For how we live.
A government-funded test-negative study put effectiveness at 86% against emergency visits and 88% against intensive care, though the smallest subgroups carried wide confidence intervals.
A Shionogi-funded randomised trial found that giving household contacts a five-day course dropped the rate of symptomatic Covid from 9.0% to 2.9%, with no severe cases in either group.
Across 41 hospitals in 19 Asian countries, ACORN-HAI found 73.7% of severe bloodstream and ventilator infections were drug-resistant, and 37.7% of those patients died within 28 days.
Colds come from viruses, not cold air. But chilling the body and breathing cold air can blunt the nose's antiviral defences enough to tip a lurking infection into symptoms.
On ten monitored flights, passengers away from a sick traveller faced low transmission risk, and every air sample tested negative for common viruses. Measles is the exception that proves the rule.
Cold sores heal on their own in about a week, and nothing clears the virus for good. Creams and pills shave hours to roughly a day off an episode — but only if started at the first tingle.
It takes only a handful of viral particles to infect you, it shrugs off alcohol hand gel, and it survives on surfaces for days. That biology explains why the effective defences are the unglamorous ones.
The honest answer is that neither wins outright. Alcohol gel is faster and is the default in hospitals — but it misses a handful of important germs that only soap and water remove.
The more contagious a disease, the more of a population must be immune to stop it spreading. Measles sets the bar near 95%. It is not one figure but a range that depends on where you are.
The uncomfortable answer from the studies is that symptoms overlap too much to be sure without a test — and that most of what genuinely helps is prevention, not a cure.
Sepsis is the body's own response to an infection turning against its organs. It kills an estimated 11 million people a year, and the evidence keeps pointing to how fast it is caught and treated.
A 100-child randomized trial in Uganda found a cheap supplement lowered infection rates on top of standard hydroxyurea therapy — though the authors say it needs a bigger trial before it changes practice.
Most women have a recurrence within a year of standard treatment. A 2025 trial stopped early once treating a woman alone proved inferior to treating her and her male partner together.
Weekly fluconazole kept most women free of thrush during treatment, yet by 12 months, six months after stopping, the advantage had narrowed sharply. A newer drug shows more durable suppression.
In the 240-woman ALTAR trial, methenamine hippurate was non-inferior to standard low-dose antibiotic prophylaxis over a year. Most other non-antibiotic prevention strategies still rest on weak evidence.
In 328 patients with third-generation cephalosporin-resistant gut bacteria in the blood, an old, narrow-spectrum antibiotic met its non-inferiority mark, offering a way to spare carbapenems.
In 59 facilities across Malawi and Uganda where 431,394 women gave birth, the APT-Sepsis programme reduced infection-related death, near-miss events and severe illness from 1.9% to 1.4%.