This is a guest blog by Peter Byass, Director of the WHO Collaborating Centre for Verbal Autopsy at Umeå University, Sweden. Peter has a regular global health blog and is on Twitter, @UCGHR. “Nothing is certain except death and taxes” – Benjamin Franklin, 1789 Unfortunately, Franklin was correct in excluding cause of death from the… Read more »
It’s estimated that around 15 million people suffer from a food allergy in America alone and it is a growing international health problem. The World Allergy Organization (WAO) is an important part of addressing this problem. It’s an international alliance of 89 regional and national allergy, asthma, and immunology societies, and through collaboration with its… Read more »
Routine screening of prostate-specific antigen (PSA) levels in men to detect prostate cancer is very controversial. The higher the level of PSA in the blood, the more likely it is that a man has prostate cancer, and the PSA test has been widely used to screen for prostate cancer and monitor treatment response in those… Read more »
This is a guest post by Professor Prabhat Jha and Lukasz Aleksandrowicz of Centre for Global Health Research. Reliable cause of death (COD) statistics have transformed public health in the last century. These basic data have uncovered links between diseases and risk factors (such as smoking), and are essential to smart allocations of spending and planning of… Read more »
If you had a condition that could be treated with a single operation that carries risks, or with a series of physiotherapy sessions, which has fewer risks but will take longer, which would you choose? A post last week on our blogs looked at participatory medicine and what the meaning of ‘participation’ in this context… Read more »
This week, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), 10 biopharmaceutical companies and several non-profit organizations launched an unprecedented partnership to transform the current model for identifying and validating the most promising biological targets of disease for new diagnostics and drug development. Currently in the US, developing a drug from early discovery through Food and Drug… Read more »
Health and healthcare were a prominent theme of this year’s World Economic Forum in Davos, and one of the first sessions took a look into our medical future. Notably, the leaders of the session did not include a doctor/physician. The moderator Lionel Tarassenko is a professor of electrical engineering at Oxford, and speakers were genomics… Read more »
As the arrival of February sees heart awareness month kicking off across many countries, it is important to consider how we can prevent heart disease through living a healthy lifestyle and avoiding potential harms that could negatively impact heart health. One such harm could be testosterone supplementation, which is increasingly being promoted in older men… Read more »
This post is the first of a series about verbal autopsy, the subject of a selection of articles just published in BMC Medicine’s Medicine for Global Health collection. Determining causes of death is vitally important to public health. It helps to determine what health problems are afflicting a population, which in turn affects policies and strategies… Read more »
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The news last month that genetic testing company 23andMe has suspended its marketing activities after intervention by the US Food and Drug administration (FDA) has again raised a related issue that’s been under debate now for several years. Should non-medically trained members of the public be offered the power to peer into their own genome?… Read more »