Health & Medicine

ShotPrime Studio/Shutterstock Vassilios Vassiliou, University of East Anglia; Ranu Baral, University of East Anglia, and Vasiliki Tsampasian, University of East Anglia Well over two years into the pandemic, hundreds of thousands of COVID cases continue to be recorded around the world every day. With the rise of new variants, the symptoms of COVID have also evolved. Initially, the NHS regarded …

The cells which clear Alzheimer’s plaques from the brain follow a 24-hour circadian rhythm. nobeastsofierce/ Shutterstock Eleftheria Kodosaki, Cardiff University A good night’s sleep has always been linked to better mood, and better health. Now, scientists have even more evidence of just how much sleep – and more specifically our circadian rhythm, which regulates our sleep cycle – is linked …

Andrii Vodolazhskyi/Shutterstock Grace C Roberts, University of Leeds As the COVID pandemic has progressed, we’ve repeatedly seen the arrival of new viral variants. Variants of concern, such as delta and omicron, are versions of SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19) which have acquired mutations. These mutations can provide SARS-CoV-2 with a genetic advantage – so for example, delta is linked …

Naeblys/Shutterstock Luke O’Neill, Trinity College Dublin In many countries, as restrictions lift and freedoms are restored, there’s a general feeling that the pandemic is over. There is, however, still the significant concern that a dangerous new variant could emerge. This happened when omicron arrived, but we got lucky with that one. Omicron turned out to be more transmissible, but mercifully …

Cavan-Images/Shutterstock Ruth Ogden, Liverpool John Moores University and Patricia Kingori, University of Oxford It’s been two years since the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the COVID outbreak a pandemic, and since then, people around the world have been asking the same thing: when will it end? This seems like a simple question, but historical analysis shows that “the end” of …

Andrew Lee, University of Sheffield; KK Cheng, University of Birmingham; Sheena Cruickshank, University of Manchester, and Trish Greenhalgh, University of Oxford The World Health Organization declared COVID a pandemic on March 11 2020. In the two years since, countries have diverged on their containment strategies, introducing many different ways of mitigating the virus, to varying effect. Here, four health experts …

Shutterstock Sarah Hellewell, Curtin University Most of what we know about how COVID can affect the brain has come from studies of severe infection. In people with severe COVID, inflammatory cells from outside the brain can enter brain tissue and spread inflammation. There may be changes to blood vessels. Brain cells can even have changes similar to those seen in …

Jonathan R Goodman, University of Cambridge Human physiological uniqueness made possible our colonisation of the world. Since our ancestors emerged from the African savanna tens of thousands of years ago, we’ve migrated and established residence in more or less every region on the planet, regardless of how hot or cold in temperature or high or low in altitude. This tendency …

The cells which clear Alzheimer’s plaques from the brain follow a 24-hour circadian rhythm. nobeastsofierce/ Shutterstock Eleftheria Kodosaki, Cardiff University A good night’s sleep has always been linked to better mood, and better health. Now, scientists have even more evidence of just how much sleep – and more specifically our circadian rhythm, which regulates our sleep cycle – is linked …

Gorodenkoff/Shutterstock Eoghan De Barra, RCSI University of Medicine and Health Sciences China, the country that first detected the novel coronavirus, remains one of the few not to have imported one of the exceptionally effective mRNA COVID vaccines developed by Pfizer and Moderna. Instead, it has so far relied on vaccines developed by two Chinese companies, Sinovac and Sinopharm. However, this …