Policy News Round-up

Cardiovascular Genetics: A News Round-Up

Principal Findings The authors identified mutations in almost half of children without a positive family history of cardiomyopathy (25 of 51 affected children) and in two thirds (21 of 33) of affected children with familial cardiomyopathy. Mutations in MYH7 (encoding -myosin heavy chain) and MYBPC3 (encoding myosin-binding protein C) were the most frequent variants identified in the children. I...

Cardiovascular Genetics: A News Round-Up

481 1. Qian L, Huang Y, Spencer CI, Foley A, Vedantham V, Liu L, Conway SJ, Fu JD, Srivastava D. In vivo reprogramming of murine cardiac fibroblasts into induced cardiomyocytes. Nature. 2012;485:593–598. 2. Song K, Nam YJ, Luo X, Qi X, Tan W, Huang GN, Acharya A, Smith CL, Tallquist MD, Neilson EG, Hill JA, Bassel-Duby R, Olson EN. Heart repair by reprogramming non-myocytes with cardiac transcr...

Round-up of Monetary Policy and Inflation Targeting

I was a fan of inflation targets before the conference, so the discussion largely confirmed my prior beliefs. However, the conference also resolved one nagging doubt about current policy. This doubt concerns the practice of interest-rate smoothing discussed by Lowe and Ellis. I have suspected that this policy is suboptimal – that central banks move interest rates slowly because of some kind of ...

Round-up

Public health round-up

People living in areas affected by Zika virus should take measures to protect themselves from mosquito-bites and destroy mosquito habitats to prevent pregnant women becoming infected with Zika virus, according to WHO interim guidance issued last month. Zika virus infection in pregnancy is typically a mild disease, but an unusual increase in cases of neurological disorders and neonatal malformat...