Vicious Times

Long Waiting Times for Elective Hospital Care – Breaking the Vicious Circle by Abandoning Prioritisation

Background Policies assigning low-priority patients treatment delays for care, in order to make room for patients of higher priority arriving later, are common in secondary healthcare services today. Alternatively, each new patient could be granted the first available appointment. We aimed to investigate whether prioritisation can be part of the reason why waiting times for care are often...

Families of Vicious Walkers

We consider a generalisation of the vicious walker problem in which N random walkers in R are grouped into p families. Using field-theoretic renormalisation group methods we calculate the asymptotic behaviour of the probability that no pairs of walkers from different families have met up to time t. For d > 2, this is constant, but for d < 2 it decays as a power t, which we compute to O(ε) in an...

Vicious Chronicles of Virology

Presented in this article, aimed at both the virologists and non-virologists among the readers, are the dark episodes of virology. These anecdotes overshadow, in comparison, the effects of Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bomb explosions, both in impact and magnitude. Needless-tosay, the episodes listed here involve viruses and may represent re-recording of largest outbreaks of some viral infectio...

Vicious Circles in Disease

Breaking a vicious cycle.

Despite prodigious advances in tumor biology research, few tumor-biomarker tests have been adopted as standard clinical practice. This lack of reliable tests stems from a vicious cycle of undervaluation, resulting from inconsistent regulatory standards and reimbursement, as well as insufficient investment in research and development, scrutiny of biomarker publications by journals, and evidence ...