Health & Medicine

Basicdog/Shutterstock Dipesh Gopal, Queen Mary University of London While we might not be hearing the daily COVID numbers anymore, the virus hasn’t gone away. In the UK alone, thousands of new cases continue to be recorded every day. Meanwhile, there’s a very large group of people for whom the virus hasn’t gone away in a different sense – those suffering …

Our stomach and brain are connected through the ‘gut-brain axis’. Anatomy Image/ Shutterstock Lynne A Barker, Sheffield Hallam University and Caroline Jordan, Sheffield Hallam University Within our body and on our skin, trillions of bacteria and viruses exist as part of complex ecosystems called microbiomes. Microbiomes play an important role in human health and disease – and even help us …

Michael Head, University of Southampton The World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic in March 2020. But it’s only in recent days, in May 2022, that the secretive Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea) has reported its first confirmed cases of the virus. While it may seem somewhat astounding that a country has managed to get so far into …

pirke/Shutterstock Rebecca A. Drummond, University of Birmingham Fungal infections kill around the same number of people each year as tuberculosis. They mostly take hold in people who are vulnerable because they have a defective immune system caused by an underlying disease, such as cancer, or a viral infection, such as HIV or COVID. Our new study shows that antibiotics can …

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 …