Posts in category: Uncategorized

It’s important for children to learn about body safety and boundaries.

Researchers from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) have outlined opportunities for achieving President Biden and First Lady Biden’s Cancer Moonshot national goal of reducing the cancer death rate by at least 50% over the next 25 years. A study published April 17 in Cancer Discovery, led by researchers at the National Cancer Institute (NCI), part of NIH, has concluded that achieving this goal will require increased access to and use of interventions known to prevent common causes of cancer death.

Adding a personalized cancer vaccine to the blockbuster drug Keytruda kept more melanoma patients in remission than the immune therapy alone, co-developers Moderna Inc. and Merck & Co. said in their first detailed presentation of a key study.

We are not given to fabricating stories.

On the rare occasion we get it wrong, apologies and amends have been rendered in good time.

Therefore, we do not take kindly to the vilification from the shambles of the Ministry of Health suggesting that we have a malicious campaign and vendetta against the ministry’s leadership.

It is as if lives lost due to sheer incompetence count for nothing. 

First, the entire procurement section of the ministry was disbanded, losing critical institutional competence resulting in the drug crisis the country is facing.

The ministry is both deceptive, cynical and inhuman. Staging false media stunts, faking drug availability. This deception is evil. 

Three Permanent Secretaries later, the situation is even more dire.

Now a systematic purge of senior professionals has been launched without any regard to the qualification of the officers involved and their contribution to the sections in which they are serving.

The first purge was in the name of corruption eradication. It is not for a rocket scientist to conclude what the new purge is about.

Like everything else at the ministry, nothing is transparent, ethical nor indeed in line with Government procedure. It is all political.

What is now even more distressing is the Egyptian debacle that defies logic and is totally irregular, without any semblance of following Government procurement procedures, all in the name of health emergency. What emergency?

If executed, it will take another six months or more to land the medication in Zambia.  

Such medication will also require validation and approval, a process that will take even more time and at what cost, considering that we had a functioning supply chain?

The Egyptian government does not manufacture medicine and neither does the Unified Procurement Authority of Egypt, to which we have sent a hundred-plus page shopping list for drugs complete with prices. 

This organisation, formally established in 2020, is a centralised procurement and supply interface, which aims to ensure equitable access of medicinal and health technology products through conducting evidence-based technology assessments, value driven procurement methods and establishing a robust and sustainable supply chain for Egypt and not Zambia.

We have our own Zambia Medicines Regulatory Authority to undertake these tasks.

Integrity and ethics are critical components of public policy and appointments as they ensure that individuals selected to implement public policy are trustworthy, accountable, and committed to acting in the best interests of the public.

Serving public interest transcend personal and political consideration. Public institutions maintain the trust of the public they serve. Indeed, ethical conduct and integrity are vital for building and maintaining trust between the government and the public.

For all intent and purposes, the Ministry of Health has lost this trust. 

The lack of medicines, broken down diagnostic equipment and sheer incompetence has eroded any trust the public held in the ministry.

Most importantly, professional appointments are supposed to be on the basis of merit and competence. There is no room for political gamesmanship.

Primary care pediatricians (PCPs) who prescribe selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) for children with anxiety and/or depression generally document appropriate indications for starting medication and prescribe without involvement of subspecialists, according to a study published online April 17 in Pediatrics.

When a person reads a sentence, two distinct networks in the brain are activated, working together to integrate the meanings of the individual words to obtain more complex, higher-order meaning, according to a study at UTHealth Houston.

Psilocybin treatment in a community setting appears safe and effective for patients with cancer and depression, according to a research letter published online April 13 in JAMA Oncology.

THERE is need for Government to invest in Trade and Vocational schools because our current education system deliberately creates unemployment as it imparts skills and training unnecessary and unusable in the current job market and informal economy, Patriotic Front (PF) aspiring president Emmanuel Mwamba has said.

Mr Mwamba said all trade and TVET schools will be made to abandon business, administrative and accounting courses they have conveniently migrated to.

He said these institutions were designed to promote technical and vocational education and skills development.

Mr Mwamba said they would be made to purposefully return to the core businesses of trade, vocational and technical courses.

“They will institute training and skills development relating to a wide range of occupational fields. It will be an education with more hands-on approach to teaching the skills needed to for graduates to survive in a highly informal economy as ours,” he said.

Mr Mwamba said most public universities would be transformed into polytechnic schools to help combine the in-depth study found at universities with practical, technology-based skills training.

He said this was to prepare a cadre of skilled professionals and workers readiness for an economy that will promote local industrialization and import substitution based on micro, small, and medium enterprises alongside large-scale industries.

Immunotherapy, particularly CAR T-Cell treatment for cancer, is extending the lives of many patients. But sometimes the therapy randomly migrates to places it shouldn’t go, tucking into the lungs or other noncancerous tissue and causing toxic side effects. A University of Rochester/Wilmot Cancer Institute team discovered the molecule responsible for guiding T cells toward tumors, setting the stage for scientists to improve upon the groundbreaking treatment.

Using a new approach for studying live embryonic mouse brains at single-cell resolution, researchers have identified an active multi-layer circuit that forms in the cortex during an unexpectedly early stage of development. Perturbing the circuit genetically led to changes similar to those seen in the brains of people with autism. The findings are reported today in Cell by a team based at the Institute of Molecular and Clinical Ophthalmology Basel.