Guus Brand A couple of weeks ago, the decentral selection process ended in all medical faculties in the Netherlands. This is a process that I have passed through six years ago myself when I applied for medical school at Radboud University. Thousands of middle school teens apply and join in the selection process, but only 20-25 percent of them actually succeed in entering medical school. The selection is often described as difficult and stressful. So difficult that there is a booming business … [Lees meer...]

Aster Witvliet If you have ever seen an image of the chromosomes (also known as a karyotype) inside a cancer cell, you know that their genetic material can get mixed around to end up looking like a child’s arts and crafts project. A part of chromosome 3 might suddenly be fused to chromosome 14, or chromosome 4 might have acquired a piece of chromosome 5 in the middle. One of the hallmarks of cancer is genomic instability, meaning that cancer cells accumulate DNA mutations and other defects … [Lees meer...]

Minke Holwerda, BSc Biomedical Sciences This October, the Director-General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus of the World Health Organization (WHO) called it a ‘historic moment’, when the WHO officially recommended the use of the first vaccine against malaria in children living in sub-Saharan Africa [1].  Malaria is a disease caused by Plasmodium parasites that are transmitted to humans by Anopheles mosquitoes and is one of the leading causes of death in low-income countries [2, 3]. In … [Lees meer...]

Bloodletting on prescription Yfke Prins, BSc Medicine Much to my surprise, an internist mentioned that the treatment of choice for a patient with polycythemia vera (PV) was bloodletting. I thought I had misunderstood her for a second, but then she repeated her sentence, probably after seeing my puzzled face. She was serious, and, as I discovered that day, bloodletting (also known as phlebotomy) is still applied in the clinic; although, much less frequent than, e.g. during the Middle Ages. … [Lees meer...]