News

April 27, 2021

Malaria is caused by Plasmodium parasites. Among 5 parasite species, Plasmodium (P.) falciparum and P. vivax are the most widespread. They are transmitted to people through the bites of infected female Anopheles mosquitoes.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), nearly half of the world’s population was at risk of malaria in 2019. P. falciparum parasites are responsible for most estimated malaria cases in the WHO African region, and P. vivax parasites in the WHO Region of the Americas.

Sanofi has produced several antimalarial drugs against P. falciparum and P. vivax parasites for about 70 years. In addition, Sanofi has developed malaria awareness program for school-age children who may suffer from malaria-induced anemia with an impact on their school attendance and cognitive development. These educational tools help children to find all the proliferation sites of mosquito in their environment and how to clear them away. Children can also learn about all malaria clinical symptoms and the actions to take in case of illness. Educating the adults of tomorrow should impact on their health behaviors and consequently that of the next generations.

Synergy Pharm is proud of providing medical writing support to Sanofi in various types of malaria projects over several years.

April 15, 2021

The multi-party consortium among 3 eminent professional organizations for medical communication professionals – AMWA, EMWA, and ISMPP – advises not to use preprints and post-publication peer review as references in any medical publication unless these are cited in the manner of a personal communication (i.e., as in-text reference).
Moreover, this statement reminds that professional medical writers enhance publication quality and speed.

More than 150 articles written by Santé Active Edition – Synergy Pharm have been published in major international journals.

March 30, 2021

The PRISMA 2020 statement has just been published!
This new statement provides an update to the PRISMA 2009 guidelines for reporting systematic reviews and meta-analyses.
You can download the new checklist template and the new flow diagram templates at http://www.prisma-statement.org/.

March 15, 2021

On the occasion of Brain Awareness Week (BAW), (re) discover the French sketchnotes and multidisciplinary books on this theme, produced by Françoise Nourrit-Poirette, a medical writer from our team, for the “Observatoire B2V des Mémoires” (B2V Memory Observatory).

March 11, 2021

Next week (15th-21st of March) is the 23rd Brain Awareness Week (BAW), a global campaign to highlight advances in brain research. There are many events taking place online across Europe, including in France organized by Société des Neurosciences, and in the UK and Ireland by British Neuroscience Association.

March 1, 2021

About 450,000 people are newly diagnosed with colorectal cancer each year in Europe, and around 140,000 people died from the disease across the EU-27 in 2016. In France, more than 43,000 new colorectal cancer cases and more than 17,000 deaths are estimated to occur each year. Screening enables colorectal cancer to be uncovered at an early stage, and the earlier it is detected, the greater the chances of recovery (the 5-year survival rate is 90% for the early stages).

Women and men aged 50 to 74 are invited every 2 years to have a rapid and effective test at home as part of the French colorectal cancer screening programme. Find out more about screening programmes in your country at https://digestivecancers.eu/colorectal-cancer/

February 28, 2021

Today is World Rare Disease Day and we would like to acknowledge the recent therapeutic advances that have brought hope to many patients and their families. Thank you to all who work in this field! Our team has a special interest in rare diseases; stemming both from the experience of two team members (Emma Pilling and Françoise Nourrit-Poirette) at Orphanet, and from our coverage of the North American Cystic Fibrosis Conference (NACFC). Marielle Romet, who is based in the United States, has attended the NACFC 4 years in a row and our team has coordinated the production of conference reports that were published live by the Pediatric Archives in partnership with the French Cystic Fibrosis Society, Elsevier and Vertex, and with the help of Profs. Isabelle Sermet, Isabelle Fajac, and Philippe Reix, and Drs. Valérie Urbach and Nadine Desmazes-Dufeu, and a group of French pulmonologists.
https://nacfc.elsevierresource.com/les-archives-des-congres-nacfc

February 27, 2021

Today is World Anosmia Awareness Day. Until recently, anosmia was a term understood mainly by patients, physicians and researchers; however, this term has now become familiar to the general public because anosmia is one of the common symptoms of Covid-19, particularly of the mild form of the disease (Lechien et al. 2021). Anosmia involves not only loss of the ability to detect odours, but also loss of the ability to sense food aromas and perceive flavours; the sense of taste only allowing the detection of sweet, savoury, sour, bitter and salty food. Loss of smell is very disturbing: it means loosing the everyday markers that are closely linked to odours and aromas. Although loss of smell is a short-term symptom for most Covid 19 patients, anosmia has been reported to persist for at least 6 months in patients with long Covid-19 (Lechien et al. 2021). Olfactory training is currently the only effective therapy for the treatment post-viral anosmia (French National Authority for Health, 2021), but oral corticosteroids may improve recovery of the sense of smell in Covid-19 patients (Le Bon et al. 2021; Vaira et al. 2020).

February 19, 2021

Predatory journals bias science through the publication of low-quality, non-peer-reviewed articles.
The scale of this problem has recently been highlighted in the latest news round-up from Nature: a recent analysis found that 164,000 articles published by potentially predatory journals from 2015 to 2017 were indexed in the Scopus database, accounting for almost 3% of the articles indexed during this period.

A previous analysis found that some predatory journals were also indexed in PubMed.

These criteria and tools can help you recognize predatory journals.

February 11, 2021

On the International Day of Women and Girls in Science, we wish to recognise the contribution of our team of female medical and scientific writers. Each member of our medical writing team has a PhD in science and has post-doctoral research experience. For several years they have been helping our clients to showcase their results: writing, editing, and rewriting publications for peer-reviewed journals, conference summaries, posters and slideshow presentations; drafting regulatory and clinical documents (IMPDs, IBs, CSPs, CSRs, CTDs, PIPs, CERs, etc.); producing lay texts containing key medical information for patients (website content, brochures, sketchnotes, etc.); and translating scientific documents.