Ursula Hofer

Lifeline is coming to London from 28 March – 2 May 2026! Lifeline stars real-life scientists, healthcare workers, and other heroes working to address the #AMR crisis. If you love performing, apply to be in the show! #IDSky

🔗 Apply to be part of Lifeline: bit.ly/4pnViv7

Misinformation is one of the world's biggest threats to public health. And governments are not doing enough to protect us.

Social media companies should be held accountable for spreading harmful misinformation in that same way we hold manufacturers responsible for spreading harmful chemicals.

The genomic surveillance gap: averting the antimicrobial resistance pandemic requires global equity and action The COVID-19 pandemic provided a stark, real-time demonstration of genomic surveillance's power. By sequencing SARS-CoV-2, the global health community tracked viral evolution, identified variants of c...

New comment:

The genomic surveillance gap: averting the antimicrobial resistance pandemic requires global equity and action

www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...

We spend a lot of care and effort on our covers; many editors love working on covers. They have such a symbolic power and are a window into your publication. So, I would like to know who has signed off this cover?

🧐

Is this AI bias in action?

I sometimes joke that I get paid to be judgemental 😉

But it takes time and experience to make good decisions. I can see how it's easier to outsource decisions to peer reviewers if you're lacking in either of these factors (not blaming individuals, workloads, training etc are systemic factors).

Or they try to solve problems we don't have...

Read our December issue!

Featuring testing obeldesivir for COVID-19 therapy, measles transmission patterns in Italy, and single dose of HPV vaccine in Costa Rica.

www.thelancet.com/issue/S1473-...

Investigating a Possible Scammer in Journalism’s AI Era | The Local A suspicious pitch from a freelancer led editor Nicholas Hune-Brown to dig into their past work. By the end, four publications, including The Guardian and Dwell, had removed articles from their sites.

holy crap... @nickhunebrown.bsky.social with some great, important work

figure showing estimated proportion of cases in clusters, for each site. range from 0.04 to 0.93, mean estimate in random effects model is 0.57 [0.46,0.68]

#AMR #Klebsiella cause >100,000 neonatal deaths globally each year.

Our new preprint shows more than half of #Klebsiella pneumoniae neonatal sepsis cases in African and South Asian are nosocomial, acquired through transmission in neonatal units. #WAAW

doi.org/10.1101/2025...

This also applies to crazy letters to the editor... Superficially these can look like legitimate letters with references, sometimes even data and stats. Only on close reading you see it's all made up and incoherent. We have a duty to check each of these. Waste of time.

🌱 New opportunity: We are recruiting a new associate editor for our journal with expertise in viral infections & antiviral therapy. Read our call and apply if you're a good fit! www.cmi-comms.org/article/S295...

⏰ Deadline: 15 Dec 2025

#IDSky #clinmicro #virology #virosky

YouTube video by MicrobeTV TWiV 1270: Clinical update with Dr. Daniel Griffin

Dr. Griffin and Vincent Racaniello record from the ASTMH meeting in Toronto for his weekly clinical update! 👇🔗

@danielgriffinmdphd.bsky.social

Epidemiological and virological update on the emerging SARS-CoV-2 variant BA.3.2 The constant emergence of novel SARS-CoV-2 variants has driven the COVID-19 pandemic and sustains the current endemic. Saltation variants, such as BA.2.86,1 encode highly mutated spike (S) proteins th...

Epidemiological and virological update on the emerging SARS-CoV-2 variant BA.3.2 - The Lancet Infectious Diseases www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...

Clinical Trials Affected by Research Grant Terminations at the National Institutes of Health This cross-sectional study summarizes the number of trials with terminated grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and calculates the proportion of affected trials among those with previou...

Important new analysis identifying the scope of clinical trials disrupted because of NIH shenanigans.

> 74 thousand trial participants affected

jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...

1/4

View from the millennium bridge towards tower bridge, blue sky, Thames at high tide.

London can be beautiful.

Post-tuberculosis lung disease: a case definition for use in research studies Despite growing awareness of the substantial burden of long-term pulmonary impairment among tuberculosis survivors, marked variability in how post-tuberculosis lung disease is defined across research ...

