Bernard Freudenthal

Abstract Musculoskeletal diseases are a major health burden. Development of bone-active therapies has been hindered by limited understanding of the cells and genes that regulate the skeleton. We exploited the value of cross-species analysis and developed single-cell methodologies in skeletal tissues to define the critical endosteal compartment that regulates bone turnover.

An initiative to screen asymptomatic health-care workers for severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) was timely and logical, and contrasted markedly with the UK Government's testing strategy of National Health Service (NHS) staff during the epidemic. The NHS staff testing policy was only to test symptomatic staff, precisely to reduce absenteeism by encouraging staff with negative results back to work, thus intentionally reducing their time in self-isolation.

Editor – Shanks et al1 describe salient physiological lessons from their patient with severe sequelae of lithium toxicity. I wish to suggest further lessons that may be learned from their report to minimise harm in future similar cases. It appears that nephrogenic diabetes insipidus (DI) was not considered until day 10 of the admission. That sodium remained elevated despite fluid resuscitation clearly implicates impaired renal salt handling and the patient’s chronic lithium treatment was known.