While outlining the evidence to support de-branding cigarette packaging, Ben Goldacre draws attention to the Unite union’s statement opposing the move. Switching to plain packaging will make it easier to sell their illicit and unregulated products especially to young people. That would undermine the regulated industry, may increase long-term health problems and put workers in [...]
Congratulations to Matthew Robinson, whose excellent blog Prescribing Advice for GPs has reached the milestone of 1000 posts. Matthew’s focused blog has relentlessly and consistently posted items of interest to prescribers for over five years. If you are a Prescriber, or are interested in prescribing issues, then I recommend you go and visit.
Keith Flett, London Socialist Historians Group, makes a point about Henry the VIII’s beard in the debate about history teaching at the Guardian letters page: There are clearly limits to what can be taught, but knowing when the French revolution, American civil war and Russian revolution were is more important than understanding that Henry VIII [...]
As a brief follow-up to this story, here’s some shock news from Science about the Nobel Prize winner. Virologist and Nobel laureate Luc Montagnier announced earlier this month that, at age 78, he will take on the leadership of a new research institute at Jiaotong University in Shanghai. What has shocked many scientists, however, isn’t [...]
Over the past three weeks the BMJ has been publishing Brian Deer‘s investigation of Wakefield’s fraudulent attempt to make money out of manufactured safety concerns about MMR. The first BMJ article dealt with the fixing of the data, the second dealt with plans to reap financial rewards from Wakefield’s deliberate stoking of fears over MMR [...]
Today Julian Assange was arrested, and in the past few days wikileaks servers had to be moved and their financial accounts have been frozen. There is also internal dissent, with some arguing that far too much focus has been placed on Assange, and on the international leaks that Assange argues are meant to stop two [...]
The safety of newly marketed drugs is always provisional, based on the relatively limited population the drugs are used in prior to marketing. The number of subjects who take a drug in clinical trials is large enough to detect efficacy, but too small to detect rare, but serious, adverse events. In addition, the patients are [...]
This summer the Nobel Prizewinner, Luc Montagnier, seemed to lend credibility to homeopathy. French virologist Luc Montagnier stunned his colleagues at a prestigious international conference when he presented a new method for detecting viral infections that bore close parallels to the basic tenets of homeopathy. Although fellow Nobel prize winners — who view homeopathy as [...]
