Health Check

We’re looking at a health issue that disproportionately affects black women - Uterine fibroids. These are non-cancerous growths that develop in or around the womb. There is little research on what causes fibroids or how to prevent them. Azeezat Olaoluwa, BBC News Women’s Affairs journalist based in Lagos, has been investigating. And the findings from a small study in South Africa on a leading Covid-19 vaccine have led to questions over its effectiveness. This one offers the most promise for Africa as it doesn’t need to be kept at super low temperatures. There are still plans to roll out this vaccine across Africa, though South Africa is now looking for alternatives. Rhoda Odhiambo has been looking into what it all means. Presented by Priscilla Ngethe.

Claudia talks to Dr Lucia Chambal at the Central Hospital of Maputo in Mozambique. She is helping to coordinate the response of the country’s largest hospital to an ongoing surge in new Covid patients. In the last three weeks, they’ve had to create more than new 150 beds to accommodate these patients, including erecting large tents to act as Covid wards in the hospital grounds. Dr Chambal talks about the pressures, saying they’ve admitted many more patients since January than during the entire period between last March and December. A study at New York hospital has revealed the substantial benefits of giving mobilising physiotherapy to hospitalised Covid-19 patients. In the first months of the pandemic at the Montefiore Medical Center when patient numbers dramatically increased, some patients received physiotherapy while others didn’t because of a lack of PPE for therapists. Looking back at the fate of both groups of patients, the hospital has now found that the survival rate of those getting the therapy was twice that of those who didn’t. What makes that result particularly interesting is the people who were given physical therapy were on average older and more likely to have risky health conditions. Yet their chances of survival were higher because of the therapy.Is coconut oil an amazing superfood or an overhyped food fad? Africa Life Clinic’s Dayo Yusif reports from coconut heaven on Kenya’s Indian Ocean coast.BBC Health and Science correspondent James Gallagher is Claudia’s studio guest, talking about evidence from Israel that the vaccination programme there is reducing the spread of the coronavirus in the population: whether the drug Budesonide in asthma inhalers prevents Covid illness development: and whether there is such a thing as a superfood.Presenter: Claudia Hammond Producer: Andrew Luck-Baker(Picture: A woman walks with her daughter in Maputo, Mozambique in February 2021. Photo credit: Alfredo Zuniga/AFP/Getty Images.)

Infections caused by germs which have become resistant to the medicines used to treat them pose a great threat to people’s health, as curable diseases become untreatable. Unregulated medicine dispensation and improper cleaning and sanitation at hospitals can all contribute to the spread of resistant germs. Overuse of antibiotics in animal rearing can also contribute, although this is less prevalent in Africa. Professor Joachim Osur and Dr John Kiiru explain. Many claims have been made about the potential health benefits of coconut oil. The oil is used widely in cooking and for hair, skin and healthcare. Dayo Yusuf travelled to Mombasa, Kenya, to investigate how coconut oil is produced and explore the nutritional facts and fiction. Priscilla Ngethe discusses these issues with BBC Africa Health Editor Anne Mawathe and reporter Dayo Yusuf.

The South African government has decided to pause its roll-out of the Astrazeneca-Oxford vaccine because of disappointing results of the vaccine’s effectiveness against the most common variant in the country in a trial of young people. And is there any good evidence from trials elsewhere that this vaccine reduces the chances of people spreading the coronavirus to others, as well as preventing severe illness and death? How do you test whether a vaccine prevents or reduces transmission of the coronavirus? Claudia’s regular guest epidemiologist Professor Matt Fox of Boston University discusses the issues. Claudia talks to two ovarian cancer specialists, Dorothy Lombe in Zambia and Georgia Funtes Cintra in Brazil about the challenges and success stories in providing treatment and care for women with this kind of cancer. The Global Cancer Coalition Network has released a report documenting the worsening situation in cancer care in 104 countries because of the coronavirus pandemic. Dorothy and Georgia tell us how the disruption has affected their patients.As Donald Trump’s impeachment trial gets underway, reporter Alison van Diggelen looks at social science research on political polarisation in US society, and an experiment run by Stanford University to heal divisions.Does a frequent intake of spicy food influence a person’s risk of developing cancers of the gut? Studies to date have been inconclusive but now a massive study following 500,000 people comes out of China, finding that spicy food is protective. Spicy food appears to lower the risk of getting cancer of the oesophagus and, to a lesser extent, the stomach as well. Presenter: Claudia Hammond Producer: Andrew Luck-Baker(Picture: A doctor walks in the Respiratory & Meningeal Pathogens Research Unit at Chris Hani Baragwanath Hospital in Soweto, South Africa in July 2020. Photo credit: Luca Sola/AFP/Getty Images.)

