Haemodynamically yours
Planning to woo your beloved with a romantic tête-à-tête this evening? Looking forward to the incomparable moment when your eyes meet in the flickering candlelight over that bottle of expensive red wine you ordered to get you both in the mood for love? At this point if you can tear your eyes away from the…
Beetroot with everything
I heard today that drinking a pint of beetroot juice (500ml) lowers your blood pressure, effects are seen within one hour. Good news for the EU (all those sugarbeet fields: what a quandary do they make sugar, use it for reaching their 10% biofuel goal OR change the type of beet so they can juice…
Feed me. Feed me…
Like many over 50’s I have aged parents: the health of mine is falling apart and finally they are facing up to moving from the only house they have ever owned after nearly 50 years. It’s a worry for me but at least their minds are intact. Unfortunately this is not the case for everyone.…
Virus infections-it’s a zoo in there!
Take a look at Nature this week: the article ‘The battle within’ by Melinda Wenner gives an intriguing insight into the interactions taking place between viruses in the body. She highlights the interaction between HIV and two other viruses, human herpesvirus-6 and GB-virus-C. Infection with the first hastens HIV disease and infection with the second…
The Nutrition Delusion
Sorry to harp back to Gary Taubes’ Diet Delusion again. I make no pretence at having read the book, just Taubes’ own ‘teaser’ in New Scientist last week. Rather than be ‘teased’ by the ‘comment & analysis’ piece, I have been left somewhat annoyed. To accuse the nutrition profession of creating ‘a field of clinical…
Joined up science
Usually, when the urge to blog comes over me, I can wait until the urge goes away and bothers someone else, or until enough time has passed to make the reason for the blog obsolete. On this occasion, however, the urge hasn’t gone away and I hope you’ll forgive me for alerting your attention to…
Omega-3 fatty acids – what have we learned?
Animal studies have suggested that a specific fatty acid, docosahexaenoic acid (DHA), plays a role in the development of cognitive abilities. So will taking extra DHA as a child make you cleverer?
The new HIV or just an outbreak of boils?
An aggressive and drug resistant version of the hospital superbug MRSA is spreading through the gay community in San Francisco. The infection rate is doubled in areas with a high gay population compared to the whole of the city. A study in Annals of Internal Medicine raised the alarm but some newspapers were way over…
Cryptosporidium and Giardia in drinking water: not just a problem for industrialised countries
Dr. Lucy Robertson, a speaker at the 8th Central American and Caribbean Congress on Parasitology and Tropical Medicine 2007, points out that as countries strive to improve their standards of public health, we should find it intolerable to accept the transmission of these infections via drinking water anywhere. Of the parasitic infections with a…
Review of 2007
Happy New Year and a big thank you to all those who subscribe or read our blog. It was a good 2007 for the hand picked … and carefully sorted with a full calendar year of blogging under our belt, turning 1 year old on 2nd November. We posted 167 articles on a variety of…