vivweb01

  The UK's 2025-26 influenza epidemic is now well underway and is taxing the NHS to its limits, as predicted. One additional ‘wild-card’ for this year comes courtesy of the junior doctors (or ‘Residents’ as they now like to call themselves), who decided to strike for yet more pay over what will probably be one of the busiest periods in the run-up to Christmas, and have just voted for an extension to their strike mandate till July 2026. A bold move by the membership who voted for it, you might say, but not one which will earn them many ‘brownie points’ with the rest of us, or with the government. Perhaps more seriously for them, there is strong possibility that they, and they alone, will be blamed for any excess deaths that result of the previous, and any future, strikes. Whether a particularly ‘gung ho’ BMA leadership will be able, or even prepared , to defend them from the consequences of their actions is another matter…. Adverse circumstances aside, this would be a good tim...

Update 15.2.26 : This year marks a relatively rare coincidence of key events in two of the great Abrahamic religions - Christianity and Islam.  Ramadan, the Islamic holy month, and Lent, the Christian festival leading up to Easter, are important periods in the religious calendars which traditionally both involve  period of personal abstinence and reflection. It's no coincidence that the start of both of these periods are dependent on our only astronomical satellite, the Moon, which is by far the brightest object in the night sky and was thus an important determinant in the adoption of the early religious calendars. In the Christian calendar, the date of Easter is determined by the Paschal full moon and falles on the first Sunday thereafter each year. The 'drift' in the lunar calendar as compared with the Gregorian is responsible for its calendar variability, and causes the timing of Easter to vary over a period of over about a month from year to year (March 21-April 25). Le...