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Health Check: 12/10/2009

12/10/2009

BBC World Service - Health Check, 12/10/2009

Clever women make better wives; Famous hypochondriacs; Public health trials.

Why educated women help their partners to live longer; Famous hypochondriacs; What are the ethics of running health trials in the developing world; A look at the Nobel prize for medicine winner.

New research from Sweden suggests that the more education a woman has, the less likely her partner is to die early.  Professor Robert Erikson from Stockholm University tells Claudia Hammond why clever women make better wives.

What do Charles Darwin, pianist Glenn Gould and pop artist Andy Warhol all have in common?  The answer is that they were all terrified of becoming ill.  Brian Dillon, author of Tormented Hope, discusses his study of famous hypochondriacs.  (Tormented Hope, Nine Hypochondriac Lives is published by Penguin Books.)

Dr David Osrin, is a member of the Towards 4+5, a consortium supported by the UK Department for International Development which brings together researchers who are trying to improve the health of children and mothers (Millennium Development Goals 4 and 5), and a partnership for real world research on mother and child health, supported by The Wellcome Trust.  Dr Osrin runs public health schemes to improve the survival rates of mothers and babies, and talks about the ethical issues of trialling new schemes in the developing world.

And the BBC’s Geoff Watts is in the studio to talk about the latest winners of the Nobel Prize for Medicine, Elizabeth Blackburn, Carol Greider and Jack Szostak, who discovered how the body protects the chromosomes that contain the genes from fraying at the ends. It’s hoped this knowledge could help lead to a cure for cancer.

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