One of great joys of being an emergency doctor, (and also one of it's sobering features) is that, on certain occasions, there will be unfortunate members of the public who present to hospital having done something ridiculously stupid. Many of these foolish acts are chronicled in the Darwin Awards.
n a single night I had patients come in for the following complaints (all brought by ambulance): “Smoked marijuana and got dizzy”, “stung by a bee and it hurts”, “got drunk and have a hangover”,
Did the swine flu pandemic save lives? A response to Richard Lehman's perspective on a recently published overview of the swine flu pandemic in Australia.
A timely follow up to 'The Two Faces of Swine Flu' is 'Critical Care Services and 2009 H1N1 Influenza in Australia and New Zealand'. This 'hot off the press' paper by the ANZIC Influenza Investigators has just been published online in the NEJM.
I read a book called 'The Coming Plague' when I was in medical school. It was fascinating. It formed a picture of the world in my mind as a bubbling soup of seething micro-organisms waiting for the right circumstances to break out, to come forth and multiply
Despite the cessation of ‘pig kissing frolicks‘ it looks as though the WHO will eventually declare that 2009 H1N1 influenza A (‘swine flu’) has reached pandemic proportions (phase 6). What does this mean? A phase 6 influenza pandemic means that…
Swine Flu for Dummies, is it really a public health emergency of international concern
The sun is making more frequent cameos in our part of the world, suggesting summer may be on its way. Another, but less obvious, indicator of the change in seasons is the gradual decline in patients with swine flu (H1N1 09 influenza) needing treatment in our intensive care units.