Medical Journal News

“The COVID-19 crisis may have passed, but a harsh lesson remains: the world is woefully unprepared for the next pandemic”, said António Guterres, UN Secretary-General, on the International Day of Epidemic Preparedness, Dec 24, 2024. His remarks resonated with those of WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus when asked whether the world is better prepared for the next pandemic. He noted that while some painful lessons have been learnt, many of the same weaknesses and vulnerabilities that allowed COVID-19 to gain a foothold 5 years ago still exist.

Chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy has revolutionised immunotherapy;1 however, prolonged manufacturing times, high cost, and limited accessibility remain a challenge.2 Allogeneic products offer a readily available off-the-shelf therapeutic modality with healthy donor cells that can be dosed multiple times.3 However, allogeneic therapies have their own limitations, including donor-specific variability in composition and efficacy, limited persistence due to allogeneic rejection, and the risk of graft-versus-host disease (GVHD).

Dermatomyositis is a chronic autoimmune disease characterised by muscle weakness, skin lesions, and systemic complications. Its global prevalence ranges from one to ten cases per million people annually, with a higher incidence in women, who are affected approximately twice as often as men.1 This condition substantially diminishes quality of life due to its debilitating symptoms and systemic impacts.2

An urgent plea to all concerned with the defence of health and human rights: the Argentine government's decision to close the Haroldo Conti Cultural Centre at the Escuela de Mecánica de la Armada in Buenos Aires from Jan 2, 2025, is an act of violence against the families of 30 000 victims who were murdered by Argentina's 1976–83 military junta. It is a decision that must be reversed if Argentina is to retain credibility as a nation concerned with protecting and advancing the wellbeing of its citizens.

Founded more than 20 years ago, the Sexual Violence Research Initiative has grown into the largest network on research on violence against women and children. Sophie Cousins reports.

Researcher Ajit Lalvani is a pioneer in the understanding of immune responses to respiratory infections and in translating that knowledge to improve care. He is Chair of Infectious Diseases, Founding Director of the Tuberculosis Research Centre, and Director of the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) Health Protection Research Unit (HPRU) in Respiratory Infections at Imperial College London, UK, and Honorary Consultant Physician at Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust. Tuberculosis has been the major focus of his 30-year research career.

The illness memoir is now a well-established literary genre. This phenomenon gives the subliminal impression that as a society, we are anxious to do away with taboos around sickness, and to support the sick. The truth, to our discredit, is that many people are keener on reading books about the illness of strangers than helping friends with major illness. The stigma of psychiatric illness is well-recognised, but that associated with physical illness much less so. In high-income countries, sick people and their families are in many respects socially isolated; even worse, society does not generally recognise this issue.

I knew the way to go to see no one at all. From the pharmacy adjacent to the surgery where my parents worked as general practitioners for 30 years—in which my surname called at the counter could not but turn heads—I took the paper bag of mood stabilisers and antipsychotics, which were not helping, and trailed my slow feet beyond the pale of the village and into the trees.

HIV and LGBTQI+ rights advocate. Born on Sept 30, 1961, in Sodus, NY, USA, he died of hypertensive atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease on Nov 8, 2024, in Washington, DC, USA, aged 63 years.