Medical Journal News

New England Journal of Medicine, Volume 392, Issue 8, Page 818-819, February 20, 2025.

New England Journal of Medicine, Volume 392, Issue 8, February 20, 2025.

New England Journal of Medicine, Volume 392, Issue 8, Page 807-816, February 20, 2025.

New England Journal of Medicine, Volume 392, Issue 8, Page 798-805, February 20, 2025.

New England Journal of Medicine, Ahead of Print.

New England Journal of Medicine, Volume 392, Issue 8, Page 806-806, February 20, 2025.

New England Journal of Medicine, Volume 392, Issue 8, Page 729-731, February 20, 2025.

New England Journal of Medicine, Volume 392, Issue 8, Page 731-733, February 20, 2025.

New England Journal of Medicine, Volume 392, Issue 8, Page 733-735, February 20, 2025.

The Aga Khan IV, a billionaire businessman who died on Feb 4, aged 88 years, repeatedly rejected the title of philanthropist despite funding universities, hospitals, and schools across the globe. Prince Karim Aga Khan IV, who through Aga Khan Development Network was undoubtedly responsible for improving the lives of millions of people, considered sharing his wealth to be part of his role as a spiritual leader of Ismaili Muslims. Certainly, he did enough to fulfil the definition of philanthropy as literally translated: the love of humanity.

Stroke is a major source of morbidity and mortality, despite advances in acute stroke treatments.1 Time-sensitive acute ischaemic stroke reperfusion approaches (thrombolysis and endovascular thrombectomy) are deployed in only a small proportion of patients with acute ischaemic stroke, depending on eligibility criteria and treatment availability.2,3 The neuroprotection hypothesis posits that ischaemic brain tissue can, in part, be prevented from infarcting with treatment that disrupts the ischaemic cascade.

US President Donald Trump is angry with WHO. Me too. We are all angry with WHO for some reason. But Trump's reasons do not make much sense. Here is his charge sheet. First, that WHO is a bloated bureaucracy that needs urgent reform. Second, that the US Government pays too much to the agency compared with other member states. Third, that WHO covered up the origins of COVID-19. Finally, that WHO mismanaged the COVID-19 pandemic. I am told that Trump might have remained a member state on three conditions: that the current WHO Director-General (DG), Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, resigned; that his successor was an American; and that China increased its contributions to the agency.

The USA is WHO's largest donor and its planned withdrawal from the organisation has prompted crisis planning during the agency's Executive Board meeting. John Zarocostas reports from Geneva.

An offensive by M23 fighters is disrupting health services and displacing people in a region already beset by health challenges. Rebecca Sers reports.

Boluwaji Ogunyemi was selected as the Canadian Medical Association's (CMA) President-Elect Nominee in December, 2024, and is expected to take up this position in May, 2025, after approval by the CMA's General Council. It is a role that helps him advocate for many of the domains he has focused on in his career: social accountability and medical teaching, research, and clinical care, especially related to health equity. Ogunyemi, who is Clinical Associate Professor of Medicine at Memorial University of Newfoundland (MUN) in St John's, NL, Canada, is also concerned with improving health systems, informed by his Fellowship in Health Systems Improvement from the University of Alberta's School of Public Health.

Andy Weir's Project Hail Mary (2021), like many works of apocalyptic fiction, is set in a world facing an existential threat. The details of that threat, however, are not immediately apparent and are instead slowly revealed in two parallel timelines. The first story unfolds in the present moment. In this thread, the protagonist, a molecular biologist named Ryland Grace, wakes up aboard a spacecraft called the Hail Mary. Following unexplained memory loss, he is attempting to piece together his past while simultaneously trying to make sense of how he found himself in outer space.

“Anxieties about malingering or feigned illness are at least a thousand years old in the West”, argued public health ethicist Daniel S Goldberg in a paper on the history of “malingerers”. He gives several examples including Arnau de Vilanova who in the 13th century was so worried that patients were fooling him, by passing off other people's urine samples as their own, that he wrote 19 pieces of advice for other physicians to spot the fraudulent. In this way, Goldberg shows how physicians have doubted the testimonies of patients for a very long time.

Physician who helped start Médecins Sans Frontières. He was born in Bernwiller, France, on July 7, 1938 and died in Mulhouse, France, on Jan 1, 2025 aged 86 years.

Although acute hearing loss is known to be a warning sign for posterior circulation strokes,1 our experience suggests that hearing assessments remain rare in suspected cases of stroke—even when patients report hearing issues. This gap illustrates a failure to integrate research findings into routine stroke evaluations. One issue is that hearing loss has drifted away from being recognised as a focal neurological sign. This issue is particularly concerning for anterior inferior cerebellar artery stroke, in which hearing loss and vertigo often precede more obvious stroke symptoms, such as hemiparesis or aphasia, and carry a higher mortality than in other stroke types.