What! Innovation in Single-Payer Britain?

Also from Medical News Today, the inexplicable decision to locate a new research center in Manchester. That's Manchester, UK, not Manchester, MA.

MIMIT (Manchester: Integrating Medicine and Innovative Technology) - the first international affiliate of the highly successful [Boston] US centre CIMIT® - will draw together clinicians and scientists from a group of Greater Manchester hospitals, GP practices and the University of Manchester in major collaborations to apply the latest technology to clinical problems and transform healthcare in the UK...

"There are many similarities between the CIMIT® approach to innovation and the organisational components which comprise the bio-medical-engineering research cluster in Manchester," [said CIMIT® founder and Executive Director Dr John Parrish.] "I am looking forward to collaborating with our new colleagues."

Have these people not gotten the word? Single-payer ends innovation. Good grief.

Curiouser and curiouser

Three years ago Britain began transfusing plasma (the liquid part of blood) exclusively from male blood donors. They're still using blood donated by women to make other blood products, but not to transfuse into accident victims and those in surgical trouble. And now the U.S. is following suit. It looks like antibodies from some women’s blood is the cause of complications from transfusions. Note where the original life-saving research was done: in single-payer, under-funded Britain.
“Curiouser and curiouser!” Cried Alice (she was so much surprised, that for the moment she quite forgot how to speak good English). ...

Swiss researchers make do

Did anyone notice that part of the news about amniotic stem cells was from Switzerland?

"Swiss scientists Dorthe Schmidt and Simon Hoerstrup of University Hospital Zurich have used amniotic stem cells to grow heart valves. They are currently testing them in sheep."

How on earth did that happen? I thought that the crippling effects of European single-payer healthcare, especially all that bargaining with big pharmaceutical companies, precluded European advances in medicine.