freelance science journalist and author
From The Saturday Paper, 18 February 2023: In historical accounts of the 1918 influenza pandemic, references can be found to people experiencing exhaustion, nervous complications, apathy and depression for weeks, even months, after they recovered from infection. And reports of persistent, chronic fatigue-like symptoms have emerged following the major respiratory disease outbreaks of the past … Continue reading Lack of data hinders long Covid response
From The Guardian, 5 November 2022: When studying disease outbreaks, think like a microbe. That’s the lesson that was drummed into Prof Catherine Bennett, chair of epidemiology at Deakin University, when she was undergoing her scientific training, and she’s never forgotten it. “In moving through a community, where are your opportunities as a microbe?” she … Continue reading Welcome to the ‘Pandemicene’: is Australia ready for the next pandemic?
From The Guardian, 16 October 2022: The story of long Covid is just beginning, and no one – not even the experts – knows how it will play out. The “known knowns” are that few, if any, health systems around the world are equipped to cope with the parallel pandemic of long Covid. It will … Continue reading How will long Covid play out over the coming years? Eight experts weigh in
From The Saturday Paper, 9 July 2022: Today, James is feeling about a two out of five. The young lawyer is reasonably articulate on the phone. He might be able to read a single news article today, maybe even go for a short walk. On a “five out of five” day, he can do four … Continue reading Long Covid: After-effect hits up to 400,000 Australians
From The Saturday Paper, 9 July 2022: Today, James is feeling about a two out of five. The young lawyer is reasonably articulate on the phone. He might be able to read a single news article today, maybe even go for a short walk. On a “five out of five” day, he can do four … Continue reading Long Covid: After-effect hits up to 400,000 Australians
From The Medical Republic, 21 March 2022: There was a time before covid, which seems a distant memory now, when the concepts of “immune” and “immunised” seemed relatively straightforward to anyone outside the field of immunology. Either by virtue of childhood infection or vaccination, a person believed that they were now protected from further assault … Continue reading What do we mean by Covid immunity?
From The Medical Republic, 10 March 2022: Covid can develop resistance to the monoclonal antibody that was thought to be “variant-proof”, Australian research suggests. A research letter published in the New England Journal of Medicine reports on four patients with covid who experienced treatment failure with sotrovimab, and were then found to have variants of … Continue reading Sotrovimab-resistant covid ‘could spread’
From The Medical Republic, 2 August 2021: At the start of this year, the covid situation in India was looking relatively good. As the pandemic raged in other parts of the world, India was reporting around 10,000 new cases each day1 – nothing like the hundreds of thousands being diagnosed in the United States. A … Continue reading Delta: a deep dive
From The Scientist, 31 August 2021: hen SARS-CoV-2 first began rampaging around the world, it was thought to primarily affect the respiratory system. It soon became clear that the virus had more far-reaching effects, including on the gastrointestinal system and its bacterial symbionts. This came as no surprise to Siew Ng, a gastroenterologist in the … Continue reading Gut microbiome may help or hinder defenses against SARS-CoV-2
From The Medical Republic, 10 June 2021: “[Society] has placed the workers under conditions in which they can neither retain health nor live long … society knows how injurious such conditions are to the health and the life of the workers, and yet does nothing to improve these conditions. That it knows the consequences of … Continue reading Is this what social murder looks like?
Bianca Nogrady 