An Old Defence Against New Infections: The Open-Air Factor and COVID-19.

Outdoors, the risks of transmission of COVID-19 and many other respiratory infections are low. Several environmental factors are known to reduce the viability of viruses and other infectious pathogens in the air. They include variations in temperature, relative humidity, solar ultraviolet radiation, and dilution effects.

Myopia and daylight in schools: a neglected aspect of public health?

A century ago, it was widely believed that high levels of daylight in classrooms could prevent myopia, and as such, education departments built schools with large windows to try to stop children becoming short-sighted. This practice continued until the 1960s, from which time myopia was believed to be an inherited condition. In the years that followed, less emphasis was placed on preventing myopia.

The open-air treatment of pandemic influenza.

The H1N1 "Spanish flu" outbreak of 1918-1919 was the most devastating pandemic on record, killing between 50 million and 100 million people. Should the next influenza pandemic prove equally virulent, there could be more than 300 million deaths globally. The conventional view is that little could have been done to prevent the H1N1 virus from spreading or to treat those infected; however, there is evidence to the contrary.

A viral aetiology for breast cancer: time to re-examine the postulate.

Despite decades of research, no aetiologic factor(s) for human breast cancer has been identified and the search for a causal agent has all but been abandoned during the past thirty years. Over 60 years ago, it was demonstrated that breast tumours in mice are caused by an oncornavirus, murine mammary tumour virus (MMTV). Whilst many at that time postulated a similar virus might be the causative agent of human breast cancer, genetic evidence was difficult to obtain primarily because of the occurrence of endogenous human retrovirus (HER) sequences within the human genome that share extensive regions of nucleotide homology with MMTV.