How should funds be allocated for rare diseases?
Brian Wallach and Sandra Abrevaya are a power couple in Chicago. They met during Obama’s campaign for President and both worked in the White House...
Lancet study forecasts people living with dementia will triple by 2050
The number of adults (aged 40 years and older) living with dementia worldwide is expected to nearly triple, from an estimated 57 million in 2019...
Vaccine mandates 1: Biden’s strategy quashed by Supreme Court
The US Supreme Court has struck down President Joe Biden’s vaccine mandate requiring workers at larger businesses get vaccinated or have a weekly test. It...
Vaccine mandates 2: policies around the world
100% vaccination rates are not even theoretically achievable. But that seems to be the goal of many governments. Here are a few of the tougher...
Vaccine mandates 3: are those deplorable anti-vaxxers ‘irresponsible idiots’?
If there are any words which Hillary Clinton could take back if she could live her life over again, it is this sentence from 2016:...
Hepatitis research: more dark corners in American medicine
When World War II began, the US military discovered that it had a huge health problem: hepatitis. Nothing much was known about the disease and...
If you want assisted suicide in Germany, first you must get vaxxed
Promoters of "voluntary assisted dying" often seem to be lacking a gene for irony. Take the Australian activist, Dr Philip Nitschke, and his attempt to...
How long can you put off seeing the doctor because of lockdowns?
One in five people avoided healthcare during lockdown in the Covid-19 pandemic, often for potentially urgent problems, according to a study PLOS Medicine. During the...
Slovakia apologies for decades of forced sterilisations of Roma women
The government of Slovakia has made a formal apology to thousands of Roma [Gypsy] women who had been forcibly sterilized over several decades. The government's...
Austria makes vaccinations compulsory
Austria, reeling from a steep increase in Covid-19 cases, has become the first country in Europe to make vaccination compulsory. Those who refuse without a...
With fewer babies and more elderly, Iran pulls out the stops to promote births
Iran’s new "Law on Family and Youth Support" is a clear example of how different perspectives colour news coverage. Iran’s theocratic, authoritarian and anti-Israel regime...
Repudiating the foundation document of American medical education as racist and sexist
1910 was a landmark year in American medicine. The publication of the Flexner Report on medical education led to a rapid transformation of the medical...