By Owen Pinnell Far removed from the world leaders making climate pledges at COP, are people like Ali Hussein Julood, a young leukaemia survivor living on an Iraqi oil field co-managed by BP. When the BBC discovered BP was not declaring the field’s gas flaring, Ali helped us to reveal the truth about the poisonous… Read More Air pollution: Uncovering the dirty secret behind BP’s bumper profits
Ian Sample Parkinson’s was first described in medical texts more than 200 years ago, yet there is still no cure. It’s a common condition, particularly in the over-50s. About 1 in 37 people in the UK will be diagnosed at some point in their life. Existing drugs aim to manage patients’ symptoms, rather than slow… Read More The scientists working to defeat Parkinson’s disease
PUBLIC GOODS • September 1, 2021 • Peter Rossman he multilateral trading system anchored by the WTO is not confined to cross-border trade in physical goods. It was also designed to protect corporate knowledge monopolies. Developing countries were told that strict adherence to the rules of ‘free trade’, codified and enforced by the WTO, would enhance their… Read More Multinational Corporations and COVID-19: Intellectual property rights vs. human rights
Many cancer treatments are notoriously savage on the body. Drugs often attack both healthy cells and tumor cells, causing a plethora of side effects. Immunotherapies that help the immune system recognize and attack cancer cells are no different. Though they have prolonged the lives of countless patients, they work in only a subset of patients.… Read More Masked cancer drug trains immune system to kill tumors while sparing healthy tissues
Ever since the pandemic struck, concerns have been raised about the improper use of antimicrobials amongst Covid-19 patients. The worry is that unnecessary prescription of antimicrobials will lead to a further increase in the already high levels of drug resistance in most parts of the world. In the past few years, alarmingly high resistance rates in pathogens… Read More Kamini Walia: The growing scourge of anti-microbial resistance needs urgent attention
Decades of political campaigning against climate science and medicine have made public health a battleground of beliefs. Vaccine hesitancy, as seen in eastern Europe, based on distrust in authority, can’t be solved with rationality alone. So what might the antidote be? Rejecting science is not so much a grass-roots movement, says Péter Krekó, in… Read More Péter Krekó: Learning to live with the madness
Weiss is the former New York Times journalist best known for her departure from that paper. In a resignation letter posted to her own website, Weiss complained that she had been subjected to constant bullying by colleagues who disagree with her views, and that the Times had “become a kind of performance space.” A New York Times spokesperson… Read More Jillian Horton: A slap in the face to health care workers
As the pandemic stretches on, our collective ability to weather adversities and bounce back to emotional stability is being challenged daily. Many of us have suffered significant trauma from illness, hospitalization and death. Many more have experienced job loss, economic uncertainly and financial instability. And everyone has had to cope with an unprecedented uprooting of… Read More The Resilience of Life
People often assume that the objectivity of science requires it to be isolated from governmental politics. However, scientists have always gotten involved in politics as advisers and through shaping public opinion. And science itself – how scientists are funded and how they choose their research priorities – is a political affair. The coronavirus pandemic showed both the benefits and risks of this relationship – from the controversies surrounding hydroxychloroquine to the efforts… Read More LIV GRJEBINE: Politicized science drove lunar exploration — but polarized scientific views are worse than ever
Until a couple of centuries ago, more than a quarter of children died before their first birthday, around half before their fifth. In “Extra Life,” Steven Johnson, a writer of popular books on science and technology, tells the stories behind what he calls, in an understatement, “one of the greatest achievements in the history of… Read More Book review – EXTRA LIFE: A Short History of Living Longer
After the truth-shower 