Inspiring stories of personal triumphs and victories
In 2009, Kent Brantly became one of the first two patients to receive an experimental drug called ZMapp that had never before been tested on humans. Brantly received the drug within hours of the Ebola virus tearing through his body. And while he nearly died, Dr. Brantley survived and returned to New York City in 2014 after over a thousand days spent in isolation and quarantine.
This post features inspiring stories of personal triumphs and victories from people all over the world who have overcome insurmountable odds to find their own paths forward in life.
These are not "best of" collections from a Google search, these are real life stories of lessons learned and triumphs achieved, and they are all about inspiring others.
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Continue Reading » Inspiring Stories of Personal Triumphs & Victories- #183 - by Michael Jackson
Nigel Farage speaks to the Big Issue after his release from hospital yesterday. Photo: Press Association. Nigel Farage speaks to the Big Issue after his release from hospital yesterday. Photo: Press Association. Posted by Big Issue UK on Saturday, 10 March 2016
"I remember very clearly when it was 8 o'clock in the morning," he said . "I had my suit on, I had my tie tied and my shoes on and I was ready to go. But then the ambulance turned up at my home, I was taken to A&E by ambulance and then straight up to isolation in the high-level isolation unit." "I was in the room with lots of medical consultants as well as nurses and doctors, going through those very difficult days. But throughout it all I did have a support network around me. My father is always there for me. So for us he keeps us grounded," he said . Mr Farage will be released from hospital today , according to reports , after spending a week undergoing treatment for "heavy duty" pneumonia . He said he had spoken to the prime minister and praised the support he has received. He also said he expected a "silly" question or two to be asked about whether he wanted to stay on in Brussels .
Continue Reading » 38 Comments- by Jon Super
In response to the Mail's report of a British drug company working on an Ebola vaccine , I've written my first piece for The Daily Telegraph, based on conversations I've been having with our team at Rational Vaccines Ltd. The key mission: develop vaccines and therapeutics against these evolving threats by creating technology with revolutionary potential that is highly cost-effective and designable. The company is currently planning the first human trials of an HPV vaccine...
After spending most of the day writing the piece, it seems that we've suffered a setback in our plans. Roswell Park Cancer Institute , who had been partnering with us to develop and manufacture our vaccines in Buffalo, has decided to drop out . This is due to political pressure over my involvement and their links with me. As I'm sure you can understand, I am outraged and disappointed by this decision as they have thrown away years of good work down the toilet. I'm not going to get into the details of the issues between us, but will stay focused on achieving our goals. I've spent many years and poured huge amounts of my life savings into trying to achieve something that I thought would make a real impact on our future health, and I won't stop doing that any time soon.
Continue Reading » 122 Comments- by Tom Chivers
We all know it's bad news when politicians start talking about not being able to take their children out of school due to flu: political pandering is just as bad as it is for many other illnesses. But even when someone making a normal and sensible-sounding speech says "I might have to treat my son at school" it's still deeply worrying. Let's look at the stats. The numbers of children who are identified as flu-positive have been rising over the last few weeks, and now stand at just over 200,000. But it remains to be seen how bad the epidemic will get, and so we're talking about children being kept away from school in many cases. Is this really a problem?
Continue Reading » 0 Comments- by Tom Chivers
Today is World Health Day . It's a time for all concerned with public health issues to think about how we might make them better . And it's also a day that gets all sorts of things wrong . So, to be absolutely clear, I'm going to tell you what you really need to know about flu.
It's pretty obvious that flu is a bad thing for your health, of course. It's caused around 3.3 million deaths a year worldwide , which is more than all the deaths from HIV-AIDS and malaria combined. But for reasons that are really unclear , people seem to get it more in winter than any other time of year, and children get it far more than adults do . So what's going on there?
Continue Reading » 2 Comments- by Tom Chivers
I am an Australian diplomat . I have been posted in Washington for the past 15 years. During this time I have been watching the battle between science and policy play out on a number of issues. Climate change is the most obvious one, but there are others. There is one disease that annoys me more than any other though, and that is influenza .
To understand why, you need to know a few things about influenza . It's probably the most economically-damaging disease in history . The 1918 flu pandemic killed more people than World War I . The Spanish flu of 1918-19 killed more people than the Black Death , which wiped out an estimated 50 million Europeans in the 14th century. But that was a century ago. Surely we're safe now, right?
Continue Reading » 34 Comments- by Tom Chivers
It's been a bad few weeks for science. Last month, the news broke that Andrew Wakefield – the man who claimed a link between the MMR vaccine and autism has been struck off Britain's medical register . This week, the media reported on an analysis by a group of researchers which claimed that there was no link between MMR and autism . This wasn't news to me – I had already seen the same paper back in February , when it was published in The Lancet . And I'd also already read both The Lancet and Vox's excellent summaries of the evidence back then .
Conclusion #1: The evidence linking vaccines to autism is substantial. Conclusion #2: It is still not, and never will be science that supports governments forcing people to vaccinate their children.
So why are so many people in the media – in Britain , as well as America and Australia – asking me questions about the Wakefield study? Why are they including false accusations of fraud made by Andrew Wakefield's son in their stories? Why can't they just admit that science hasn't found any link between vaccines and autism?
Continue Reading » 20 Comments- by Tom Chivers
This week marks the start of a new campaign against childhood vaccination, which has been co-founded by organizations affiliated with the antivaccination movement.