Category: Medicine
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Ebola psy-ops
THE Ebola epidemic in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) is providing a natural experiment in fighting fake news. Occurring in a conflict zone, amid a controversial presidential election, the epidemic has proved to be fertile ground for conspiracy theories and political manipulation, which can hamper efforts to treat patients and fight the virus’s…
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Why don’t we remember these 100 million dead?
IN France, where I live, there are more than 170,000 monuments to the First World War. To my knowledge, there is only one to the 1918 influenza pandemic. A simple stone cross, it stands at Lajoux in the Jura Mountains, close to the border with Switzerland… This article first appeared on UnHerd.com on 6 November 2018.…
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Centenary of a catastrophe
ON June 29th 1918 Martín Salazar, Spain’s inspector general of health, stood up in front of the Royal Academy of Medicine in Madrid and declared, not without embarrassment, that the disease which was ravaging the country was to be found nowhere else in Europe… This article first appeared in The Economist on 27 September 2018. To…
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Adventurer in time
IN JULY 1962, Michel Siffre took off his watch and descended into the abyss of Scarasson in the French Alps. There, in a cave 130 metres below the surface, he set up camp next to a glacier. With a torch as his only light source, and deprived of all reminders of the passage of time,…
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Naming diseases
TUNE into a discussion of how diseases get their names on BBC Radio 4’s Word of Mouth, hosted by Michael Rosen with linguist Laura Wright, and guests me and Prof Peter Piot, who co-discovered Ebola, was a pioneer in the science of AIDS, and now heads up the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine……
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Worried about Australian flu?
WHAT is it with us and the blame game? This year, Australia is taking the rap for sending us flu, a disease that has been endemic in humans for at least 10,000 years, and that grips much of the globe every flu season (the clue’s in the name)… This comment piece first appeared in The Guardian…
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Vaccine wars
A new law takes force in France on 1 January to up the number of mandatory childhood vaccines to 11 from three. It has provoked a polemic, but the law is sound. If there is a problem here, it is the neglect by officials of the main drivers of vaccine hesitancy… This article first appeared…