👋 Happy Friday. Shhh, Shhh. It’s okay. I know you’ve been quietly weeping because you haven’t had Med news all week. We’re back to make things okay again.

Here’s what we’ve got:

• 💉 Childhood Vaccines: The Latest Offender in the Ongoing SCANG Scandal

• ✊ Patience Is for Saints, Not Strikes: BMA Open Ballots for Industrial Action

• 💊 Antibiotics at Birth Blunt Vaccines Later. But What’s Really Going On?

• 🐍 200 Snakes Bites Later. We Have A New Antivenom

• #TheMoreYouKnow: Other Top Stories of The Week

GUIDELINE CHANGES

Childhood Vaccines: The Latest Offender in the Ongoing SCANG Scandal

Are you a medical student or doctor? You’ve probably been the victim of SCANG fraud and you don’t even know it…

That’s right. Sudden Change Affecting National Guidelines.

Since the dawn of the NHS, students and doctors have spent hours, days and months committing national guidelines to memory. Pneumothorax. ALS. Cervical screening. Developmental milestones.

Physical and emotional damage caused as a direct result of not knowing how many bricks an infant can stack at 15 months. After smashing again(<1min) and again(<1min) on Anki, it finally goes in. 

Then. Poof. They change the damn guidelines. All that hard work. Gone.

Anki decks become archaeological artifacts. Clinical notes? Useless. OSCE prep? A relic of the past.

Some victims report numbness in the soul, compulsive urges to reprint laminated flowcharts, and brief hallucinations involving NICE guideline PDFs. 

The latest offender: Childhood immunisation schedules. 

NHS England and the Gov have made a joint letter outlining the many, many changes to when to give the many many vaccines a child should have growing up. These changes will affect kids born after 1st July 2024.

There are reasons for the changes but I won't bore you with the details.

Here’s the updated timeline:

2 months: 6 in 1, MenB(1st dose)
3 months: 6 in 1, MenB(2nd dose), Rotavirus(1st dose)
4 months: 6 in 1, PCV13(1st dose)
1 year: MMR(1st dose), MenB(booster), PCV13(booster)
18 months: 6 in 1(new 4th dose), MMR(2nd dose)
3-4 years: Pre-school booster
12-14 years: HPV 1 and 2, Teenage booster and MenACWY

If you or a loved one have suffered from chronic exposure to shifting national guidance, we understand.
We’re here for you.
You may be entitled to… nothing at all.
But you’re not alone 🫶

This is SCANG. And it’s very real.

NHS NEWS

Patience Is for Saints, Not Strikes: BMA Open Ballots for Industrial Action

They say patience is a virtue. Well…moral excellence is overrated. Just ask Matt Hancock. Affairs and COVID scandals didn’t stop him from bagging a sweet salary on I’m A Celeb.

The BMA’s patience with the government has run out. They have called for ballots to decide of strike action going on from the 27th May to 7th July

A little throwback:

In last year's general election the gov and BMA agreed to a pay-rise of 22.3%. Whilst a step in the right direction, doctors still feel shortchanged. Resident doctor wages are still 20% less than the rate in real terms in 2008. 

So in March 2025, a formal review from the DDRB (Review Body on Doctors' and Dentists' Remuneration) was requested. You would think this would be pretty speedy, considering this is their only job. But no. They’re slow. So slow that after a month of no progress, the BMA formally wrote to Wes Streeting. In short, saying they have 4 days to get their act together, or else…

3 weeks later they did not get their act together. So ballots for industrial actions were confirmed. With the rally cry “No doctor today is worth less than they were 17 years ago.”(facts), the BMA have made their statement. They have striked before and they aren’t afraid to strike again!

In response to the recent decisions, the gov and health secretary have said hold your horses guys, we haven’t even told you the pay deal yet.

Streeting told Times Radio: “Firstly, it’s disappointing that the ballot for strike action is going out before they’ve received their pay offer”, He’s stated that he thinks the ballot is both “unnecessary” and “premature”. 

At the same time he’s said what the BMA are asking for is a bit too much:

 “What they’re actually asking for in terms of full pay restoration… I met with them last week, and I said to them: ‘In all honesty, asking for around RPI plus 8% or 9% – I can’t honestly say we’ll be able to deliver that year-on-year’.

Blah blah blah. To you and I, all that matters is that the polls open at the end of the month. If you’re a BMA member, make sure to cast your vote.

RESEARCH UPDATE

Antibiotics at Birth Blunt Vaccines Later. But What’s Really Going On?

Infants are great. Until they’re not. Until they get sick. There is nothing worse than a sick baby.

The crying, the vomiting…the crying. No sleep. Pure stress. This time though, baby is really sick. Nurofen isn’t working. Turns out the little tyke needed IV antibiotics. Thankfully, everything turned out okay.

Actually now that I think of it, there is something worse than a sick infant. A toddler getting a vaccine. The screaming, the kicking…the screaming. Goodness gracious me. 

Annoyingly, there is a growing body of evidence that the antibiotics baby got as an infant reduces the efficacy of the vaccine they get later on in life. 

A recent study led by Ryan et al looked into this exact issue. They followed nearly 190 full-term babies from birth to toddlerhood, comparing those who got antibiotics in the first couple of days with those who didn’t. All the babies got their usual vaccines, and researchers checked how well their immune systems responded.

The results? Not great for the antibiotic crowd. Babies who had antibiotics early on, especially IV antibiotics right after birth, produced fewer antibodies after their jabs. And the antibodies they did make didn’t always work as well.

One likely culprit? Gut bacteria. Antibiotics, while necessary, can wipe out helpful bugs like Bifidobacteria, which seem to play a key role in helping the immune system learn from vaccines.

The takeaway isn’t to avoid antibiotics when they’re truly needed, but it does suggest there might be room to support the gut afterwards. Maybe with probiotics. Maybe with time. But it’s something we’re going to have to keep an eye on.

FUN PRECLINICAL RESEARCH
200 Snake Bites Later… We Have A New Antivenom

It’s pretty much every boy’s dream to become a Superhero. You’d go to sleep hoping and praying that a radioactive spider would bite you too and you’d become the friendly neighborhood spider. 

Well, I don’t know what kind of sick hero Tim Friede was trying to become, but he has voluntarily allowed snakes to bite him over 200 times. All kinds too. Cobras, mambas, krait, taipan. Why, oh why would you do this to yourself.

And I guess his plan worked to become a superhero of sorts. His blood is now the potential source of the world’s most powerful antivenom.

This is relevant because snake bites are still (somehow) the cause of 100,000 deaths per year, and the current antivenoms work on like 3 different kinds of venom. 

Combine the antibodies in his blood with varespladib(an enzymatic toxin inhibitor), and he has an antibody cocktail that has protected mice against 13 species of snake venom in pre-clinical trials.

This can be produced at scale. Centivax is a US company that produces synthetic versions of antibodies. So we can buy it at the duty-free Boots before a trip to South America(once getting FDA/NICE approval).

At the end of the day, self experimentation in medicine isn’t all bad. The guy who discovered that H. pylori causes peptic ulcers swallowed a vial of the stuff. The guy who invented cardiac catheterization did it on himself… Just don’t get any wacky ideas 👀

OTHER NEWS YOU SHOULD KNOW

• Meta-Analysis of Efficacy Bronchiolitis Vaccine

• Do Gabapentinoids Increase Self Harm Risk?

• Endometriosis Medication Approved For NHS USE

• New Guidelines for Bowel Cancer Monitoring in IBD Patients

Handover Over 🫡 

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