In 4 days football (a.k.a. soccer) will take over our TV screens once again as the opening game of Euro 2008 kicks off in earnest. But English football fans, like me, have little to cheer for since our national side of under-performers failed to qualify for the finals. As a result, the BBC has resorted to the “so who will you support?” line in its advertisements. But the BBC isn’t the only organisation to use this approach it seems.

Yesterday I received an email in my inbox from the World Development Movement with the catchy heading “love football hate poverty”. Here’s the blurb:

“This time England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland didn’t qualify. So who do you cheer for? What about the coolest flag design (probably Portugal)? Maybe the best holiday destination or food (got to be Italy)? How about supporting the team that gives the most aid to poor countries? Or perhaps cheering on the country that spends the most on healthcare?”

Yes, indeedy. Fantasy football with a conscience. Why hasn’t anyone thought of this before? It has to be a winner!

Actually, the site is rather fun and well worth a look. It allows you to pit the national sides that have qualified for Euro 2008 (plus a notional “UK” side to keep people like me happy) against each other, using a combination of statistics such as the proportion of national income spent on health as a surrogate for footballing talent. I am pleased to report that I correctly guessed which side came out at number 1 using these metrics, but it took me a while to discover which country occupied the number 2 spot. Can you do any better?

In 2003 the 3 by 5 initiative was launched: a commitment by the global community to provide antiretroviral treatment (ART) to 3 million people living with HIV/AIDS in low and middle income countries by the end of 2005. But by the time the deadline passed only 1.3 million people, living in the poorest regions of the world, were receiving treatment. However, today the World Health Organisation (WHO), UNAIDS, and UNICEF jointly announced that around 3 million people were on ART by December of last year.

Despite the initial disappointment of failing to hit the 3 by 5 goal, today’s announcement shows what can be achieved when the necessary political will and financial resources are put in place. Providing 3 million people, living in incredibly challenging environments, with access to treatment is no mean feat. But there is still a long way to go. Perhaps the best way I can illustrate this is by explaining the scale of the problem:

• There are 33.2 million people living with HIV in low and middle income countries (66% of whom live in sub-Saharan Africa); 2.1 million of them are children
• Of the 33.2 million infected people, 9.7 million need ART according to WHO’s clinical treatment criteria.
• 3 million of them are receiving treatment (31%). This compares with 5% in 2003, 8% in 2004, 15% in 2005, and 22% in 2006.
• An additional 950 000 people received ART in 2007 compared with 2006. However, 2.5 million people became infected with HIV in 2007, so we’re still losing ground in the battle against the disease.
• 2.1 million people died of AIDS in 2007 (to put that into figure context, in total around 60 million people will die of all causes this year).

Now that the 3 million target has been hit, what should the goal be? Well, in 2006 the international community agreed to put in place “universal access to comprehensive prevention programmes, treatment, care and support” by 2010. This is effectively a commitment to reach the remaining HIV-infected people who need treatment, but who are not receiving it, by the end of this decade. According to the report that was published today, to meet this target financial resources need to quadruple by 2010, from the 2007 level, to $35 billion.

Without doubt, a major contributor to the successes that have been achieved so far has been the move towards measuring and recording how many people are infected with the virus. For with measurement comes a tangible sense of what can be achieved and how much progress has been made; or as the heads of WHO, UNAIDS, and UNICEF put it in the report: “What gets measured gets done”.

Can I really be the only person in the UK not to have had a go on a Nintendo Wii? Everyone seems to have one except me and frankly I’m jealous. But now I have the perfect excuse to treat myself: I can justify a purchase as part of my campaign to get fit.

This month sees the launch of Wii Fit, a $90 game that Nintendo hopes will help all the young adults who got obese playing the company’s vast repertoire of video games to lose a few pounds (both physically and financially, one assumes). Wii Fit comes with a “balance board” which, according to a Time interview with the developer, Shigeru Miyamoto, can be used to do yoga, aerobics, and hula hoop.

The World Health Organisation estimates that over 1 billion people are overweight and that at least 300 million people are clinically obese, so the potential market for Wii Fit is huge. But somehow I doubt these figures will change much as a result of Wii-induced exercise campaigns.

This isn’t the first time that Nintendo has tapped into our desire to keep healthy and improve ourselves. Brain Age, which claims to improve users’ cognitive performance with repeated use, has sold tens of millions of units, primarily to older users who are concerned about staving off the onset of dementia.

There is very little evidence that computer games like Brain Age prevent cognitive decline, however (for further information see this news feature that I wrote recently for the BMJ). But of course absence of evidence is not the same as evidence of absence and the general consensus among the clinicians that I interviewed for the BMJ article was that games like Brain Age almost certainly do no harm; indeed some neurologists actively encourage their patients to use programs like Brain Age as part of a mental exercise routine.

I wonder whether primary-care physicians will follow suit and recommend Wii Fit to their overweight patients. I’m sure the people working in Nintendo’s marketing department will be hoping so.

Welcome to Adverse Events, my first foray into the blogosphere.

I should probably start by setting out my stall, as it were, to give you some idea of what you can expect to find in this blog over the coming months. In short, I plan to write about the latest developments in medical research, but I’m sure I’ll deviate from that brief from time to time.

I’m a neuroscientist by training, so it’s quite likely that I’ll blog about the brain in health and disease. I also spent 7 years working at The Lancet and so I’ll almost certainly cover topics such as the global response to HIV/AIDS, why the Millennium Development Goals are so important, and the role of the pharmaceutical industry in medical research.

Perhaps it’s also worth explaining why I’m bothering to write this blog at all (apart from the fact that it should be good for me). I joined NPG about 2 months ago as Publisher of the eight Nature Clinical Practice review journals. I’m enjoying my new job immensely, but the one drawback is that I don’t get to write much. So I’m hoping that this blog will satiate my cravings to type and will help me to keep up to date with what’s going on in medical research; I have often found in the past that the best way of getting to grips with a subject is to write about it.

The other reason for doing this blog is that I want to explore how medical research can be empowered by social networking sites like Nature Network. Email and the internet have revolutionised the way scientists communicate and my gut feeling is that medical researchers will increasingly use networking sites like this one to share data and to discuss the implications of their work.

One of my colleagues at Nature Clinical Practice, Helen Jaques, has started a forum on Health and Medicine, and I encourage Nature Network users to head over there to discuss medically related topics that interest them. I’m sure more specialised medical forums will appear on this site in the months and years to come. Indeed, why not set one up yourself?