The first time we landed in Delhi after our long-haul leg from London I felt the pull of exotic India and wished I was going out into the traffic-filled, smog-drenched yet endlessly intriguing streets of the city. The second time, more than eight hours later, it was the last place I wanted to be. Our short-hop two-hour flight to Kathmandu had turned into a working day’s worth of aimless circling and to-ing and fro-ing, only to end up right back where we’d started, in Delhi’s terminal 3, with its sweeps of dull orange, geometric-patterned carpet, like an Escher painting gone wrong. (more…)
Category: Asia
Xtreme Everest – Going to Extremes to Understand Critical Illness
Intensive care represents the knife edge between life and death and extreme illnesses require cutting edge research to provide solutions. Despite intensive care being one of the most sophisticated areas of hospital care, hypoxia – lack of oxygen reaching the body’s vital organs – is a common problem for patients in an intensive care unit. Approximately 80% of people in intensive care suffer hypoxia and until this can be controlled they can’t be treated effectively. For both scientific and ethical reasons it’s difficult to conduct research on critical care patients. In response to this, Xtreme Everest, a not-for-profit organisation led by doctors and scientists from University College London Hospital, University of Southampton and Duke University in the US, is conducting an innovative research project which uses the shortage of oxygen experienced at high altitudes to simulate the hypoxia that affects people in intensive care. (more…)
Gooster on the Loose 