Calin lives in the Romanian city of Cluj. He suffers from melanoma and his mother died from colorectal cancer, aged 58. “It took two months just for a colonoscopy,” he recalls.

When Salvatore was diagnosed with brain cancer, he made headlines all over the world . International outlets like CNN and the BBC presented him as “the hacker who decrypted his medical records to create his open-source therapy”.

As future covid-19 prevalence varies across time, health authorities must revolutionise testing to see if people are infected.

Viruses do not evolve with the purpose of being more or less infectious or dangerous: it is just natural selection at work. New random variants occur continuously and most of them are neutral or make the virus less infectious.

There is still no treatment that can reverse the effects of Parkinson’s disease , a condition estimated to affect  10 million people  worldwide.

The spread of cancer cells to other parts of the body, known as metastasis , is the main cause of cancer-related deaths. According to the US National Cancer Institute, in 2018 there were 9.

If aliens were to examine a human, they would think we were just slavish organisms designed to feed microbes and carry them around. Our bodies contain ten times more bacteria than cells , and there are an estimated 3.

Between 30 and 40 million people in Europe suffer from rare diseases —many of them children. As most of these diseases have genetic origins, gene therapy is a major hope for their future cure .

We age in two ways. There is the ageing we count by clock and calendar. And then there is biological ageing. The latter is written into our genes. But, it is also influenced by our lifestyle and history.

Millions of people undergo surgery each year. Many of them suffer from moderate to severe pain afterwards. This post-operative pain may impede recovery or even lead on into chronic pain .

About 20 million Europeans are subject to food allergies. Now scientists are looking at these allergies in new ways. It involves the food industry in its work and pays special attention to the link between early diets and allergy in later life .

Lysosomes are membrane-bound organelles found in most animal cells. They are responsible for treating cellular waste. Genetic mutations in lysosomal enzymes lead to lysosome malfunction and waste accumulation.

Global warming is leading to an increase in mosquito-borne diseases such as malaria . It is considered the plague of developing countries. According to the World Health Organisation , it is responsible for one child death every minute.

New advances related to new uses of imaging technologies could help scientists uncover the brain’s mysteries.

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.

A treatment to directly fight Huntington’s disease could finally be in sight . Until now, therapies for this severely debilitating genetic disorder have only focused on alleviating physical and psychiatric symptoms.

With a drop of blood and some laboratory analyses, doctors have been able to tell patients whether they suffer from diabetes or some sort of cancer.

Whooping cough and bronchiolitis are respiratory infections frequently affecting young children. In particular, infants under three months are very sensitive to these illnesses, which can lead to death in the most severe cases .

In Europe, whooping cough ( Pertussis ) is in the increase, with more than 20.000 cases reported annually . Often infants fall victim to the disease, where it can be life-threatening.

Patients affected by a bacterial infection can usually be treated with an antibiotic. But sometimes a resistant bacterial strain is causing the infection .