As CEO of MAXIS GBN, Mattieu Rouot oversees relationships with more than 500 multinational companies in over 120 countries around the world. Global Benefits Vision: Mattieu, thank you for speaking to us – Can you share a few highlights of your career, perhaps with emphasis on global employee benefits?

Whether or not a person with COVID-19 develops severe disease depends a lot on how their immune system reacts to the coronavirus. But scientists still don’t know why some people develop severe disease while others suffer only mild symptoms – or no symptoms at all. Now, a new study from Yale University sheds some light on the issue.

After a year of toxic stress ignited by so much fear and uncertainty, now is a good time to reset, pay attention to your mental health and develop some healthy ways to manage the pressures going forward. Brain science has led to some drug-free techniques that you can put to use right now. I am health psychologist who developed a method that harnesses our rip-roaring emotions to rapidly switch off stress and activate positive emotions instead. This technique from emotional brain training is not perfect for everyone, but it can help many people break free of stress when they get stuck on negative thoughts.

For most people, infection with SARS-CoV-2 – the virus that causes COVID-19 – leads to mild, short-term symptoms, acute respiratory illness, or possibly no symptoms at all. But some people have long-lasting symptoms after their infection – this has been dubbed “long COVID”.

Featured: Interview of Mattieu Rouot, CEO, MAXIS GBN – Severe COVID May Be Caused by Autoantibodies – Long COVID, Who Is at Risk? – Outsmarting COVID-19 Fears

Over the past nine months, the word “uncertainty” has cropped up time and time again across the news and social media worldwide. The pandemic has created uncertainty in nearly every aspect of daily life. This is not only down to worries over exposure to COVID-19 and access to medical care, but also concerns about the stability of the economy, job security, the availability of food and household supplies – and even when to book a holiday. We have needed to adjust and readjust our behaviour continually in response to changing risks and government guidelines.

In our daily life, we unfortunately have become used to seeing images of tumors and melanomas. You may have noticed that they’re are not entirely symmetric. This asymmetry is useful to doctors in their diagnoses, but why are they asymmetric?

As the weather cools, the number of infections of the COVID-19 pandemic are rising sharply. Hamstrung by pandemic fatigue, economic constraints and political discord, public health officials have struggled to control the surging pandemic. But now, a rush of interim analyses from pharmaceutical companies Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech have spurred optimism that a novel type of vaccine made from messenger RNA, known as mRNA, can offer high levels of protection by preventing COVID-19 among people who are vaccinated.

Paolo Lippi is the founder of consulting firm, LongueVue Analytics. Global Benefits Vision: Tell us about yourself – your career to date in a nutshell.

The role of compensation and benefits manager in charge of a company’s pension plan has always required multiple skills. Not only must you know about the pension scheme itself, you also must be an honorary actuary and an expert in finance, accountancy, and tax.

The European Pension System: State of Play – Q&A with Paolo Lippi – mRNA Vaccines Against COVID-19 – Mathematical modeling of tumors – COVID-19, Coping with Uncertainty

Social Recognition for Employee Engagement: Q&A with Achievers – Obesity Harms the Body in Real Time – Self-Employed? How to Protect Your Wellbeing

The Best Compliant Model for Expatriates – Interview with GEB’s Eric Butler on The Response To Covid-19 – IBIS 2020 Conference Report – Gig-Working to Dramatically Change Employment Landscape – R&D: Weight Loss: The Tricky Last Few Pounds – R&D: Coronavirus: Why Some People Lose Their Sense of Smell – Employee Benefits 2045 – Where Could We Be 25 Years from Now?

