Lots of news breaking in the media that around 1 million children aged 1 to 9 years are to be offered a booster polio vaccination. This follows the discovery of polio virus in the sewage from eight north and east London boroughs after the initial discovery some months ago. (Note: Ealing is not affected, but …
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Category:News Reports
Scarlet Fever
Concerns are being raised at the increasing prevalence of Scarlet Fever – which mostly affects under 16s. It is a Streptococcal infection, so the treatment is likely to be a course of antibiotics. As far as I’m aware there is no vaccine against Scarlet Fever. Although not that common these days, compared with 100+ years …
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Immune Amnesia
This is rather interesting. And yes, you did read that correctly: your immune system can suffer from amnesia and forget everything it knows. It is commonly caused by measles – and is a very excellent reason to get your measles vaccination. Other virus can do this too, just not as efficiently as measles. The measles …
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10% of Prescribed Drugs “Useless”
A review, ordered by the government in 2018 and published this week, concludes that overprescribing is a major problem. The review found that one in 10 drugs dispensed by GPs and pharmacists are pointless and potentially harmful. Moreover around one in five hospital admissions in over-65s are caused by the adverse effects of medicines – …
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Organ Donation Trial
The NHS is to run a large trial of an approach that could boost number of organs available for transplant, and the transplant success rate. If it works, potentially thousands of lives could be saved as the demand for transplants vastly exceeds the supply of useable organs. The plan is to give organ donors a …
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Rare Diabetes Diagnosis
The NHS is planning to use genetic testing to help diagnose thousands of people who have a rare inherited form of diabetes. The condition, monogenetic diabetes, makes up one in fifty diabetes cases, but it is difficult to diagnose or distinguish from the more common types of the condition – type 1 or type 2 …
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