2020 saw the world battling the most destructive pandemic seen in a hundred years. The SARS CoV-2 coronavirus had jumped from bats to humans. Now, at least three new variants of the virus (from UK, South Africa and Brazil) have emerged with concern. Just when we had vaccine victory in…

Widespread pandemics have hit civilisation about once every 80 years or so since ancient times. The first recorded pandemic, the Plague of Athens, occurred around 426 BCE. In December 2019, as if to mark the centenary of the devastating 1918 Flu, a ‘pneumonia of unknown origin’ emerged in Central China. …

Two Johns Hopkins Public Health Professors of Immunology and Infectious Diseases, Arturo Casadevall and Liise-anne Pirofski, have proposed a relatively low cost way to contain COVID-19. The method has a history of effectiveness in other viral diseases and uses the antibodies from recovered patients. …

Kris Vette was Border Controller for New Zealand’s H1N1 (Swine Flu) Pandemic response in 2009. Previously he managed General Medicine and Infectious Diseases at St Georges Hospital in London during the 2003 SARS outbreak. …

The mechanism for life on earth is so simple and so spontaneous that it is both hard to believe that it could have happened (how could it be that simple?) and at the same time, hard to believe that it could not have happened many times before in the universe. Yet that code that controls the expression of life can sometimes go wrong. It then drives the expression of disease. This article begins a series that explores recent discoveries in genomic science that now have the potential to cure patients of disease with a single injection.

Part I gave an understanding of the complexity of the world, technology and social constructs that surround us. Part II explored how we must avoid indepth planning if we are in dynamic settings. Part III is about practical application. …

Part I discussed the world that we now live in. It is complex, ever changing and uncertain. To succeed in such an environment, one needs to understand it. Part II explores how we must avoid indepth planning if we are in dynamic settings. We need to develop a working model…

Previously I have discussed ‘Lessons for Winning in the Networked Age’, using learning from the military strategist John Boyd to help organisations think about their orientation, decisions and actions in an age of rapidly evolving connection. …

Remember a blockchain is a network made up of ‘nodes’ (a computer or device with a microprocessor). Across that network of nodes, a common, synchronised, identical set of data is guaranteed. The process used to validate and ‘lock down’ that data into a block is called ‘consensus’. There are different…