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A respected doctor in China called a brutal knife attack that robbed him of his surgical career “a pleasant surprise” because it forced him to reassess his life. Tao Yong, an ophthalmologist, spoke one year after a patient, Cui Zhenguo, stabbed him in the head and arm with a vegetable knife at Beijing’s Chaoyang Hospital, where he is head of ophthalmology. Tao sustained injuries on the back of his head and the neck and stayed in ICU for two weeks. The doctor required surgery to save his hand, and the stabbing was so precise that he is unlikely ever to perform eye surgery again. Two other members of staff were wounded as they tried to stop the attack. “To summarize last year, I can think of

Pediatric services in the US could be overwhelmed by thousands of sick infants and young children – an overlooked group that has a higher risk of serious illness from Covid-19, according to a new study. While children are at a lower risk of fatality from the disease as compared with the elderly, the very young were most at risk of becoming seriously ill, the study said.  It warned the sheer weight of population numbers in the United States meant there was an urgent need to be prepared. The research was led by Elizabeth Pathak, a population health scientist and president of the US think tank Women’s Institute for Independent Social Inquiry, who warned against a sense of complacency about the

The murder of a doctor in Beijing has overshadowed the passage of a law designed to improve basic health care services in China, and has put a spotlight on the problems the law is trying to fix.  The fatal stabbing was the latest in a string of attacks on medical staff by angry patients and their relatives. Tensions are being fueled by a lack of resources and limited services at many medical facilities. In the latest incident, the doctor Yang Wen was stabbed in the neck on Christmas Eve following a row with the relatives of a 95-year-old stroke victim at the Civil Aviation General Hospital in Beijing. She died the following day. Doctors said the patient’s family had dismissed repeated sugge