Media Monitoring: 3rd – 9th April

The WHO published its first-ever reports addressing the critical lack of medicines and diagnostic tools for invasive fungal diseases, showing the urgent need for innovative research and development (R&D) to close these gaps.
Fungal diseases are an increasing public health concern, with common infections – such as candida, which causes oral and vaginal thrush – growing increasingly resistant to treatment.
These infections disproportionately impact severely ill patients and those with weakened immune systems, including individuals undergoing cancer chemotherapy, living with HIV, and who have had organ transplants.

Just 1 in 5 people (21%) in 2024 said they were satisfied with the way the NHS runs.
6 in 10 people (59%) said they were ‘very’ or ‘quite’ dissatisfied with the NHS in 2024, a sharp rise from 52% in 2023.
This is the highest level of dissatisfaction with the health service since the British Social Attitudes (BSA) survey began in 1983.

Researchers have developed a blood test for patients with thinking and memory problems to check if they have Alzheimer’s and to see how far it has progressed.
The team behind the work say the test could help medics decide which drugs would be most suitable for patients.
Plaques of a protein called amyloid beta and the formation of tangles of another protein called tau in the brain are considered hallmarks of Alzheimer’s disease.

Last week, the WHO convened more than 15 countries and over 20 regional health agencies, health emergency networks and other partners to test, for the first time, a new global coordination mechanism for health emergencies.
The two-day simulation, Exercise Polaris, tested WHO’s Global Health Emergency Corps (GHEC), a framework designed to strengthen countries’ emergency workforce, coordinate the deployment of surge teams and experts, and enhance collaboration between countries.
The exercise simulated an outbreak of a fictional virus spreading across the world.

A Greater Manchester hospital has become the first in the UK to use a new laboratory system designed to reduce test result waiting times.
Royal Oldham Hospital’s FlexLab X can process up to 15,525 blood test tubes every hour.
The hospital said this would massively speed up diagnosis times for patients. There is only one other FlexLab machine in a hospital anywhere in the world.

The Wellcome Trust has released this report which sets out a vision for science to be embedded at the heart of the UK National Health Service (NHS). It examines the current context of the research ecosystem and outlines recommendations to achieve the vision.