Cholera spreads in Haiti Five cases of cholera have been documented in Port-au-Prince, raising fears that a rural outbreak of the disease could spread into the post-earthquake slums in the capital city, according to the Boston Globe. Cholera in rural areas of Haiti has already killed 250 people and sickened more than 3,000. If measures…
Healthcare workers face a number of occupational hazards, including physical injuries from lifting heavy items (patients!) and infectious diseases from needleprick injuries and the like. But the tools of the trade also carry a risk—and a report from J Occup Environ Med highlights the danger of anti-cancer agents to nurses, pharmacists, and people not directly…
After this morning’s post on the lack of full disclosure of financial interests I quite coincidentally came across this intriguing list of health providers who earned more than US$100,000 from pharma last year. There are some interesting questions surrounding this sort of list. For example, should the amount a practitioner can receive be capped? Should…
It started, as many good ideas do, in a pub. Unlike most such ideas, this one went somewhere, culminating in a launch party at the Free Word Centre in Faringdon last night. I mentioned the Geek Calendar three weeks ago—but that was before I knew I was getting an invite to rub shoulders with the…
Do you receive more than a million dollars in consulting fees? Did you declare it when you published that paper? Probably not, according to a paper in Arch Intern Med, From Disclosure to Transparency: The Use of Company Payment Data1. The study is the first to definitively document under-reporting of author financial relationships in the…
Nikon has announced the winners of this year’s International Small World Competition — the 36-year-old contest that pits the world’s research laboratories against each other to crown the rulers of microscopy — and the results are stunning. Jonas King, a graduate student in the Vanderbilt University lab of biologist Julián Hillyer, took home the prize…
In this week’s F1000 roundup (your primary source of free F1000 evaluations) we have the genetic basis of height, a handle on the treatment of Parkinson’s disease, the effects of discrimination on lesbian, gay and bisexual adults, a new diagnostic for leptospirosis, and, I promise, no structural biology…
When we come down with flu, we do everything we can to get rid of the virus and get better. But when we come down with mind viruses—or ideas that harm us rather than help us—we often just accept them as “how things are,” doing nothing to counter their damaging effects. There’s one mind virus,…
Last Wednesday, in celebration of Stem Cell Awareness Day, the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) announced the winners of its annual poetry contest. The poems were not all well received, however. One poem in particular, titled Stem C., contains liturgical language used during the Christian sacrament of Eucharist, causing the Life Legal Defense Foundation…
A breathalyser for diagnosing disease sounds like something we’d expect to see on Star Trek. But work published in the British Journal of Cancer and evaluated by Christopher Janetopoulos suggests that such a thing might become not just possible, but affordable too. The ‘electronic nose’ detects volatile organic compounds1 arising from the peroxidation of membrane…
