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For openers, we have COVID vaccines – a choice or three, but not at our discretion. We are, indeed, lucky to have what is on offer, but do remain a touch cynical – none have been adequately tested and tried. At least the brief phases 0 and 1 of clinical…

It should not be any sort of surprise that a new COVID variant has arrived rudely on our doorstep to mess up our sacred Christmases. Although the coronavirus family is not as speedy a mutator as the influenza virus, COVID already has 20,000 close cousins known to science. Whether or…

Smallpox epidemics ravaged the world for millennia. By the 1950s, it is estimated that 50 million cases occurred each year, up to 60% dying from thedisease. “Variolation” against smallpox originated in China using old scabs from healing pustules applied to newly scarified skin. This practice spread to India over…

                References:PMC7494488PMID: 32883151PMID: 32436355 THE WELLMAN CLINIC TRT SCREENTestosterone Replacement TherapyUnderstand the causes of Testosterone Deficiency Syndrome…

We are told that the much anticipated COVID-19 spike has arrived. On 17 October, there were 785 new COVID in-patient admissions to hospitals in England, including 87 to hospitals in London. There were 8 COVID patients occupying beds at Guy’s and St Thomas’ (who care for 95,000 in-patients a year).

It’s smart to admit you don’t know the answer. Sir, Ed Conway (May 29) asks, “how did Britain suffer one of the worst episodes of (Covid-19) in the world?” It might be old hat, but Occam’s razor remains relevant; the simplest solution to a conundrum is often the right solution.

The hairy quina quina tree is a native of the warm, moist slopes of the Andes. In 1532, following the Spanish victory over the Inca empire, Peru became a viceroyalty. The incoming Jesuit missionaries were made aware of the bark of the quina quina tree as a remedy for the…

“Nobody but poor wretches in the streets”                                                           Samuel Pepys writing of The Plague in September 1665 At 1.3 billion, China is home…

2019-nCoV is causing the epidemic in China. It is “zoonotic”, being transmissible from animals to humans, in this case from bats. It is classified as a betacoronavirus, the same group that caused the SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) epidemic in 2002-2003 from civets to bats in Southern China and MERS…

With any luck we will all get “old”, some older than others, “oldest old” – 80 plus. Our physiological processes become increasingly ineffectual from our early fifties onwards. The speed of onset of senescence is notably variable: the fitter, the slower the decline, and that counts for both mind and…