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Many of us will not even realise that March is Endometriosis Awareness Month. This condition is pervasive as it affects 10% of women (or 1.5 million people in the UK) and yet bizarrely takes an average of seven to eleven years to diagnose. In the meantime people are offered little or no support for either the physiological or physical trauma that it generates.

A Healthy Diet. The latest piece of research regarding this matter is by the American Heart Association proves that eating about five daily servings of fruits and vegetables, in which 2 are fruit and 3 are vegetables, appears to be the optimal required for a longer life.

The NaV1.7 Gene. Gene therapy for chronic pain could offer huge benefits and potential because it would deliver a safer, non-addictive alternative to opioids. Remarkably this now appears to be theoretically possible (at least in animal-based models).

The remains of ‘Little Foot’ were discovered by University of the Witwatersrand paleoanthropologist Ron Clarke who unearthed the fossil in the 1990s. In June 2019 in great secrecy ‘Little Foot’ was transported to the UK to be examined in microscopic detail using the ‘Diamond Light Source’ at the national synchrotron facility in the UK.

A key scientific holy grail has been to accurately predict and understand how proteins fold and tangle themselves into the shapes that hold the key to how they carry out their vital functions (like Watson and Crick’s double helix). Even working out the shape of just one requires expensive equipment and can take years. Now an Artificial Intelligence program called AlphaFold appears to have cracked the problem.

Many more people will die in Africa from malaria than COVID-19 in 2021. Malaria killed 409 000 people in 2019 and 411 000 in 2018, most of them babies and toddlers in sub-Saharan Africa.  MultiMalVax (short for Multiple Malaria Vaccine) is a pan-European project that is addressing shortcomings in the fight against malaria

COVID-19 has stimulated our surveillance of any other possible future threats to our well-being. As we wage war against viruses and bacteria there is also a third organism which is  emerging. Scientific research now strongly suggests that fungi are developing genetic mutations that give them resistance to our key anti-fungal medications.

The South African variant emerged after the first epidemic wave in a heavily infected metropolitan area, Nelson Mandela Bay, located on the coast of the Eastern Cape Province. We now know that B.1.351 is characterised by eight mutations in its spike protein, including three at important places in the receptor-binding domain (K417N, E484K and N501Y) that may influence how it binds to receptors and infects human cells.