The Thin End

Many people will be affected COVID-19 beyond those directly infected by it.  Lives will be lost as a result of the efforts to save lives from the virus.  This is a sad reality of the response to the pandemic. As we focus on the potential loss of life through the virus, we need also to consider why so many others have had to put off possible life-saving treatments, or had operations cancelled. We must also consider that the long term impact of the economic consequences will be considerable. The problems we face are due to a decade of austerity, which made preparations for a pandemic almost impossible to achieve. Of course, resources are always going to be stretched in such circumstances.   But it would be wrong to assume that such a pandemic was unforeseen.   On the contrary, all NHS Trusts have made some contingency plans for such a virus. It would be easy enough to imagine that a decade of underfunding of the NHS has had no significant impact.  Bu...

For many years I served on NHS research ethics committees.  One aspect of clinical trials that always concerned us was how representative any trial was of the population.  This matters a great deal, as biased samples may give erroneous results or miss results that are of crucial importance   Now, new research has revealed bias and stereotyping among clinical and research professionals who recruit patients to enrol in cancer clinical trials. The findings are published online in CANCER , a peer-reviewed journal of the American Cancer Society (ACS). It is important to include diverse patients in clinical trials to ensure that the results will apply to patients in the general population. One form of bias is in the selection of those on the trail.  The proportion of racial and ethnic minorities participating in cancer clinical trials is persistently lower than the proportion of minorities in the U.S. population at large.  This has the potential for g...