical schools: "second chance" or serving a real need?
“Second
chance med school”, by Anemona Harticollis in the New York Times July 31, 2014,
is the most recent treatment of the topic of for-profit Caribbean medical
schools that train American students who, in most cases, were unable to gain admission
to traditional US-based schools. This is not the first time Ms. Harticollis has
covered the story; they are also the subject of her article in the Times from December 22, 2010, “Medical
schools in region fight Caribbean flow”, which focused on the fear of US
schools that these Caribbean schools are willing...
Leukaemia risk from mitoxantrone: higher than previously reported
"All the discussion now days, when we
discuss DMTs in MS, is risk benefit. One of the more risky drugs that
is licensed in several countries for treating MS, is the chemotherapy
agent, mitoxantrone. This drug works by inhibiting an enzyme that unzips
DNA and causes mistakes when the DNA strands are spliced and stitched
back together. As a result of the mistakes, mitoxantrone causes a
specific kind of treatment-related leukaemia. This meta-analysis shows
that the risk is higher than previously reported and occurs in 1 in 137
MSers treated....
Vitamin D birth levels do not affect risk of MS
Multiple Sclerosis Research: Vitamin D birth levels do not affect risk of MS: Ueda P, Rafatnia F, Bäärnhielm M, Fröbom R, Korzunowicz G, Lönnerbro R, Hedström AK, Eyles D, Olsson T, Alfredsson L. Neonatal vitamin D s...
Sex and MS
Multiple Sclerosis Research: Sex and MS: Lew-Starowicz M, Rola R. Correlates of Sexual Function in Male and Female Patients with Multiple Sclerosis. J Sex Med. 2014 Jun. doi: 10.1...
Bronchodilators don't help bronchiolitis
Autumn brings the start of another
Respiratory Syncytial Virus (RSV) season in the U.S., a virus that can
cause bronchiolitis in younger children. The wheezing - and sometimes
decreased oxygen saturation - of bronchiolitis can be scary for parents
and physicians alike; since bronchodilators like albuterol help many
older kids and adults with wheezing, it seems intuitive that they would
help bronchiolitis as well. The November 1 issue of AFP discusses
a Cochrane update, however, demonstrating that bronchodilators don't
improve...
BIOMAB: Research Day Antwerp - 24 Oct 2014
BIOMAB: Research Day Antwerp - 24 Oct 2014: Beste Hierbij wensen wij u uit te nodigen op de jaarlijkse onderzoeksdag van de Faculteit Farmaceutische, Biomedische en Diergene...
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