Showing 1 - 10 of 34
Terminal volunteers can save lives
News, Peter Singer & Benjamin L Sievers, Published on 13/09/2025
» At the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), a programme called Last Gift offers terminally ill patients the opportunity to help create more effective treatments. Their special circumstances transform the usual risk-benefit calculus of joining a clinical study of an untested drug. Researchers can ask them to consider consenting to being research participants in ways that they would not ask healthier people with long life expectancies, and terminally ill patients may choose to give that consent when others would be less likely to do so.
Reform lending laws
Oped, Postbag, Published on 03/09/2025
» Re: "Buy now, bankrupt later", (Business, Sept 1). Little is ever said about the so-called many (often SET-listed) prolific finance companies here, which charge very high interest rates, levy late fees very quickly, and impose other strict rules that are often, may we say, not very consumer-finance friendly.
Early-onset cancer shift
News, Editorial, Published on 26/07/2025
» The death of 29-year-old Chiang Mai doctor Krittai Tanasombatkul from lung cancer at the end of 2023 was a wake-up call for Thailand's healthcare community.
Climate change poses health threat
Oped, Manica Balasegaram, Published on 17/05/2024
» It is widely believed that climate change is the single biggest threat to human health. A global temperature increase of 2C -- a threshold that will likely be exceeded by the end of the century -- could claim as many as one billion lives, with extreme weather events, heatwaves, droughts, flooding, infectious disease outbreaks, and food shortages among the causes of death. But the situation may, in fact, be far worse because the current forecasts fail to account for the inevitable increase in antimicrobial resistance (AMR).
A promising turn in the quest to treat long Covid
News, Lisa Jarvis, Published on 25/01/2024
» A study published this week in Science makes a compelling case that people with long Covid have a chronic imbalance in their immune response. The findings don't explain why that immune response is out of whack, and needs confirming in larger studies. Still, this is an important new piece to the vexing puzzle that is long Covid.
Antibiotic overuse fuels shortage
Oped, Manica Balasegaram, Published on 31/10/2023
» The overuse of antibiotics is now widely recognised as one of the main factors contributing to antimicrobial resistance (AMR) -- often called the "silent pandemic". But what is less well known is that shortages of antibiotics also play a role in fuelling AMR.
Life elsewhere will someday be possible
Gwynne Dyer, Published on 17/09/2023
» This week's real news is the discovery of life on another planet. As Cambridge University's Nikku Madhusudhan said in the first sentence of his report: "The search for habitable environments and biomarkers in exoplanetary atmospheres is the holy grail of exoplanet science." And he has probably found the Holy Grail.
Be careful what you take
Tatat Bunnag, Published on 17/07/2023
» Like many others in the modern world who eat unhealthy and neglect the right diet, I suffer from chronic conditions like acid reflux and irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), which frequently leads to abdominal pain due to a bloated stomach and constipation. I rarely get quality sleep and often go in and out of the hospital which affects both mental health and job performance.
'Frankenstein chemicals' trump 'forever chemicals'
Oped, FD Flam, Published on 07/07/2023
» Health fads come and go, but drinking more water (and less beer and soda) is one of the few things that's unequivocally good for the human body. It should be as easy as putting a glass under the tap, but what kinds of potentially harmful chemicals lurk there? News that 3M is paying more than US$10 billion (351 billion baht) to clean "forever chemicals" from municipal drinking water isn't helping our confidence.
Climate change is making us sick
Oped, Naveen Rao and Eloise Todd, Published on 27/12/2022
» A day before the latest United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP27) began, a group of global experts convened by The Lancet published a report about the adverse health effects of climate change. Their conclusion was as jarring as it was straightforward: human health is at the mercy of fossil fuels.