In my view

This time I want to focus on a side of our society where there is a lot of suffering by innocent people that is not commonly known. I am talking about babies who are born premature. A normal pregnancy lasts about 40 weeks from the date of the last menstruation cycle. Every year in Europe there are about 500,000 children born before week 37 and 100,000 will have to go to Intensive Care. Of thes…

Recently I had made a reservation to fly from Amsterdam to Kyiv, Ukraine. When I learned that Ukraine has closed its borders for foreigners as part of their COVID-19 containment measures, I had to cancel my flight. I went to the website, forgot and entered 3 times a wrong password. Now the system kicked me out and I had to get a new password. All my fault and I cannot complain about that. W…

Since I spend most of my time in the USA, I am “privileged” to all news in this country. There is good news and bad news. Unfortunately, there is also a lot of nonsense and misleading (even false) information. I am going to try to break it down in pieces. When I am writing this, according to the Johns Hopkins University Coronavirus dashboard (which I recommend to everyone who wants to know more…

It must have been about 25 years ago that I met Cees Smit for the first time. I had just started in 1995 as the Executive Director of the European Association of the Plasma Products Industry. A long name with a history that I will explain at another moment. Cees Smit is a special individual who taught me one the first and important lessons around hemophilia. He taught me to talk about persons wi…

IT IS WORSE THAN YOUR WORST NIGHTMARE Less than 6 months ago, the world heard for the first time about the SARS-CoV-2 virus, better known as COVID-19. Today as I am writing this, the official count from the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center is that worldwide over 10 million persons are/were infected, and half a million people have died from it. A total of 188 countries is hit by the viru…