Advanced Tools for Financing Employee Benefits Globally – Digital Transformation: Four Critical Workplace Planning Areas Holding Organizations Back – R&D: Antigen Tests For COVID-19 – R&D: Chronic Lyme Disease – Does It Exist? – R&D: COVID-19, Smell and Taste – R&D: No Evidence That ECT Works For Depression – R&D: HPC and the Race To Understand COVID-19 – R&D: The Original SARS Virus Disappeared, Coronavirus Won’t Do the Same – R&D: Why Coronavirus Death Rates Don’t Fall as Quickly As They Rose

There are excellent opportunities to improve the financing of insurable Employee Benefits (EB) globally and tangible initiatives to support local subsidiaries and their employees with the execution of a global EB strategy. In this article you will find an updated comparative analysis of the most common global EB solutions (traditional EB Pooling, alternative risk financing with EB Captive solutions and the innovative concept of Global Underwriting (GUW) for EB insurance), a more detailed view on GUW and EB Captive as well as two case studies to show how global EB solutions can support the execution of global EB strategies in practice. This article assumes some familiarity with financing EB globally and therefore does not focus on traditional EB Pooling but is concentrating on the more advanced solutions EB Captive and GUW instead.

With vast technological advances over the last few years, and now the dramatic changes brought on by COVID-19, it has never been so clear that digital transformation is essential to organisational success.

Coronavirus deaths shocked us with how rapidly they rose from a base of none at the start of the year, to many thousands within the space of mere weeks. At the peak for England and Wales on April 8, more than 1,300 people died in a single day (as revealed later when all death registrations were reported).

British cancer doctor Prof Karol Sikora recently claimed that the current COVID-19 pandemic would “burn itself out”. His thinking is that if there are more infections than we realise, and that those milder, unrecorded infections result in robust immunity, then this would quickly lead to “herd immunity”, leaving the virus nowhere to go but extinct. Extend this to the world’s population and the virus eradicates itself.

In “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” by Douglas Adams, the haughty supercomputer Deep Thought is asked whether he can find the answer to the ultimate question concerning life, the universe and everything. He replies that, yes, he can do it, but it’s tricky and he’ll have to think about it. When asked how long it will take him he replies, “Seven-and-a-half million years. I told you I’d have to think about it.”

Many people will be familiar with electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) as a historical treatment for “mental illness”, in which an electrical current is passed through the brain to trigger seizures, with the aim of somehow treating the illness. In fact, ECT is still being administered to about a million people each year to treat severe depression, including about 2,500 in England, under anaesthetic. The majority are women, and over 60 years of age.

In March 2020, Google searches for phrases like “can’t taste food” or “why can’t I smell” spiked around the world, particularly in areas where COVID-19 hit hardest. Still, many of us have experienced a temporary change in the flavor of our food with a common cold or the flu (influenza). So, is COVID-19 – the disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus – somehow special in the way it affects smell and taste?

Her symptoms started quickly: neck pain, extreme fatigue and intermittent fever and chills. The woman had been healthy until then, and since she enjoyed gardening and landscaping at her rural Maryland home, she wondered if a tick bite might have given her Lyme disease although she had not noticed the telltale bull’s-eye skin lesion.

In late February, I fell ill with a fever and a cough. As a biochemist who teaches a class on viruses, I’d been tracking the outbreak of COVID-19 in China. Inevitably I wondered: Did I have COVID-19, or did I have the flu?

In early 2020, it seemed like people with diabetes were disproportionately dying with COVID-19, but the data provided more questions than answers. What type of diabetes did people have? Were people dying because the condition itself put them at greater risk, or because those with it tend to be older and have other illnesses? And what should people with diabetes do to protect themselves?

Many countries are moving to exit a lockdown triggered by COVID-19, but the virus has not gone away and there are real concerns that a second wave of infection could happen. We urgently need to understand more about how the body deals with this infection and what we can do to tackle it. Immunology has taken centre stage here in revealing what happens when our body fights this virus, and brings us the possibility of treatments and vaccines.

Some people question why the current coronavirus has brought the world to standstill while a previous deadly coronavirus, SARS, did not. Others have questioned why a vaccine is so urgently needed now to stop the spread of the current coronavirus when a vaccine was never developed for SARS.

Scientists are constantly revealing newly discovered benefits of exercise. In experiments over the past 10 years, my research has found that exercise can help with a respiratory problem known as ARDS.