So far five African counties have begun vaccination campaigns, with vaccines gifted to them by wealthier countries. For many of the continent’s 1.2 billion people Covid -19 vaccinations will come through the COVAX initiative, which is a programme designed to reach many of the poor and vulnerable across the world. Whilst this is a huge task, Africa does have the advantage of having developed effective methods of delivering vaccinations with campaigns to fight Polio and Ebola.Along with the global pandemic, life threatening diseases such as cholera still thrive in inadequate sanitary conditions which is the situation for many people worldwide. However, there are some relatively simple and cheap solutions available, such as a scheme to build waterless latrines in Nigeria. Reporters Rhoda Odhiambo and Charles Mgbolu join presenter Priscilla Ngethe to discuss these health issues.

Claudia Hammond discusses the latest influx of excellent Covid-19 vaccine results with Sarah Boseley, health editor of The Guardian. Dr Samara Linton reports on efforts by black doctors in the UK to overcome vaccine hesitancy in their communities. The Biden administration is to rescind the USA’s Mexico City Policy which denies federal aid funding to organisations overseas that provide abortion counselling or services. The policy, also known as the Global Gag, prevented other family planning and HIV prevention services from receiving essential funding. Joy Phumaphi, former Botswanan health minister and now with the Partnership for Maternal, Newborn and Child Health talks to Claudia about the impact of the policy on the health and wellbeing on women and children in sub-Saharan Africa, and about the prospects for these services after the Mexico City Policy’s imminent demise. A team of eye specialists at University College London has found that levels of air pollution typical of big cities around the world increase the risk of one of the commonest causes of age-related sight loss – macular degeneration, a progressive deterioration of the retina. Professor Paul Foster tells Claudia how airborne pollutants from traffic and industry can damage the eye. Presenter: Claudia Hammond Producer: Andrew Luck-Baker(Picture: Dr. Nita Patel, Director of Antibody discovery and Vaccine development, lifts a vial with a potential coronavirus, COVID-19, vaccine at Novavax labs in Gaithersburg, Maryland in March 2020. Photo: Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP.)

The Brazilian city of Manaus remains in a state of crisis as its second surge of Covid-19 cases continues to overwhelm its hospitals and kill hundreds of people every day. Dr Marcus Lacerda, a clinical researcher at the FioCruz Institute talks to Claudia about the city’s medical oxygen supply shortage and why the coronavirus has caused even more suffering during this second surge of cases.One of the commonest symptoms of Covid-19 illness is the loss of the sense of smell. It returns after a few weeks in most people but a significant minority still can’t smell anything many months later. We talk to Professor Carl Philpott of Norwich Medical School who’s led an international panel of nose doctors, assessing the evidence for the best therapies to restore the olfactory sense to people who’ve lost it following respiratory infections. So-called smell training comes out top as the most evidence-based approach. Carl explains how it works and we hear from two people who are trying to regain their sense of smell.Can some people suffer from the side effects of some drugs because they are expecting to experience them, and not because the drugs are actually causing them? That does seem to the case with statins, the cholesterol-lowering drugs prescribed to many millions of people around the world. Many people stop taking them because of side effects such as joint pain and muscle aches. But a fascinating study suggests that in many patients, it’s not the drugs that are the problem but something known as the nocebo effect - the evil twin of the placebo effect. We hear from Imperial College London cardiologist James Howard and one of the study’s participants.Doctor Graham Easton is Claudia’s guest of the week, talking about whether Covid vaccines will be effective against the new, more infectious variants of the coronavirus; a link between afternoon naps and sharper mental agility; and he comments on the nocebo effect in medicine. Presenter: Claudia Hammond Producer: Andrew Luck-Baker(Picture: A man holds an oxygen tank in Manaus, Amazonas State, Brazil in January 2021 amid the Covid-19 pandemic. Photo credit: Michael Dantas/AFP/Getty Images.)

