On the UN's International Day of Women and Girls in Science, we hear from young researchers at Warwick and ask them about their hopes for their research and the importance of equality in their chosen field.
Vaccination is routine in Britain and for most the public health programmes which go alongside them are about as interesting as the sewage system. And then came Covid. Since we all now (apparently) need to be experts here’s four things you might not know about vaccines and vaccination from Dr Gareth Millward from the Centre for the History of Medicine at the University of Warwick.
The news that many of the pandemic restrictions we have been learning to live with in the UK over the last nine months will be lifted for five days over Christmas will delight some, but it may not be good news for everyone, explains Professor Sarah Stewart Brown, expert in public health and wellbeing from Warwick Medical School.
The UK is far from free of the Corona virus. So why are some people taking the risk of COVID-19 less seriously now? Dr Kieran File from the University of Warwick's Department of Linguistics thinks some government messaging could be lulling us into a false sense of security.
If it really were true that reduced social-distance measures can give the UK all the expected economic and social benefits without raising the risks, why weren’t they introduced weeks ago, asks Professor Graham Loomes from WBS.
While the pandemic is just temporary, plastic pollution will be long lasting, says Dr Fengwei Xie from WMG, University of Warwick.
It’s not surprising that some families find that tensions grow in close quarters. Families are having to find ways of living together that they are entirely unused to, when many of their usual ways of coping have been taken away says Professor Sarah Stewart-Brown from Warwick Medical School.
Mindfulness is often described as a state of being where our awareness is focused on the present-moment flow of experience without commentary, analysis or judgement. In this state the mind has less chance to wander and worry about other things, explains Dean Howes from Warwick's Centre for Lifelong Learning.
Life in lockdown may not last forever but Bill Gates is probably right in saying we will not return to normal until a vaccine has been rolled out worldwide. This could be many months, if not years away. In the meantime, we provide supportive treatment to the most severely affected patients and look into our arsenal of existing drugs to treat COVID-19, explains Dr Ayfer Ali from WBS.
“As the COVID-19 pandemic wreaks havoc across the world, the alarm has been sounded in prisons too”, the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative reported early in April. It wasn’t wrong. Jails are high-risk environments for disease, where pathogens are easily transmitted.
