The COVID-19 pandemic has turned life, travel, and the economy upside down all around the world. But what impact has it had on research study and research study practices, in general? In this Special Function, we investigate.
Last month, Medical News Today published an interview with Dr. Catherine Oldenburg, a contagious illness epidemiologist and co-lead scientist of a new medical trial examining a prospective treatment for COVID-19
In the interview, Dr. Oldenburg talked about some unexpected ways in which the pandemic has actually impacted how scientists conduct their research study.
Items that were easily offered before the pandemic, such as lab or scientific trial products, have actually become harder to acquire due to constraints on international motion.
” It’s intriguing the number of things we took for granted before COVID-19– you know, [like the] moving of products,” Dr. Oldenburg mentioned in the interview.
What else has changed in the landscape of research as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic?
In this Special Function, MNT ” takes the pulse” of the research neighborhood to see where it now stands.
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With the world dealing with a new coronavirus, the immediate focus throughout the research community is– appropriately so– on finding vaccines and treatments that will work successfully versus SARS-CoV-2.
However what has occurred to the remainder of the medical research centered around equally important causes?
In a comment piece that appeared in The Lancet on Might 16, the journal’s editor-in-chief, Richard Horton, mused on the truth that, after the pandemic started, COVID-19- related research almost monopolized the publication’s focus, to the hinderance of other topics that the editorial group had intended on covering.
” At The Lancet, we had actually planned to provide child and adolescent health particular attention in 2020,” Horton wrote.
He likewise confessed to having intended on “developing a new platform of deal with migration and health, […] and continuing to advance the program we began in 2015 on the synergies between diet, disease, and planetary environments.”
The group dropped all of these targets to concentrate on advances in COVID-19 research study. Horton acknowledged that other public health subjects have stayed no less pressing in spite of the fact that attention has shifted away from them.
” We are not alone in this problem. The huge obstacles provided by the Sustainable Advancement Goals[outlined by the United Nations] have actually also been pushed to one side by COVID-19 Extreme poverty, gender injustice, safe water and sanitation, and the promotion of peace through health have all end up being casualties of the pandemic.”
— Richard Horton
“[A] ll people who operate in worldwide health should make sure that we do not turn away from a broader point of view on health,” Horton alerted.
While governments and different funding bodies have actually been investing millions in COVID-19 research study and emergency situation aid, the situation looks very different for other research locations.
In a main briefing that the European University Association (EUA) released in May, they noted that the pandemic is likely to affect earnings sources for universities throughout Europe and that this effect might have significant ramifications.
” As the nations absorb the economic repercussions of the coronavirus crisis, there is a considerable risk that public financing allowances across Europe will decrease in the next 2