28/06/2017 Fikile Mzomba

Bambisanani is a community-based organization operating in rural areas of South Africa’s Eastern Cape Province. Tuberculosis (TB) is a major cause of death in South Africa – in 2010, over 10,000 people died of TB in the Eastern Cape Province alone. Recognizing the acute importance of improving and expediting the efforts against TB in South Africa, the Bambisanani organization, supported by the Bristol-Myers Squibb Foundation, implemented the WHO ENGAGE-TB approach between November 2013 and August 2015.

27/06/2017 Dr. Magdy Younes

In contrast to gold standard medical sleep monitoring, which entails a full night of monitoring in a lab and hours of specialist analysis, commercial sleep monitoring is portable, accessible and affordable, often consisting of motion sensors worn on the wrist or even an app on a smartphone. But are these products actually effective in monitoring our sleep? Here to explore this issue is sleep expert Dr. Magdy Younes.

27/06/2017 Svitlana Volkova

Can we tell if a person is physically ill by the way they tweet? On a recently published article in the journal EPJ Data Science, researchers at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory uncover links between the health of users and the emotional tone of their social media output.

22/06/2017 Sabine Meinck

It’s a widely held view that adolescents spend far too much time communicating with peers on their smartphones. However, new research published in Large-Scale Assessments in Education could help ease parents’ concerns as it finds a strong positive relationship between students’ computer and information literacy proficiency levels and the frequency of their use of electronic devices for social communication.

20/06/2017 Rob Walton

“In this blog, co-authors Rob Walton (Cello Health Public Affairs), Jeffrey V Lazarus (CHIP, WHO Collaborating Centre on HIV and Viral Hepatitis at Rigshospitalet, the University of Copenhagen and Editor-in-Chief of Hepatology, Medicine and Policy), Homie A. Razavi (Center for Disease Analysis), Jagpreet Chhatwal (Harvard Medical School), Charles Gore (Hepatitis C Trust), Pierre Van Damme (Vaccine & Infectious Disease Institute – VAXINFECTIO, University of Antwerp), Luís Mendão (GAT –Treatment Activist Group), and Angelos Hatzakis (Athens University Medical School and Hepatitis B & C Public Policy Association), discuss an innovative financing mechanism to eliminate Hepatitis C in Europe.“

14/06/2017 Raquel Peck

On World Blood Donor Day (14 June), the World Hepatitis Alliance is calling for all blood donations to be screened and tested to prevent the transmission of viral hepatitis.

13/06/2017 William Riley

Behavioral interventions are often complex, resource intensive and extend beyond healthcare settings. Combined with the lack a market driven, regulatory structure of medical interventions; behavioural interventions often fail to be adopted. Facilitating the adoption of these interventions is now the priority of the Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research (OBSSR). Here to discuss the challenges and opportunities associated with this priority is William T. Riley, author of a commentary on this topic published in Translational Behavioral Medicine, a SpringerOpen journal.

12/06/2017 Darshan Patel

The pursuit of knowledge and discovery has always been an intrinsic human characteristic, but when new knowledge is curated and put in the right hands it has the power to bring about high value change to society. I work in the research team at the Health Foundation, an independent charity committed to bringing about better health and health care for people in the UK. Our aim is a healthier population, supported by high quality health care that can be equitably accessed. And one key way in which we go about realising this vision is through supporting and funding innovative research and evaluations, which I explore below.

10/06/2017 Travis Saunders

In science, having clear and specific definitions for terms is essential. But for rapidly developing fields such as sedentary research, confusion can quickly arise over new terminology. A new publication in the International Journal of Behavioural Nutrition and Physical Activity reports the final definition of key terms related to sedentary behaviour. Here to tell us more is author of the paper, Travis Saunders.

07/06/2017 Ian Scoones

How can the complex interconnections at the heart of a One Health approach be understood? Linking human, animal and ecosystem health, with a focus on poverty, wellbeing and livelihoods, is easy to proclaim. It is much less easy to do. Can modelling approaches help us develop a conversation between different perspectives so we can define more effective responses and interventions?