Gavin Ritchie

More than a decade ago, we first posted on public health interventions proposed or implemented by the Scottish Government. A key focus area from those initiatives, alcohol mortality, has recently reported status, and the news does not seem encouraging. Despite the introduction of a minimum unit price (MUP) for alcohol in 2018, Scottish alcohol deaths reached a new high in 2024.

How should we describe a lifestyle change that doubles our likelihood of suffering a major traffic accident? Oddly,  evidence from Scotland suggests the answer is "worth making". Let me explain.

In criminal investigation, it is well known that passing time obscures the facts, making what happened more difficult to discern. Eventually, the case turns cold - unlikely to be solved unless we discover new evidence. In some ways for over a century, epidemiologists have been dealing with just such a cold case, picking through the rubble of the 1918 Influenza pandemic and trying to make sense of what they find. But as we will see, debate continues in a number of areas.

This blog discusses misinformation - including deliberate disinformation - during the SARS-COV-2 pandemic. I won't link directly to anti-vaccine content to avoid adding search-engine credibility to material best left unfound.

That there is "no substitute for experience" is a truism, and one that is very tempting to apply wholesale to human immunity. Indeed, we previously touched upon an particular feature of the 1918 Spanish Flu outbreak, the so-called "W-shaped" mortality impact resulting in disproportionate fatalities amongst younger adults in the 20-40 range.

A large part of our service has traditionally revolved around Dedicated Servers — parallelised instances of our applications running on multi-threaded platforms for a single license holder (in contrast our shared servers offer single-thread performance in a multi-tenant way to multiple license holders, a model that is suitable for only the least demanding use-cases).