February 10th, 2021President Vladimir Putin’s announcement in August that Russia had cleared the world’s first COVID-19 vaccine for use before it even completed safety trials sparked scepticism worldwide. Now, reports Bloomberg, he may reap diplomatic dividends as...
February 3rd, 2021The government should encourage voluntary donations from medical schemes to fund its vaccination roll-out, rather than “forced donations through regulatory pressure” that will cause “significant future strain” on reserves, writes Craig...
February 3rd, 2021A European Union panicked by citizen anger over the tardy roll-out of vaccines tried briefly to interdict British supplies of the AstraZeneca vaccine only to back down within hours, following international condemnation, including from the World...
January 20th, 2021The much-feared colonoscopy is increasingly been replaced in the US by FIT, the faecal immunochemical test, an at-home test that is as reliable as the traditional screening, health experts say, and more agreeable, writes The New York Times.
Most...
January 20th, 2021South Africa's vaccine "strategy" is not a strategy but a goal. And an unrealistic one at that, writes Prof Shabir Madhi of the University of the Witwatersrand in The Conversation.
Madhi, professor of vaccinology and director of the SAMRC...
January 13th, 2021The Western media's reporting on Africa, as exemplified by a recent The New York Times article, tends to towards the simplistic and condescending, according to an analysis in African Arguments.
Mamka Anyonaj writes:
Were it not for the...
January 13th, 2021Israel is delivering the world's fastest COVID-19 vaccination drive by far, writes MedicalBrief. More Israelis have now been vaccinated than caught the virus.
In the vulnerable above 60s age group, more than 70% have received their first shot....
January 6th, 2021The Mews, a father-son team of British orthodontists, have a controversial and derided theory about the source of crooked teeth, writes William Brennan for The New York Times Magazine. It's rapidly earning them a cult following in the darker corners...
January 6th, 2021Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, many have suggested that countries led by women have fared better than those led by men. This popular narrative has appeared in the New York Times, Forbes, Vox, the Harvard Business Review, Stanford...
December 16th, 2020The COVID-19 pandemic is shedding light on how best to go about building National Health Insurance in South Africa – and what to avoid – writes Professor Steve Reid of the University of Cape Town in The Conversation. The ideal of universal...
December 9th, 2020To push the idea that the virus didn’t come from China, the government has misrepresented experts’ remarks and given dubious theories the veneer of science, writes Javier C. Hernández in The New York Times.
Alexander Kekulé, the director of...
December 9th, 2020Mystery illness suffered by US diplomats in Cuba was most likely caused by directed microwave radiation, concludes a report from the National Academies of Sciences, reports MedicalBrief. No blame is attributed but the NAAS report says research into...
December 9th, 2020A vaccine for COVID-19 has the potential to unlock society and save millions of people from death and serious disease, writes The Guardian. The unlikely hero of the hour is Big Pharma, an industry often regarded with disdain.
“Traditionally and...
December 2nd, 2020The denial evidenced by a mass failure to adhere to medical advice on COVID-19 is unique in modern history, notes an item in The Lancet. The time is ripe for psychoanalysis to discard “decades of insularity” and co-operate with experimental...
November 25th, 2020”I’m sorry, but the treatment’s not working.’ “These are the words that nobody wants to hear. Especially if you are the parent of a sick child. Yet increasingly, there is a real concern that we might have to start using them. In fact, some...
November 25th, 2020Coronaviruses closely related to the COVID-19 pandemic virus have been discovered in Japan and Cambodia, reports Nature. The viruses, both found in bats stored in laboratory freezers, are the first SARS-CoV-2 relatives to be found outside...
