Economics professor David Blanchflower, in his capacity as a member of the Monetary Policy Committee of the Bank of England, has found that the Scottish people are more likely than their peers in the United Kingdom to be unhealthy, unhappy and suicidal. He announced that "2.2 percent of Scottish people agreed they were depressed, had bad nerves or suffered anxiety, compared with 1.7 percent across Britain as a whole," the Bloomberg news service reported. Blanchflower attributed the trend to "bad diets, smoking and alcohol," and other factors. "It turns out that they have high rates of obesity, diabetes, accidental death, blood disease, [and] heart disease," he told Bloomberg.
Enterovirus 71, a member of a family of viruses that also includes poliovirus, should factor into global plans to respond to major epidemics, Dr. John Modlin, professor and chairman of pediatrics at Dartmouth Medical School, concluded in an article in the March 22 edition of the New England Journal of Medicine. "The recent experience with enterovirus 71 epidemic disease also invokes a sense of deja vu for those familiar with the history of poliomyelitis," Modlin wrote. "If history is any guide, it would also be foolish not to be better prepared than we are now. It would be prudent to add enterovirus 71 to the list of emerging infections that threaten us, develop a plan to respond to an outbreak, and take the first steps toward developing a vaccine."
Innovation is becoming a prominent element of the corporate agenda, said Vijay Govindarajan, professor of international business and director of the Center for Global Leadership at the Tuck School of Business in the March 28 edition of BusinessWeek. In an interview with Marshall Goldsmith, Govindarajan explains that large companies will have a hard time keeping up with small startups in terms of innovation, but that they "have advantages that independent entrepreneurs can only dream of: assets like brands, customer relationships, expertise, manufacturing capacity, and more," he said. The biggest impediment to innovation, Govindarajan argued, is that companies "underestimate just how hard it is for an organization to shake itself loose from its past."
