'The DHSC is launching a chickenpox vaccination programme which will protect around half a million children each year. And, from January 2026, eligible children will get an MMRV vaccine to protect against measles, mumps, rubella and chickenpox.'
Report @mirror.co.uk
www.mirror.co.uk/news/health/...

Me three months ago:

NEW: The bipartisan Senate Appropriations Committee has rejected Trump’s proposed $18 billion, 40% cut to the National Institutes of Health budget and endorsed a $400 million increase.

DO NOT GIVE UP! Our advocacy is working. Keep speaking up and calling your elected officials.

Add a new drug, CETP inhibitor, to the ways beyond lifestyle that we can reduce p-tau 217, the key biomarker for risk of Alzheimer’s disease

ir.newamsterdampharma.com/news-release...

#Japan Meteorological Agency has issued a #tsunami warning and advisory for the Pacific coast from #Hokkaido to #Okinawa. The estimate of maximum wave height is now expected to be 3 meter. japannews.yomiuri.co.jp/society/gene...

And I I coined the term Holland plot for early depression GWAS, and I seriously think that we need to use the term Dubai plot for oligogenic large GWAS and Shanghai plot for highly polygenic large GWAS.

Tom Lehrer died today. He was one of the great comedians our culture ever produced. Without Tom, there's no Weird Al, probably no that entire branch of comedy.

He went alone and beat the odds.

youtu.be/frAEmhqdLFs?...

Spot-on from @nixonsimon.bsky.social

Yes - I think the one exception is the first time you study a phenotype as black swans may be found. When that not found (unfortunately they are rare). So suggests standard nested - from initial small core multi-modal, then larger and lighter clinical, then online remote sampling population level.

<big sigh>. As a rule of thumb, if you gather more multi-modal data, you are going to need more samples (patients) rather than less to be confident of results. Importantly you need some sort of credible belief that for the measurements you propose to do you have some hope of the analysis working

1. The pediatric death toll from #flu for 2024-25 continues to climb, with #CDC informed of 5 more deaths last week. That brings the season's total so far to 266, which is only 22 fewer than during the 2009 H1N1 pandemic! Of kids eligible for vax & for whom vax status is known, 90% weren't vaxed.

Answer would appear to be yes! "An overwhelming 82% of those who had taken the GCSE CS confirmed that the additional study of Citizenship topics had increased their democratic literacy and confidence about political issues"

Structural variants are significant contributor to autism. But many SVs & TRs are hard to detect with short reads. Long read sequencing with @pacbio.bsky.social and @nanoporetech.com captures and maps out alot of what short reads miss. So what can LR-WGS tell us about autism? 🧵

Some good news from this week!

- Rough sleeping is decriminalised in England
- Brazils murder rate has dropped 20% in the past 10yrs
- Solar power was Europe's biggest electric production in June
- Huge pride march in Budapest after Hungary outlawed it

There are good things happening. Keep hope.

Yes. IMAO I think a lot of people on especially political podcasts and newspapers have come themselves into a cycle of despair about the world and about Britain's place in it. My anecdotal impression though is that things are improving and that Britain is a country that still has much to offer.

Can rightwing press now please agree on the fact that trying to publicise the locations of current Afghan asylum seekers is a stupid idea. www.thetimes.com/article/7a64...

This is quite a big deal and references the Asset Recovery Incentivisation Scheme (ARIS) that POCA-enabled law enforcement orgs receive to boost their funding - after HMT has taken its cut and victims of crime receive compensation. www.telegraph.co.uk/business/202...

We should be having a debate about how British incompetence put the lives of thousands of Afghans at risk. Instead we're having a debate about 'how many criminals they let in'. Tells you everything you need to know about where we're at as a country inews.co.uk/opinion/tori...

Comparison of different ways of measuring trait polygenicity, and what properties a "measure of polygenicity" should have. Authors have a really useful section on how to interpret deviations between the measures for a specific trait www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Bad news for dev bio research ... it needs animal models. A total ban would utterly devastate science.

Mathematical modeling is NOT a replication of biology, it's an abstraction. It cannot replace experiments!

But, luckily looks like animal research rn can continue as long as modeling is included

This will devastate all of my colleagues that do neuroscience in mice. Drugs don't always translate from mouse to human, But 90% of our genes are shared. They allow recordings and manipulations that cannot be done in humans. We will cede discovery to Europe and China with this unnecessary handicap.

Someone's been up to some quality work here.

Exciting, but wish the hype was dialled back. "This will enable identification & intervention for individuals at high risk of developing common diseases" probably better as "cheap once in lifetime test will nudge many people over & under certain thresholds for interventions.