Tony Blakely
If COVID-19 were allowed to spread unchecked, it would devastate Australian society. My modelling suggests that Australia could get as many as 400,000 to 600,000 infections a day at the peak – translating to about 150,000 to 200,000 symptomatic cases a day. There’s no way we can let the numbers get that high. It would be absolute carnage.
Continue reading “Coronavirus in Australia”Ka Hung Chan, Derrick Bennett, Kin Bong Hubert Lam and Zhengming Chen
Chronic liver diseases (CLD), such as liver cirrhosis and liver cancer, affect more than 800 million people worldwide, with a third of these living in China. Smoke from solid fuels (e.g. coal and wood) and tobacco contains high concentrations of thousands of toxic chemicals. When breathed in, these chemicals can reach and harm major internal organs, including the liver.
Continue reading “Did you know that breathing in smoke from solid fuels or tobacco may increase your risk of dying from chronic liver disease?”Ding (Melody) Ding, Adrian Bauman, Esther van Sluijs and Klaus Gebel
Have you ever had this experience? You’re looking into the literature on the association between an exposure (such as accelerometer-measured physical activity) and an outcome (such as all-cause mortality) and, you find six papers, not one, written by the same authors based on the same sample. “Are these the same paper?”, you wonder. On careful perusal of the titles and abstracts, you realise that these are different papers on similar and related research questions, only with minor differences: one looks at the association in men, another in women, a third one in older adults, a fourth in a subsample with a pre-existing condition …
Continue reading “Salami publishing: why we need to talk about it”Tessa Strain and Søren Brage
We are all familiar with studies that investigate the associations between physical activity and outcomes such as death or cardiovascular disease. However, we rarely focus on the length of time over which these study participants are followed up to see if one of the outcomes occurs.
Continue reading “With great (statistical) power comes great responsibility”Katie Overbey, Kellogg Schwab and Natalie Exum
For children in low-income countries, diarrhoea remains a major cause of death and can lead to long-term health consequences. Accurate estimates of childhood diarrhoeal illness are crucial to evaluating the success of campaigns to defeat diarrhoea and improve health in countries where the burden of diarrhoea is high.
In our study, recently published in the IJE, we found that caregivers may underestimate diarrhoeal diseases in children aged under 5 years when asked to recall whether the children had diarrhoea in the previous 2 weeks. Compared with a 1-week recall period, there was a consistent underestimation of the prevalence of diarrhoea across five countries in sub-Saharan Africa.
Continue reading “Childhood diarrhoeal illness may be underestimated in national health surveys”Suman Chakrabarti, Md Tajuddin Khan and Samuel Scott
Respiratory infections are the most common chronic disease in children globally and a leading cause of death in developing countries. This situation is exacerbated by air pollution.
Air pollution in northern India, mainly New Delhi and the neighbouring states, is exacting a toll on the health of residents, making global headlines and highlighting the severity and extent of this public health disaster in one of the world’s fastest-growing economies.
A contributory factor to air pollution in northern India is the harmful practice of crop residue burning — when farmers burn the crop residue to clear fields before sowing a new crop. Although banned by the Indian government in 2015, this practice remains prevalent in many parts of the northern Indian states of Punjab, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh.
Continue reading “Take my breath away: India’s crop residue burning affects respiratory health”Terence Dwyer
Over an average week, adults in the United Kingdom living with chronic disease spend 61 minutes (9%) less on moderate activity — such as gardening, brisk walking and housework — and 3 minutes (11%) less on vigorous activity — such as running and aerobics — than their healthy peers.
Perhaps this comes as a surprise. After all, few of us would question the health benefits of keeping moving and getting our heart rate racing. Physical activity guidelines, such as those developed by the UK’s National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence, specifically refer to the importance of increasing physical activity for chronic disease management.
So why have we observed a gap in activity levels between those living with chronic disease and those without?
Continue reading “Did you know that adults with chronic disease in the UK are markedly less active than their healthy peers?”Inger T Gram
Smoking was established as a cause of lung cancer in the late 1950s. It then took another 50 years to establish that colorectal cancer was also a smoking-related cancer. However, as of 2018, a causal relationship between smoking and breast cancer had not yet been established. It may seem strange that it is taking so long to prove that smoking is a cause of all three of the most common cancers globally. Breast and lung cancer each account for 2.09 million cases annually and colorectal cancer for 1.8 million.
Continue reading “Is it time to establish breast cancer as a smoking-related cancer?”Tricia L Larose, Arnulf Langhammer and Mattias Johansson, for the Lung Cancer Cohort Consortium (LC3)
Lung cancer is one of the most common cancers worldwide, accounting for 2.09 million cases and 1.76 million deaths in 2018. Two of the most prolific cancer epidemiologists of our time — Sir Richard Doll and Sir Bradford Hill — identified smoking as the biggest cause of lung cancer in their seminal report, “Smoking and Carcinoma of the Lung”, published in the British Medical Journal in 1950. Nearly 70 years later, smoking remains the predominant risk factor for lung cancer, as well as for 15 additional cancers and other non-communicable diseases.
Continue reading “Circulating cotinine concentrations and lung cancer risk evaluated in 20 international cohorts”Jennyfer Wolf, Richard Johnston, Matthew C Freeman and Annette Prüss-Ustün
Handwashing with soap after faecal contact is key to preventing disease and death from enteric infectious diseases. Our study, recently published in the IJE, is the first to provide global, regional and country estimates of handwashing with soap after potential contact with human faeces, based on representative data on access to handwashing facilities collected for monitoring of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Our results show that handwashing with soap after using the toilet or other potential contact with human faeces is poorly practised worldwide and that even the necessary equipment – handwashing facilities with soap and water – are inaccessible to billions of people.
Continue reading “Hygiene gaps: between access and practice, and from region to region”
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