Health Check

BBC World Service•www.bbc.co.uk

Health & Fitness

Health issues and medical breakthroughs from around the world.

Last refreshed: June 24th, 2026 at 8:30 PM

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Episodes

Covid vaccine ‘90% effective’

Health Check examines the excitement around the preliminary announcement of 90% effectiveness of BioNTech and Pfizer’s Covid-19 vaccine in its phase 3 clinical trial. Claudia Hammond talks to Professor Gregory Poland, head of vaccine research at the Mayo Clinic in the United States about what we do and don’t know about the vaccine at this stage, and how the vaccine may be approved and deployed in the coming months. She consults Kalipso Chalkidou, Professor of Global Health Practice at Imperial C...

Nov 11, 2020•26 min

Covid-19 vaccines: Unknowns and dilemmas

Some of the first large scale trials of Covid-19 vaccines may report results to regulators in the next few weeks. These first results will reveal how effective these vaccines are at preventing mild Covid illness but they’re unlikely to tell us how good they are at preventing serious disease and death. Should governments permit wide scale vaccination of populations based on that level of data when this may compromise learning more about their efficacy? And might widespread deployment of first gen...

Nov 04, 2020•35 min

Covid-19 plasma therapy trial results ‘disappointing’

For months now, many people hospitalised with Covid-19 have been given convalescent plasma – donated blood serum from people who’ve already had the illness. The hope has been that transfusing donated antibodies against the coronavirus will help to prevent deaths and serious illness. Convalescent plasma therapy received a high profile boost in the USA in August when the Trump administration announced emergency use authorisation for the treatment, despite the lack of robust evidence for its effica...

Oct 28, 2020•37 min

Coronavirus update

As South Africa goes into lockdown what measures are they taking? Plus big data in Taiwan and a round-up of drug trials, antibody testing and low cost ventilators. Presenter: Claudia Hammond Producer: Geraldine Fitzgerald (Image: Microscopic view of influenza virus cells. Photo credit: Panorama Images/Getty Images.)

Mar 25, 2020•26 min

Autism: the problems of fitting in

Many people with autistic spectrum disorder learn techniques to overcome their difficulties interacting with others. The first study that has looked at the consequences of these compensatory strategies reveals some benefits but also significant downsides. The consequences can be stress, low self-esteem, mental illness and misdiagnosis. Claudia talks to lead researcher Professor Francesca Happé from King’s College London and Eloise Stark, a woman with autism. A new research programme at Imperial ...

Jul 31, 2019•33 min

Lighting the brain after birth

Claudia Hammond visits the Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition. Every year a minority of births goes wrong and the baby is deprived of oxygen, which can lead to long-term brain damage and conditions such as cerebral palsy. Early treatment can reduce the likelihood of permanent disability or even death, so a team at University College London have now developed a new portable device which uses harmless infra-red to detect signs of brain injury in newborn babies, minutes after birth. It is call...

Jul 03, 2019•27 min

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