April 8 marks a year since China's lifting of the 76-day lockdown in Wuhan—the epicentre of the COVID-19 outbreak. Since the reopening of Wuhan, efforts to control the pandemic in China have thus far successfully prevented resurgence and importation of new cases, while re-establishing the country's social and economic activities. Although China has since had sporadic outbreaks of COVID-19 in several areas, including Beijing and Qingdao, they were all contained. How has China managed to control COVID-19? And is the global scientific community in a position to benefit from China's experiences?

Since 1990, many new antiseizure medications have been launched. Many have been licensed on the basis of evidence from add-on therapy in resistant epilepsies; there have been few head-to-head comparative data in patients who are newly diagnosed.1 Findings from Standard and New Antiepileptic Drugs (SANAD) I, the first SANAD trial, provided the first comprehensive data to address this question; lamotrigine was shown to be superior to carbamazepine, gabapentin, oxcarbazepine, and topiramate in time to treatment failure,2 and valproate was a clinically and cost-effective alternative to lamotrigine or topiramate.

As focus shifts to the next phase of research on the origins of SARS-CoV-2, calls for data sharing and more rigorous studies intensify. John Zarocostas reports.

Conflict in the Tigray region of Ethiopia is resulting in death, injury, and sexual abuse, with the majority of health centres not functioning. Sharmila Devi reports.

The awards, which recognise basic research that has impacted health, were given to scientists for work on GLPs, BRCA1, clinical trials, and emerging viruses. Talha Burki reports.

Nursing had always been a career that Professor Dame Donna Kinnair, Chief Executive and General Secretary of the UK Royal College of Nursing (RCN) and Non-Executive Director, East London NHS Foundation Trust, wanted to be a part of. Her family came to the UK in the 1950s, part of the Windrush generation. “I have a brother who is a doctor, and a sister who is a midwife…nursing was actually a part of my family, it was also part of my family history in the Caribbean”, she says. Yet nursing wasn't the path she initially followed.

The 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was one of the least surprising in recent times. No Nobel watchers doubted that it would be awarded soon for the discovery of the CRISPR-Cas9 system of genome editing that has transformed the technologies and possibilities of genetic manipulation. The uncertainty, however, was about who would get it. Few questioned that biochemist Jennifer Doudna of the University of California, Berkeley, and microbiologist Emmanuelle Charpentier of the Max Planck Unit for the Science of Pathogens (who did some of the key work while at Umeå University, Sweden) were the leading candidates.

The US police killings of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd in 2020 sparked a set of responses and uprisings to racism that may have seemed different but should by now be all too familiar. Huge numbers of people protested, institutions made all the right noises, and there have been increased book sales for Black authors. The sheer size of the protests and the commitments from governments and corporations to make lasting changes have led to renewed optimism that this time it may be different. Yet there are persisting, major deficits in our collective education about racism and protest.

Health development expert. He was born in Vilvoorde, Belgium, on Feb 6, 1967, and died after a motorcycle accident in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, on Jan 15, 2021, aged 53 years.

John Donne warned, “No man is an island.”1 The COVID-19 pandemic is a reminder not only of the interconnectedness of humans to each other, but also to their environment.

Mente A, O'Donnell M, Rangarajan S, et al, for the PURE, EPIDREAM, and ONTARGET/TRANSCEND Investigators. Associations of urinary sodium excretion with cardiovascular events in individuals with and without hypertension: a pooled analysis of data from four studies. Lancet 2016; 388: 465–75—The Declaration of interests section of this Article should have stated that Martin O'Donnell was supported by funding from the European Research Council (COSIP grant, 640580). This correction has been made to the online version as of April 8, 2021.

Ramasamy MN, Minassian AM, Ewer KJ, et al. Safety and immunogenicity of ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 vaccine administered in a prime-boost regimen in young and old adults (COV002): a single-blind, randomised, controlled, phase 2/3 trial. Lancet 2020; 396: 1979–93—In figure 7 of this Article, the green line in the key should have been labelled “18–55 years group (low dose)”. This correction has been made to the online version as of April 8, 2021.

These findings do not support the use of levetiracetam or zonisamide as first-line treatments for patients with focal epilepsy. Lamotrigine should remain a first-line treatment for patients with focal epilepsy and should be the standard treatment in future trials.

Compared with valproate, levetiracetam was found to be neither clinically effective nor cost-effective. For girls and women of child-bearing potential, these results inform discussions about benefit and harm of avoiding valproate.

A 40-year-old-woman presented to our outpatient clinic with a 6-month history of pain in her throat and a feeling that she had a foreign body in the submandibular region. She said the pain was pricking, intermittent, bilateral, non-radiating, aggravated by eating solid food, and moderate to severe in intensity. She reported no history of trauma or previous operations—specifically a tonsillectomy. The patient was previously fit and well and had no medical history.

Racist anti-Asian incidents and rhetoric in the USA have been on the rise during the COVID-19 pandemic, by some accounts increasing as much as 150%. The horrific mass shooting on March 15, 2021, in which six of eight people killed in three spas in Atlanta, Georgia, were Asian women, has prompted urgent conversations about prejudice against Asian Americans. Organisations including the American Medical Association were swift to underscore that racism, in addition to gun violence, is a public health crisis.

More than half (51%) of the world's population of people living with HIV-1 are women.1 Each year, the incidence of new HIV-1 infections in women of reproductive age is high, with 5·2 million women of reproductive age newly diagnosed between 2010 and 2015,2 and 1·3 million pregnant women receiving HIV-1 treatment in 2018.3 Perinatal transmission of HIV-1 has fallen most substantially through increased access to antiretroviral therapy (ART) in pregnancy and during breastfeeding. UNAIDS has reported that new HIV-1 infections among children have halved from 310 000 in 2010 to 150 000 in 2019 through active management of pregnant women living with HIV-1.

Acute kidney injury (AKI) remains a serious condition with a high risk of mortality.1 In the absence of any new drugs, renal replacement therapy (RRT) is the only treatment option. However, balancing the risks of an unnecessary intervention with the risk of not correcting a potentially life-threatening complication remains a challenge.

COVID-19 has created a syndemic scenario that is deepening pre-existing structural inequalities for migrants in Latin American countries (LACs).1,2 LACs have been severely affected by COVID-19, and migrants are among the populations most impacted by the heightened humanitarian crisis across the region. Socioeconomic inequalities between migrants and local people have widened, and there are fears that progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) will be reversed.

Interim Prime Minister Abdul Hamid Dbeibah must deal with COVID-19, migration, and the legacy of 10 years of conflict. Sharmila Devi reports.