Some trusts have adopted a system of a "ring-fenced" allocation per head of consultant and if any of this funding remains unused it can be carried over to the next financial year. The time is right for the Government adequately to fund the CME/CDP activities of career-grade hospital staff. (This should include part-time staff. A doctor who works half time must not be half trained). In view of t...

In 1854, John Snow’s work on cholera in London immortalised the power of mapping as a tool for disease prevention and control. Over 160 years later, a more ambitious effort to map cholera has been reported in The Lancet. Forgoing so-called shoe leather epidemiology in favour of big data, Justin Lessler and colleagues used 279 cholera datasets covering 2283 locations in 37 countries, and cluster...

Mutual fund investors desire high risk-adjusted performance at low cost, which may not necessarily be the objective of fund families. Fund families want to maximize assets under management (i.e., their market share) and the resulting management fees. This paper studies the extent to which conflicts of interest are mitigated by competition in the mutual fund industry using the universe of U.S. m...

A small molecule called Sm4 can disrupt interactions involving a transcription factor called Sox18, while having little impact on other members of the SoxF family.

BACKGROUND The potentially destructive polarisation between 'vertical' financing (aiming for disease-specific results) and 'horizontal' financing (aiming for improved health systems) of health services in developing countries has found its way to the pages of Foreign Affairs and the Financial Times. The opportunity offered by 'diagonal' financing (aiming for disease-specific results through imp...