After the first few days of India’s Covid mass vaccination programme rollout, Claudia talks to medical ethicist and health policy expert Anant Bhan about the issues arising from the lack of efficacy data for one of the two vaccines. Will they undermine confidence in this gargantuan public health exercise?Cindy Sui reports from Taiwan about a recent increase in the number of suicides among students there.Claudia talks to Zi-Jun Liu about the obese miniature pigs that he is using to study the dangerous condition of sleep apnoea. Claudia’s guest of the week is Tabitha Mwangi of Cambridge University, with news on making yellow fever vaccines go much further when there’s a serious outbreak, protecting vulnerable children from malaria and how the pandemic is putting commercial sex workers in West Africa at greater risk of HIV infection.Presenter: Claudia Hammond Producer: Andrew Luck-Baker(Picture: BMC medical staff congratulate their colleague Sr. staff nurse Charushila More after she administered the first Covid-19 vaccine shot at KEM hospital, on January 16, 2021 in Mumbai, India. Photo credit: Anshuman Poyrekar/Hindustan Times/Getty Images.)

BBC global health correspondent Naomi Grimley joins Claudia Hammond for a round-up of the latest developments in Covid vaccines and their rollouts – including the World Health Organisation’s Director General who has admonished richer countries and pharma companies for undermining the chances of access to vaccines for all countries. Plus a controversial vaccine rollout in India and the Iranian leader wants to ban US and UK vaccines.Claudia’s guest of the week is family doctor Ann Robinson who has perspectives on some of the latest Covid treatment news. Early results suggests a place for two monoclonal antibodies in treating patients who are sick enough to be in intensive care, although the drugs are expensive. And there are some encouraging results from a small trial in Argentina of convalescent plasma therapy in older mildly ill patients. The pandemic has disrupted the training of the next generation of health professionals. From Chile, Jane Chambers reports on how a leading dental college in Santiago is innovating to keep the practical tuition of its students up to standard.Ann Robinson tells Claudia about new research measuring the role of air pollution in miscarriages and stillbirths in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh.Should only doctors do surgery? Claudia talks to Sierra Leonian surgeon Thomas Ashley and Jenny Lofgren of the Karolinska about training more junior health care workers to perform relatively simple surgical procedures such as hernia repair, in the hope of addressing the enormous unmet need for this operation across sub-Saharan Africa.Presenter: Claudia Hammond Producer: Andrew Luck-Baker(Image: Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 vaccines pictured in January 2021 in Liege, Belgium. Photo credit: Vincent Kalut/Photonews/Getty Images.)

Claudia Hammond talks to Guardian health editor Sarah Boseley exactly one year after she and Claudia first talked on Health Check about a mysterious respiratory disease that had appeared in Wuhan in China – with 59 cases reported at that point. What have been the highs and lows of the world’s response to the coronavirus so far?Alison van Diggelen reports from the USA on research which has found that on average the mental wellbeing of older people has held up better during the pandemic than that of younger generations, despite the mortality risk being much higher for the elderly. Researchers in California and Georgia have also looked at why. For listeners living under strict lockdowns, psychologist Virginia Frum recommends awe walks. Walks during which you deliberately look out for things to be amazed by can boost your emotional wellbeing. You don’t have to travel to spectacular scenery: awe walks can work just as well in a city as out in nature. Boston University’s global health epidemiologist Matthew Fox is Claudia’s guest of the week. They discuss the United States’ troubled Covid vaccine rollout, the long term health problems of conflict refugees, and how smartphones can improve a low-tech method of cervical cancer screening. Presenter: Claudia Hammond Producer: Andrew Luck-Baker(Picture: Medical staff members wearing protective clothing accompanying a patient in Wuhan, China in January 2020. Photo credit: STR/AFP/Getty Images.)