Since the World Health Organisation declared  COVID-19 a pandemic , progress has been made on testing, tracing and treating people infected with the virus, and industries have developed  several vaccines in a record time.

Many of the prototypes that have made the history of biorobotics worldwide are visible in a showcase set up at The BioRobotics Institute of the Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies in Pontedera, near Pisa, Italy.

How would you like a fancy Christmas garment embedded with sensors to measure your body movements? Or a reindeer hat that moves its horns when your heart beats faster? Don’t worry if you’re not a fan of winter festivities, because the technology behind the next generation of smart clothes is for everyone and can be woven into anything we wear.

Around 700,000 people are killed by antibiotic resistant infections in the world every year, estimates say. Antimicrobials are increasingly overused and misused, while some organisms are becoming more resistant to antibiotics.

Around the world more and more babies are born preterm, according to a WHO report from 2012. Despite medical advances, very small preterm infants may suffer from various complications and diseases, or even die .

Talking or reading. Texting a message or listening. The dilemma of choosing between various tasks is not an invention of the modern information age. Humans and all vertebrates have to prioritise their actions.

A major challenge in combatting malaria is to develop effective yet sustainable mosquito repellents.  Now, the ENAROMaTIC project, a European effort to reduce the spread of malaria completed in 2012, may have done just that.

Health claims and symbols on food products could improve public health. At least, that is according to consumer researchers. But how they can best do that as effectively as possible is still a mystery.

The International Agency for Research on Cancer ( IARC ) has produced a handbook detailing the scientific evidence on tobacco pricing and tobacco control entitled: Effectiveness of Tax and Price Policies for Tobacco Control .

Smoking is the largest single cause of preventable premature death and disease , accounting for some 650,000 premature deaths each year in the European Union, according to official EU statistics.

The so-called hygiene hypothesis claims young children need to get in contact with a number of relatively benign pathogens to develop a robust immune system .

Are allergies and so-called autoimmune diseases, like type 1 diabetes, likely to be caused by a lack of exposure to relatively benign pathogens in early childhood? This theory is referred to as the hygiene hypothesis.

These were introduced in the wake of the mad cow disease scandal in the 90s'. Now, horse meat sold as beef in minced meat products and ready-made meals has revealed that traceability can only do so much for consumer reassurance.

youris.com talks to Clare Hall, social science researcher at the Scottish Agricultural College in Edinburgh, UK, about the best ways to effectively inform the public about food safety in relation to pathogens responsible for foodborne diseases.

Medical experts pointed to non-infectious diseases—diabetes, cancer and heart disease— as a ticking time bomb at a recent meeting of health experts at the European Health Forum in Gastein, Austria.

Martin McKee recently expressed his views at the 2012 European Health Forum in Bad Gastein, Austria. Can we measure the impact of austerity on people’s health? The human cost of austerity has been largely invisible because of lack of data.