By Chris Bird, MSc Health Policy student at Imperial College and Project Manager in the System Engagement Programme at NICE
Today mark’s World Blood Donor Day – an event to celebrate and thank volunteers the world over, who generously donate blood to support life-saving care and to raise awareness of the continued need for donations of blood and blood products to support high quality safe care for patients who need it most.
by Ana Luisa Neves, General Practitioner and Research Associate at Imperial NIHR PSTRC
Making motherhood safe is a human rights imperative. In the last 20 years, a steady decline has been observed in maternal mortality rates worldwide, but much more needs to be done: nearly 300,000 women still die every year because of pregnancy or childbirth-related complications (1). This means that a mother dies every two minutes.
By Dr Shivani Misra, Honorary Clinical Research Fellow, Faculty of Medicine, Department of Medicine
This Diabetes Week, it’s important to remember that there are more than just two types of diabetes and how global insights into ethnic-specific types can benefit local people with diabetes.
By Paul Huxley, Research Postgraduate, Faculty of Medicine, School of Public Health
Ronald Ross, a British medical doctor of the late-19th and early 20th centuries, was first to identify the mosquito as the winged-insect carrier of malaria-causing parasites. Prior to this breakthrough, bad air (mal aria in Italian) was thought to have been the culprit. Together, Ross and Giovanni Grassi (who’s work, unlike Ross’, was controversially ignored by the Nobel Committee in 1902) uncovered a truth of huge ecological and epidemiological significance and sparked an ongoing international research effort aimed at answering fundamental questions about the processes that drive patterns of human morbidity and mortality caused by diseases carried by mosquitoes.
By Dr Ryan Li, Adviser, Imperial College London, Global Health and Development Group
Universal health coverage is about ensuring all people can get quality health services, where and when they need them, without suffering financial hardship. No one should have to choose between good health and other life necessities.
As part of World Health Day, Dr Ryan Li from the Global Health & Development Group who is an advisor for the International Decision Support Initiative (iDSI), which supports countries to get the best value for money from health spending, reflects on a visit to Vietnam and the principles for developing clinical quality standards in Low and Middle Income Countries (LMICs):
I remember very vividly two of the hospitals I visited in Vietnam, during my first field trip as a global health advisor for iDSI.
By Professor Simon Taylor-Robinson, Consultant Hepatologist and Professor of Translational Medicine at Imperial College London
Cholangiocarcinoma is a rare primary malignancy arising from cholangiocytes, the endothelial lining of the biliary ducts, with an incidence 2500 cases of per annum in the UK. The only option for cure is surgical resection, but cholangiocarcinoma usually presents late when it grows sufficiently to block the drainage of bile from the liver, presenting with jaundice. By this point it is often irresectable, and palliative management includes holding open the ducts with stents to prevent blockage, and chemotherapy. One-year survival is only 5%.
The incidence of this insidious disease is increasing, and earlier diagnosis and better treatment are urgently required.
By Kitty Liao and Abellona U of Ideabatic, IGHI’s 2017 Student Challenges Competition winners
So much has happened since we won the Student Challenges Competition last year. The prize from the competition has been very helpful for us to secure our UK patent. Following that, we have recently submitted our global patent.
By Dr Julia Makinde is a Research Associate with the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative at Imperial College London
It is estimated that there are 36.7 million people living with HIV globally with 1.8 million new infections in 2016 alone (1). This number represents an 11% drop in the number of new infections from 2010 . Some might consider this an achievement or a testament to the impact of strategic national and global policies aimed at tackling the epidemic. But in reality, these numbers mask the discrepant pace in the effort to tackle transmission and AIDS-related deaths in countries across the globe.
By guest blogger, Dr Yu Zhi Zhang (Dennis), Clinical Research Fellow and Specialist Registrar in Histopathology at the National Heart and Lung Institute (NHLI), Imperial College London; on behalf of the National Centre for Mesothelioma Research (NCMR), National Heart and Lung Institute (NHLI), Imperial College London
The 9th edition of the renowned Osler’s Textbook on the Principles and Practice of Medicine, published in 1921, dedicated only two (out of 1,139) pages to lung cancer, at which point the condition was described as “New Growths in the Lungs”. Almost a hundred years on, the patterns of epidemiology have shifted drastically, and lung cancer now is recognised as a major health problem globally with more than 1.8 million new cases diagnosed every year.
By Dr Timothy Rawson, Clinical Research Fellow, Esmita Charani, Senior Lead Pharmacist and Dr Enrique Castro Sanchez, Academic Research Nurse all from the Faculty of Medicine, Department of Medicine
Antibiotics are a powerful resource that allows us to safely perform surgery, treat cancer with chemotherapy, and recover from infections that over 100 years ago would have killed even the fittest among us.
We are seeing however, a dramatic increase in infections with bacteria resistant to the killing effects of antibiotics (termed drug-resistant infections). These are antibiotics that until recently used to be effective. These resistant bacteria make many infections more and more difficult to treat – in some cases causing patients to die because we no longer have antibiotics that are able to manage the infection.