Merlin Young

It’s Duan Wu (Dragon Boat Day - 端午节) again, this year falling today (on the 19th of June) – and intriguingly it’s also falling the nearest we can remember it to midsummer. The best day for harvesting mugwort for moxa In respect of Traditional East Asian Medicine there’s a long history of this Duan Wu day being the best day in the year for collecting mugwort for medicinal or therapeutic purposes. It’s certainly not the only tradition associated with Duan Wu, and what's more it’s uncertain when...

Every year World TB Day falls on March 24 th . On this date 144 years ago the German immunologist Robert Koch first demonstrated the existence of the TB bacterium. At the same time he showed how to identify it in a TB patient with active disease – through so-called ‘sputum microscopy’. Sputum microscopy actually isn’t a very reliable or sensitive diagnostic because it requires a good dollop of hawked up sputum from the patient – and in many TB cases this is really difficult to manage...

Each year we offer our analysis of the WHO’s Global TB report soon after it gets published. This year it’s appeared a little later than usual which already suggested to us that it might contain material that’s been more carefully reviewed than usual for the purposes of political expediencies, and after considering the Report’s contents we believe that this is probably the case. So, because some particular aspects of the Report are reported but are somewhat muted in the way they are messaged...