Friday, July 28, 2017

We are far from having anything definitive in medicines and medical treatments


Having been ingrained with 'must finish full course' for years, now we are told this.

Advice to finish antibiotics is ‘incorrect’, say British scientists

BRITISH disease experts today suggested doing away with the "incorrect" advice to always finish a course of antibiotics, saying the approach was fuelling the spread of drug resistance.
Rather than stopping antibiotics too early, the cause of resistance was "unnecessary" drug use, a team wrote in The BMJ medical journal.
"We encourage policymakers, educators and doctors to stop advocating 'complete the course' when communicating with the public," wrote the team, led by infectious diseases expert Martin Llewelyn of the Brighton and Sussex Medical School.
"Further, they should publicly and actively state that this was not evidence-based and is incorrect."
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Wednesday, July 12, 2017

Cheng Boon Ong: Mygration Story: Postcolonial musings from Asia to Europe

United Nations University (UNU-MERIT):

"Our ‘Mygration Story’ series tracks the family histories of staff and fellows at UNU. The aim is to show that many of us owe our lives and careers to the courage of migrant ancestors. People who left their homes to build safer or better lives — for themselves and for their children. With this monthly series we want to show that migration is not an historical aberration, but a surprisingly common element in family histories worldwide."

"It’s difficult to be wholeheartedly critical of colonialism when one’s family history is so closely intertwined with it. My great-grandparents joined the historical wave of Chinese labour emigration of the late 19th and early 20thcentury to what was then British Malaya. My home city of Batu Gajah was a boom town for tin mining, and for decades a colonial district capital with a courthouse, hospital and horse racing track. Both my parents were born before the country’s independence, schooled in the English language, and ultimately met while studying in England in the early 1970s. (And even today, Malaysians make up one of the largest international student communities in the UK.)"

Cheng Boon Ong
"About the Author
Cheng is an affiliated researcher at UNU-MERIT, and holds a PhD in Public Policy and Policy Analysis from Maastricht University. Currently, she is a humanitarian assessment officer for Yemen at REACH, a joint initiative of two international NGOs (ACTED and IMPACT) and the United Nations Operational Satellite Applications Programme (UNOSAT)."
More: http://www.merit.unu.edu/mygration-story-postcolonial-musings-from-asia-to-europe/
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