Minerva

Many Nazis were environmentalists and many were vegetarians, says a review in The Sciences (1999;39(3):14-9), which describes their positive contributions to public health. In contrast with many other Western countries in the 1930s, Nazi Germany pioneered screening for the early detection of cancer and campaigned against tobacco smoking.

The link between human herpesvirus 8 and Kaposi's sarcoma is strong enough to support calling human herpesvirus 8 “Kaposi's sarcoma associated virus,” but many questions remain unanswered, says a review in the New England Journal of Medicine (1999;340:1912-3). In particular, no explanation has yet been found for the mechanism by which infection with HIV-1 dramatically increases the risk of Kaposi's sarcoma developing in people infected with human herpesvirus 8. The virus is found in about a third of healthy blood donors in South Africa.

The concept of fibromyalgia has been highjacked by lawyers seeking compensation for their clients, says the Annals of the Rheumatic Diseases (1999;58:325-6). The disorder has also become a focus for self diagnosis and assessment, and rheumatologists are becoming increasingly reluctant to treat patients who attend their clinics “clutching pages of information downloaded from the internet.” Minerva has heard it all before—and in particular the assertion …