Post-TB lung disease - the impact of TB on patients does not end with the course of antibiotics, characterised by substantial long-term pulmonary impairment.

Proposed case definition to support assessments and interventions in research studies 👇

#TBSky #IDSky @thelancetinfdis.bsky.social

Communicable E40: AMR in conflict and crisis zones It’s World AMR Awareness Week (WAAW) and we have prepared a special...

🎙️ Just published: Communicable E40: AMR in conflict and crisis zones

Hosted by Nav Narayanan & Thomas Tängdén

w/ invited guests Aula Abbara (UK), Guido Granata (Italy), Tuomas Aro (Finland)

Listen on #Communicable:

#IDSky #Clinmicro #WAAW2025 #AMR @taescmid.bsky.social

Misinformation around paracetamol use in pregnancy When US President Donald Trump cautioned pregnant women against taking paracetamol (acetaminophen in the USA) during a September 2025 press briefing, claiming the drug increases the risk of autism in ...

News just published in @lancetobgyn-wh.bsky.social on misinformation surrounding #paracetamol use in #pregnancy.

Read it here: www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...

#obgynsky #womenshealth #medsky

Proportion of participations made by men (yellow) and women (purple) according to various session and conference characteristics, including conference type, gender of the first intervenor, moderators' gender, speakers' gender, type of participation (comment vs. question), and conference gender attendance (>50% women). Percentages represent the share of each gender among total participations within each category. Dotted lign represents the global proportion of women attendees at conference. Men over represented in questions/comments across the board

Gender differences in audience participation at infectious disease & microbiology conferences: a prospective observational study

@sarah-delliere.bsky.social #IDSky

Men overrepresented among audience participants during ID /micro meetings

www.clinicalmicrobiologyandinfection.org/article/S119...

So sponges are the original cool aunties...

Nice work!

Now I want a sweatshirt like that...

Carriage of extended-spectrum β-lactamase–producing Enterobacterales among healthy adults: a cohort study in Finland Despite increasing antimicrobial resistance (AMR) in clinical samples in high-income countries, data on healthy community dwellers remains limited. We explored the prevalence and types of extended-spe...

📣 How many healthy people in a high-income, low-resistance country will be #ESBL carriers? In this prospective cohort of >700 adults with no at-risk travel history, whole genome sequencing showed 5% prevalence. It was all #Ecoli.

#IDSky #clinmicro #MedSky #OA

www.cmi-comms.org/article/S295...

New malaria drug could be a life-saver as the standard drug shows signs of weakness The best drug to fight malaria is facing increased resistance from the parasites it fights. Now there's an alternative in the pipeline and it looks promising.

New malaria drug could be a life-saver : Goats and Soda

www.npr.org/sections/goa...

Still some way to go for mpox RAT; sensitivity not quite there yet, in particular in children and early in the disease course.

Heading to @astmh.bsky.social tomorrow?

Join us at 11:30 am for our symposium, “Mpox Without Borders: Global Trends, Breakthroughs & Preparedness.”

Honored to co-chair with my colleague & friend Dr. Placide Mbala, with an all-star panel of experts.

You don’t want to miss this!
#ASTMH2025

Editors in the wild!

Financial incentives to improve uptake of partner treatment for sexually transmitted infections in antenatal care: a cluster randomised trial in Zimbabwe Financial incentives did not address barriers to index participants informing partners, and ultimately did not improve partner attendance for STI treatment. Multifaceted packages addressing barriers f...

Partner notification is a key part of STI care but uptake in many LMIC settings is low.

Our RCT in Zimbabwe tried to improve uptake via financial incentives.

Results out in Lancet Global Health.

tl;dr Answer was no. Possibly as incentive only averted indirect costs of care & that wasn't enough.

Manuscript Submissions Are Up! That’s Good, Right? - The Scholarly Kitchen Publishers have led themselves into a mess by focusing on rising submissions as a positive indicator of journal performance.

"The time has come to close the floodgates and require that authors demonstrate their commitment to quality science before we let them in the door."

Interesting discussion.

My hunch is that the worst fraudulent influencers are probably the ones with degrees, misusing the legitimacy a degree gives them.