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Repurposing local factories can keep supply chains working during a crisis. Image credit - Marcin Jozwiak/Unsplash
health | industry
22 February 2021

How to repurpose a factory in a crisis

Medical suppliers must change how they manage their supply chains, and factories need to be able to rapidly pivot to manufacturing different products, in order to respond quickly to the next major crisis and avoid shortages of vital medical goods, experts say.

According to Professor Schmiegelow, the lack of paediatric trials for age-appropriate cancer treatments is due to a paucity of funding. Image credit - National Cancer Institute/Unsplash
health
04 February 2021

Five things to know about childhood cancer

Advances in diagnosis and care have yielded significant improvements in childhood cancer survival rates in Europe, but the long-term side-effect burden in young people — driven by the unlicensed use of adult cancer medicines — often means the price of survival is high, scientists say.

Living with people means that dogs and humans experience similar social and environmental influences on a daily basis. Image credit - Alvan Nee/Unsplash
health | science in society | environment
03 February 2021

Why dogs can teach humans about healthier ageing

Our pet dogs could help extend human lives beyond their documented effects on people’s wellbeing. Increasingly, studies are looking at how the domestic dog, Canis familiaris, is key to understanding cognition and processes involved in ageing – something that could improve both animal and human wellbeing.

Researchers found that high-salt diets reduce the amount of good bacteria found in the gut and affect our immune system. Image credit - Daria Shevtsova/Unsplash
health | frontier research
02 February 2021

Why gut bacteria are becoming key suspects in autoimmune diseases

The human immune system is powerful and complex. It must be on guard at all times and be able to distinguish friend from foe. Unfortunately, it does not always get it right and sometimes attacks the body’s own cells, causing hundreds of ‘autoimmune’ diseases, from multiple sclerosis (MS) to rheumatoid arthritis.

In the late 19th century a flu-like illness that caused loss of taste and smell likely came from the 'common cold' coronavirus in circulation today, according to Prof. Marc Van Ranst, an expert on coronaviruses. Image credit - Rob Stevens/KU Leuven
interview | coronavirus outbreak | health
27 January 2021

Q&A: Why history suggests Covid-19 is here to stay

A mysterious flu-like illness that caused loss of taste and smell in the late 19th century was probably caused by a coronavirus that still causes the ‘common cold’ in people today, according to Professor Marc Van Ranst at KU Leuven in Belgium, an expert on coronaviruses.

By triggering original fear memories, a researcher hopes to weaken them to help treat phobias. Image credit - Islander Images/Unsplash
health | frontier research
26 January 2021

Triggering original fear memories could treat phobias and PTSD

In a lab in Amsterdam, arachnophobes have volunteered to encounter their eight-legged nemeses to help researchers hoping to conjure and obliterate fear memories. These studies, as well as new understanding of overlooked brain regions, are revealing how fears linked to PTSD or phobias work, and how they may be treated.

Data on the impact of delaying the second dose of mRNA vaccines is still missing, says Mariola Fotin-Mleczek, chief technology officer of CureVac, which is in the late stages of developing a vaccine using this technology. Image credit - U.S. Secretary of Defense/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>
coronavirus outbreak | health
22 January 2021

Five things you need to know about: Delaying the gap between Covid-19 vaccine doses

As the first coronavirus vaccines started to be rolled out at the end of a tumultuous 2020, UK officials unexpectedly endorsed stretching the gap between the first and second vaccine dose by up to three months – an approach also considered by other countries.

A piece of the lung's airway wall. Researchers are putting together a 'cell atlas' of the human lung to better understand lung disease. Image credit - Prof. Wim Timens, University Medical Center Groningen
health
07 January 2021

In a picture: The quest to map all the cell types in a human lung

Professor Martijn Nawijn, an immunologist at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, tells Horizon about his quest to map every cell in a healthy human lung.  He says this work should help to understand more about the causes of lung disease - which is comparatively understudied - and should lead to new therapies in the next 15 to 20 years.

With a 2020 that focused on coronavirus, we asked some of our interviewees from the year what they expect to see happen in their scientific field in 2021. Image credit - Gabriella Clare Marino/Unsplash
health | coronavirus outbreak | environment
04 January 2021

2021: Beyond coronavirus - what’s in store for science in the year ahead?

There was one science story that dominated 2020 and coronavirus is likely to remain a dominant theme in 2021. But from vaccine rollout to lessons for future pandemics and – that other big challenge that we’re facing – climate change, how will the year in science play out? We asked a selection of our interviewees about lessons from 2020 and what needs to happen in their fields in the coming year.

coronavirus outbreak | health
18 December 2020

PCR, antigen and antibody: Five things to know about coronavirus tests

To diagnose and contain the spread of coronavirus, testing is critical. There are two types of Covid-19 tests — those that are designed to detect whether you have the infection now, or those crafted to check whether you have been previously infected by the virus — SARS-CoV-2 — that causes the disease. Like any other product these tests have varying degrees of accuracy and reliability, and can be used to achieve different aims.

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