June 17th, 2020Some of the world’s leading medical journals are reviewing their processes after they were forced to retract major covid studies based on flawed data, reports The Guardian. None of the peer reviewers who examined a questionable study on the impact...
June 17th, 2020Most of the registered clinical trials of potential treatments for COVID-19 underway as of late March were designed in ways that will greatly limit their value in understanding potential treatments, according to a study from researchers at Johns...
June 10th, 2020A critical 500-person Cape Town trial, part of an international examination into whether the BCG vaccine protects against COVID-19, is under pressure from demands from a group of activists.
Bhekisisa reports that aCape Town scientists are...
May 13th, 2020
The nuance of a study showing a link between vegetarianism and poor mental health got lost as the study was shared widely online, reports Business Insider.
Previous research shows an association between vegetarianism and a higher risk of...
May 6th, 2020
The COVID-19 pandemic has seen "droves of research papers rushed to pre-print servers, essentially outsourcing peer review to practising physicians and journalists", write ethicists at Carnegie Mellon and McGill universities.
The global outbreak...
Results from the first studies designed to determine how widely the coronavirus has spread in communities have started to trickle in, drawing immense attention. Stat News reports that experts are already raising concerns about the validity of some...
April 22nd, 2020
Claims that the racial disparities to be seen in US pandemic data evidence of are evidence of systemic racism rests on a false presumption, writes Coleman Hughes on Quillette.
There is now a racial justice angle on the coronavirus pandemic,...
April 22nd, 2020
Most day-to-day diseases don’t seem to care what sex you are: man or woman, those coughs, colds and stomach bugs latch on regardless. But, says a report in The Daily Telegraph, there’s clear evidence that COVID-19 is different. Across the...
April 15th, 2020
The unwillingness of the authors of a recent study in Nature Medicine, to minimise moral or socio-political conclusions — in this case between Chinese wet markets and the emergence of COVID-19 — is a disheartening failing in the liberal Western...
March 25th, 2020
A once-in-a-century pandemic. But, writes John PA Ioannidis, professor of medicine, of epidemiology and population health, of biomedical data science and of statistics at Stanford University and co-director of Stanford’s Meta-Research Innovation...
March 18th, 2020
In a rare decision, the Journal of the American Heart Association announced the retraction of a widely publicised study claiming vaping increased the likelihood of heart attack.
The study by Dr Stanton Glantz, professor of medicine and director...
March 4th, 2020
A large-scale malaria vaccine study led by the World Health Organisation (WHO) has been criticised by a leading bioethicist for committing a “serious breach” of international ethical standards", finds a special BMJ report. The cluster...
February 26th, 2020
There has been considerable confusion from three large-scale randomised trials of aspirin in high risk primary prevention subjects, leaving doctors understandably confused about whether or not to prescribe aspirin for primary prevention of heart...
February 12th, 2020
Independent scientists have questioned research that suggested that the outbreak of coronavirus disease spreading from China might have passed from bats to humans through the illegal traffic of pangolins, reports Reuters Health.
South China...
February 5th, 2020
A row over scientific fraud at the highest level of British academia has led to calls for one of the country’s leading geneticists and highest-paid university chiefs to leave his posts, reports The Guardian . David Latchman, professor of...
December 11th, 2019
The group of international experts, which also includes scientists from the National Institutes of Health, Stanford University, Harvard Medical School, Columbia University Medical Centre and University College London, point to inflammation-related...
