Robert Wargas

A well-trained boxer is the most thoroughly conditioned human in the sporting world: there is no other sport that demands such a sustained level of ruthless physicality from its participants. If I had to offer one bit of health advice for the Western world, should it ask me, it would be to learn boxing. And when I say boxing, I do mean actual boxing – not ‘cardio kickboxing’, nor any other trendy meld of neutered combat and boring aerobics. As an on-and-off student of the martial arts since the age of nine, I trained in boxing for several years in my early twenties. Sick of machines and dumbbells, I sought an actual sport, not merely a set of movements, as a path to fitness.

Medieval medicine doesn't have a great reputation, it's fair to say. But one of its recipes may help us tackle the great curse of 21st-century disease control – the growing ineffectiveness of antibiotics. In April 2014, the World Health Organisation warned that we were entering a 'post-antibiotic era', an age in which drug resistance could render routine infections deadly. We do seem to be entering this age rapidly; the news is relentless. Now the US Centres for Disease Control are warning that a multidrug-resistant strain of food poisoning, the eerily named Shigella, has reached American shores from abroad.

The history of cancer research is one of inevitable hype and dashed hope. Though most people have been primed to believe in elusive 'cures', the most important news is usually about slowly strengthening imperfect treatments. Some of the most promising of these involve vaccines. A study published recently in Nature, a top-tier journal, has demonstrated that a tetanus shot, when administered before an experimental vaccine therapy, can lengthen survival times for patients afflicted with glioblastoma multiforme, a dreadful brain cancer that is almost universally deadly. Researchers at Duke University in North Carolina injected patients with a tetanus booster before administering a vaccine designed to target the brain tumour.

Normally I'm allergic to health scaremongering of any sort, especially if it uses government-funded studies to bolster its dire predictions. But here in America the subject of superbugs – microbes that have developed resistance to the drugs once effective in killing them – has resurfaced with a disturbing and ironic twist. Superbugs already kill 700,000 people a year around the world. Now they are apparently being spread by a surgical camera used to help treat cancer. The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced on March 12 that it will convene a panel on the spread of superbugs. The panel is to meet in mid-May.