Later on this week, I’ll be doing a Journal Club on Journal Clubs (on Weds 21st at 1500 UK time – register here)! The aim of this Journal Club is to provide a bit of a ‘how-to’ guide on identifying and critically analysing good studies. Clearly, the definition of a “good” study will very much depend on your point of view and your interests. For example, a very well designed and conducted study in one journal may be of far less interest to you than a less well designed and / or conducted study on a more relevant topic. I picked up this BMJ Evidence Based Medicine article on Journal Clubs from 2017, which I’ve suggested as reading material before the Journal Club.
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Genetic susceptibility for rotavirus infection
Each week our PhD students have their own Journal Club. Apparently they recently developed an interest in http://www.reflectionsipc and asked whether I was interested in getting their input. What a great idea, I thought, and here is the first one. Josephine van Dongen discussed a Scientific Reports paper on acute gastroenteritis (AGE) due to rotavirus. A global burden among children, but it can be prevented effectively by vaccination (still not recommended in our country!). Rotavirus discriminates: if your genes encode your cells to have a “secretor status” or being “Lewis positive” your infection risk increases (there even is a meta-analysis, for those still in doubt). And you are more likely to have these genotypes (at least secretor) if you’re Asian. Whether genotypes also predispose for more severe infection is unknown, and that’s what the study was about. Continue reading
Reflections on Infection Prevention and Control 