Three scientists who discovered the virus Hepatitis C have won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology. The winners are British scientist Michael Houghton and US researchers Harvey Alter and Charles Rice. The Nobel Prize committee said their discoveries ultimately “saved millions of lives”. The virus is a common cause of liver cancer and a major reason why people need a liver transplant. In the 1960s, there was huge concern that people receiving donated blood were getting chronic hepatitis (liver inflammation) from an unknown, mysterious disease.

The Nobel Prize committee said a blood transfusion at the time was like “Russian roulette”. Highly sensitive blood tests mean such cases have now been eliminated in many parts of the world, and effective anti-viral drugs have also been developed. “For the first time in history, the disease can now be cured, raising hopes of eradicating Hepatitis C virus from the world,” the prize committee said.(BBC)…[+]

The health secretary has said a technical glitch that saw nearly 16,000 Covid-19 cases go unreported in England “should never have happened”. The error meant that although those who tested positive were told about their results, their close contacts were not traced. By Monday afternoon, around half of those who tested positive had yet to be asked about their close contacts. Labour said the missing results were “putting lives at risk”. Experts advise that ideally contacts should be tracked down within 48 hours.

The technical error was caused by some Microsoft Excel data files exceeding the maximum size after they were sent from NHS Test and Trace to Public Health England. It meant 15,841 cases between 25 September and 2 October were left out of the UK daily case figures. PHE said the error itself, discovered overnight on Friday, has been fixed, and outstanding cases had been passed on to tracers by 01:00 BST on Saturday. But Health Secretary Matt Hancock told MPs the incident as a whole had not yet been resolved – with only 51% of those whose positive results were caught up in the glitch now reached by contact tracers. He said it had “not substantially changed” the government’s assessment of the epidemic, however, and had “not impacted the basis on which decisions about local action were taken”. He also said outbreak control in care homes, schools and hospitals had not been directly affected, as they do not rely on the data in question.(BBC)…[+]