Stalking Nature's Most Dangerous Beasts

The most dangerous hospital or the most dangerous equation?

BACKGROUND Hospital mortality rates are one of the most frequently selected indicators for measuring the performance of NHS Trusts. A recent article in a national newspaper named the hospital with the highest or lowest mortality in the 2005/6 financial year; a report by the organization Dr Foster Intelligence provided information with regard to the performance of all NHS Trusts in England. ME...

The Most Dangerous Branch

The Most Dangerous Equation

W constitutes a dangerous equation? There are two obvious interpretations: Some equations are dangerous if you know them, and others arc dangerous if you do not. The first category may pose danger because the secrets within its bounds open doors behind which lies terrible peril. The obvious winner in this is Einstein's iconic equation e = nic~, for it provides a measure of the enormous energy h...

Evolving the world's most dangerous animal.

The devastating consequences of malaria are well known but many mysteries remain about its key protagonists, a handful of Anopheles species. New work provides a framework for solving such puzzles, by generation and analysis of whole genome assemblies for 16 Anopheles species, with genomic flexibility a key emergent theme.

Guarding against the most dangerous emerging pathogens.

Control of emerging infectious diseases will be difficult because of the large number of disease-causing organisms that are emerging or could emerge and the great diversity of geographic areas in which emergence can occur. The modern view of the evolution of pathogen virulence--specifically its focus on the tradeoff between costs and benefits to the pathogen from increased host exploitation--al...