Dr Tony Holohan getting married to girlfriend Ciara Cronin next week
Dr Holohan, who chaired the National Public Health Emergency Team (Nepht) during the Covid-19 pandemic, shared the news on his social media.
Dr Holohan shared a photo of the pair walking in Dun Laoghaire, with the caption: 'One week to go to our big day. I'm so happy that Ciara and I will spend the rest of our lives together.'
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In his memoir, We Need To Talk, released in 2023, Dr Holohan opened up about the death of his first wife Dr Emer Holohan, who died in 2021 following a diagnosis of multiple myeloma nine years prior.
She was a specialist in public health medicine and a medical graduate of UCD.
In the memoir, Dr Holohan had revealed he is now in a 'lovely' relationship with psychotherapist Ciara Cronin.
He also criticised the Government's decision to reopen hospitality in late 2020 for a 'meaningful Christmas'. During the pandemic, the National Public Health Emergency Team exercised major control over recommendations around lockdowns, freedoms such as how far people could exercise outside their home, as well as the closure of schools and hospitality.
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Irish Post
27 minutes ago
- Irish Post
Heatwaves have ‘major impact' on spread of disease
HEATWAVES can have a major influence on the spread of disease new research by Irish scientists has found. The study conducted by researchers at Trinity College Dublin, found that a multitude of factors related to sudden heatwaves can have a significant impact on environmentally transmitted diseases. It also found that many existing predictive models related to the spread of disease have overlooked this factor. 'While scientists have a relatively good idea of how temperature impacts some viruses and disease-causing pathogens and parasites, they know much less about the effects of sudden heatwaves or cold snaps, or how influential variation in the duration of these events are,' the report authors explain. Specifically, the scientists discovered that differences in heatwaves – such as how much hotter they are than normal temperatures, and how long they last – can increase or decrease disease burden by up to 13 times. Their discovery and its implications come at a time when global climate change and related extreme weather events are impacting counties across the globe, and their findings have been published in the leading international journal PLOS Climate. 'In this study, we worked with the water flea (Daphnia magna) and a microsporidian pathogen (Ordospora colligata), which is a widely used model for environmentally transmitted diseases, to investigate the impacts of different heatwave attributes,' first author, Niamh McCartan, a PhD candidate from Trinity's School of Natural Sciences, said this week. 'We manipulated the amplitude and duration of heatwaves across four average temperatures and four distinct time points at which the hosts were exposed to the pathogen. 'This approach gave us 64 unique heatwaves for comparison.' The results showed that, when compared to other types of temperature variation, such as cold snaps, heatwaves alter parasite burden up to 13-fold, which drives significant variation in infection outcomes. 'A recently published study reported that 58 per cent of human pathogenic diseases have been aggravated by climate change, with temperature changes impacting host susceptibility due to altering biological properties such as how our immune systems function, as well as our behaviour,' Ms McCartan explained. 'From a bigger-picture perspective, this work underlines the need for more detailed, context-specific models to help better predict the likely impact of heatwaves and climate change on different diseases. 'We now know that amplitude, duration, baseline temperature and the point at which exposure occurs have differing effects in shaping disease outcomes, so overly simplified models may miss critical complexities.' She explained: 'For example, other researchers have suggested almost 70 per cent of Covid-19 cases in the summer of 2022 could have been avoided if there hadn't been heatwaves around that time – imagine the difference that a better understanding of how heatwaves alter disease dynamics could have made to countless people?' 'Climate change is also causing mosquito species that carry diseases like dengue, Zika, and malaria to be increasingly found in parts of southern and central Europe, including Italy and France, areas that were previously too cool to support them. 'While Ireland has so far been less affected, the findings of our study highlight the urgent need to understand how warming and extreme weather events can alter disease dynamics more broadly. 'With all of this in mind, it's important that future disease-specific models must account for fluctuating and extreme temperatures, not just averages.' See More: Disease, Heatwave, Research, TCD
RTÉ News
7 hours ago
- RTÉ News
Bitter pill: EU exploits Trump anti-science climate to forge deal on medicines
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"In the US you have a chaotic situation," says one source familiar with negotiations, "between [Health Secretary] Robert Kennedy Jr, who doesn't believe in science or vaccines, and the Trump administration, which has sacked three and a half thousand people from the Food and Drugs Administration. "There was a sense in Europe that we should try to get this proposal settled so that we have a stable system in Europe when there's instability elsewhere." The legislation will now go to the European Parliament, where negotiations between MEPs, the member states and the European Commission, begin on 17 June. There are hopes that the entire package could be adopted by the end of the year. The European Commission first proposed overhauling the EU's medicines regime in April 2023, as Europe was emerging from the Covid pandemic. The EU was reeling from the strain the emergency put on health systems and on the availability of certain kinds of medicines, with a deepening awareness that Europe was overly dependent on China and India for drugs such as antibiotics. At the same time, digitalisation and the availability of clinical data were opening up new possibilities in how medicines are developed and used. Despite that, innovative therapies were not reaching patients across Europe at the same speed while in some member states patients did not have access to medicines they needed due to shortages. The instinct to reduce health spending further has been given fresh impetus by the expected surge in EU defence expenditure following Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Overall, the pharma package sought to boost the competitiveness of the sector, reduce the administrative burden - and the over-reliance on India and China - and to tackle the environmental impact of drug manufacture and use. 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A number of sources have said that while member states with important pharma sectors went public two years ago, when the commission first proposed reducing clinical data protection from eight years to six, in demanding the status quo of eight years, Ireland remained on the fence, and did so right up until a key meeting of EU ambassadors on 21 May. On that date, Ireland joined a blocking majority of ten countries - including Belgium, Denmark, the Netherlands and Germany - to oppose the latest Polish proposal that would have essentially increased the RDP by one year to seven, but short of eight. 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Irish Independent
19 hours ago
- Irish Independent
‘Roughly what I expected' – Leaving Cert students react after first day of exams
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