Rankings Season is Here

Here comes influenza season.

H1N1 influenza is here.

On 11 June WHO announced that the spread of H1N1 had reached pandemic phase 6. Since then countries around the world have increased their planning and preparedness for the continuing pandemic. Guidelines have been issued and circulated but confusion continues over their interpretation. We need to remind ourselves of the principles behind control measures and educate and reinforce standard infec...

Shale is here again.

What do we know about ageing at work? Evidence-based fitness for duty and health in fire fighters. The current enthusiasm for fracking takes me back to the oil crisis of the late 1970s. I had been asked to see a post-thoracotomy patient and, when he recovered, found that his lesion had been pneumoconiotic. When I enquired which mine he worked in, he told me that it had been a shale mine and sin...

The cellulitis season is open

F or some infectious diseases specialists, the equivalent of the summer blockbuster was the release of the 'Practice Guidelines for the Diagnosis and Management of Skin and Soft Tissue Infections' (SSTI) update on June 18, 2014, by the Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA) (1). It is timely because summer is when patients consult the most for SSTI. In the present note, we review the mos...

The Future Is Virtually Here

I ncreasingly popular for more than a decade, massively multiplayer online role-playing games now generate remarkable revenues. The current king of MMORPGs, World of Warcraft, boasts 10 million active subscribers as of early 2008. Developed by Blizzard, WoW hosts a virtual population larger than the real-world populations of countries such as Sweden and Hungary. In addition to population number...