Health Check

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.)

Claudia Hammond explores how children think with two psychologists; Dr Victoria Simms from Ulster University who researches how children’s understanding of maths develops and Professor Teresa McCormack from Queens University Belfast who researches how children understand time. The discussion was recorded in front of an audience at the Northern Ireland Science Festival in February 2020.Presenter: Claudia Hammond Producer: Caroline Steel(Picture: A group of preschool students sitting on the floor with their legs crossed and their arms raised in the air. Photo credit: FatCamera/Getty Images.)

Have you lost a loved one who is still a part of your life in some way? Did it leave you feeling confused or frozen about how to continue with life? Claudia Hammond examines the distressing phenomenon known as ambiguous loss – the enormous challenge of dealing with a loss when you aren’t sure what has happened, leaving you searching for answers, unable to move on.What has the pandemic done to our memories? Anecdotally many people report that they keep forgetting things which they are sure they would have remembered before. Psychologist Catherine Loveday of the University of Westminster examines the new emerging evidence.Our brain is formed of two hemispheres and in most of us, the two halves are interconnected by millions of nerve fibres that form a large bridging structure called the corpus callosum. But some babies are born without a corpus callosum, linking the two sides. A quarter of these babies grow up with serious developmental difficulties and half have mild to moderate cognitive problems. But a quarter have no problems at all suggesting that somehow the brain is compensating for the low level of connectivity between the two hemispheres. New brain scanning research at the University of Geneva by Dr Vanessa Sifreddi has revealed how the brain does this. Are you more open, less conscientious or more neurotic than you used to be? It used to be thought that personality was fixed in adulthood but it can and does change. Psychologist Eileen Graham has studied data from thousands of people and explains how and which traits are likely to increase or decrease.Presenter: Claudia Hammond Producer: Andrew Luck-Baker(Picture: Vintage orange velvet armchair in a stylish, minimal domestic room. Photo credit: Catherine Falls Commercial/Getty Images.)

Iran was one of the first countries to be hit hard by the coronavirus. In the first population wide survey of infection rates in a Middle Eastern country, Iranian medical researchers now estimate that about one in five people on average were infected during its first wave in 18 cities in the country. But the rate varies enormously from city to city. In the city of Rasht, they estimate more than 70% of the population caught the virus. Claudia Hammond talks to Iranian infectious disease researcher Maryam Darvishian about the findings and what they mean for Iran’s attempts to control the virus today. We look at the sleep hygiene plight of international students whose study and sleep cycles have been thrown into chaos because of Covid travel restrictions. We hear the experiences of a student in Singapore studying remotely at Columbia University in New York. Her classes are usually in the dead of night Singapore time. Harvard sleep researcher Jeanne Duffy advises on the best ways for students to plan their work/sleep patterns. When surgical patients are under general anaesthetic, playing them soothing music and comforting messages may reduce the pain that they experience and the need for opioid pain relief in the 24 hours after their operations. This is the conclusion of a randomised study of about 400 patients undergoing surgery in five German hospitals. Claudia talks to anaesthesiologist Ernil Hansen of Regensberg University who explains how this might be working to make post-operative recovery more comfortable and less reliant on strong analgesic drugs. Claudia’s studio guest this week is BBC Medicine and Science correspondent James Gallagher, talking about Covid-19 vaccines, how our genes influence the severity of Covid illness and how ear wax might improve blood sugar monitoring for diabetes.Presenter: Claudia Hammond Producer: Andrew Luck-Baker(Picture: People wearing protective masks walk through a street in Tehran in July 2020. Photo credit: Fatemeh Bahrami/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images.)

Are genetic therapies for sickle cell disease beginning to come of age? Claudia Hammond talks to David Williams and Erica Esrick of Boston Children’s Hospital about their promising results with a gene therapy for the disease in a pilot trial involving six young patients. Their report appears in the latest edition of the New England Journal of Medicine alongside encouraging results of a CRISPR gene editing therapy for sickle cell disease. Both approaches target the same gene – the result of which is to make bone marrow cells to produce foetal haemoglobin to compensate for people’s faulty adult haemoglobin. BBC Global health correspondent Naomi Grimley has a coronavirus global round up for us, and we report on the discovery of a pair of salivary glands new to medical science – the first new set of organs to be discovered for centuries. Dutch researchers detected them with a sophisticated form of body scanning, hiding where the back of the nasal cavity meets the top of the throat. It’s an anatomical revelation which may have implications for kinder radiotherapy for head and neck cancer.Claudia’s studio guest is Tabitha Mwangi, who is a lecturer in public health at Anglia Ruskin University and has also been a malaria researcher in Kenya. Tabitha talks about the great benefits of giving children four months of malaria prophylaxis tablets during the rainy season in West and Central sub-Sahelian Africa. A study involving millions of children and tens of thousands of health workers halved the number of children dying from malaria. Tabitha also tells Claudia about a simple strategy for improving the success rate in getting people onto TB treatment quickly, and whether schemes in low income countries to encourage mothers to grow their own vegetables to improve their children’s nutrition actually work. Presenter: Claudia Hammond Producer: Andrew Luck-Baker(Picture: Dr. Erica Esrick and Manny Johnson, the first patient to participate in the Boston Children’s Hospital sickle cell disease clinical trial. Credit: Boston’s Children’s Hospital.)

In the week of World AIDS Day, Health Check looks at what's being described as a milestone in the prevention of HIV infection in women. It is a form of pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) - an injection every 8 weeks of a drug called cabotegravir. A clinical trial has been comparing it to a daily PrEP pill which is already known to be effective at preventing HIV infection. The injection regimen was about 90% more effective at shielding women from the virus than the daily tablet. The trial involves more than 3,000 women in seven Southern and East African countries. Claudia talks to study co-leader Sinead Delany-Moretlwe of the University of Witwatersrand about why this form of PrEP seems to be so effective and whether it will be affordable for low and middle income countries. Chhavi Sachdev reports on informal health workers known as ‘chhota doctors’ who are the backbone of primary health care for the hundreds of millions of rural people in India. They are not formally recognised as health care providers by the authorities and lack medical degrees, but they are the first port of call for many when people feel ill, particularly during India’s coronavirus lockdown. At a time when so many people are stuck indoors working at home, World Health Organisation has published new recommendations on how much physical activity we should be doing for the sake of our health. We talk to Fiona Bull, head of the WHO’s physical activity unit. James Gallagher is the Health Check guest this week talking about Covid-19 vaccines, vitamin D and a step towards a blood test to predict Alzheimer’s disease.Presenter: Claudia Hammond Producer: Andrew Luck-Baker(Picture: Female doctor giving a young female patient an injection in her consultation room. Photo credit: Henk Badenhorst/Getty Images.)