For most of my career I've split my time between practising medicine and writing about it. That has meant that for part of most weeks I'm seeing patients, and for the rest I'm at the sharp end of research, hearing and reading about how medicine is developing.

It's exciting, but always tempered by the fact that many of the research projects eventually come to nothing. They encounter problems unforeseen when they start, and can't be continued.

So when I heard, a year or two ago, about viruses that could kill the MRSA bacterium that is plaguing our hospitals, I didn't write about them, because the work to be done to make them safe, so that they wouldn't themselves cause disease, was still going on.

Last week came the good news. The virus is now known to be safe for use in humans - and the way it is to be used is ingenious.

Many MRSA cases occur because the patient's skin carries the germ. On the skin it's harmless - only when it gets under the skin, say through a crack or wound or during surgery, does it begin to cause disease. So the best way to prevent infection with it is to ensure that no MRSA can manage to invade.

The traditional way to do that is to cover the skin in an antiseptic before operating - but that's not always completely effective. Some MRSA may even survive the surgical cleaning procedures.

So, to add extra protection, the researchers impregnated stitching material with the MRSA-killing virus. The sutures leak' the virus into the wound surfaces and any MRSA are destroyed.

So far the tests are extremely promising, and if the rest of the trials go well, we should be seeing the new sutures accepted throughout British hospitals fairly soon.

Meanwhile the best way to stop MRSA spreading still remains rigorous hand-washing before touching any patient. That goes not just for nurses, doctors and all the hospital staff in direct contact with patients, but for visitors too.

That wasn't the only good news last week. I suppose when we were children we all heard about African sleeping sickness and the devastating illness it causes throughout sub-Saharan Africa.

It is spread by the tsetse fly, and until recently its only treatments were not very effective and caused serious side-effects.

Around 70,000 people in rural districts of East Africa are slowly dying from it. Now, for the first time, they have hope. The trials of a drug, eflornithine, have shown that it is highly effective, and that its side effects can be borne by most patients.

It is a huge step forward, and best of all the company making it has agreed to make it freely-available to the poverty-stricken countries in desperate need of it.

If that weren't enough, two more great pharmaceutical developments were reported in the same edition of the British Medical Journal. Brucellosis is a chronic infection that kills hundreds of thousands worldwide, and causes miscarriages in pregnant women throughout the Mediterranean and other subtropical countries.

It has always been difficult to eradicate - the infection comes from infected milk and meat. A new trial of a combination of three antibacterial drugs has shown it to be a big advantage over the present treatments.

I have particular interest in the final piece of good news - better treatments for advanced kidney cancers. They are called multitargeting kinase inhibitors'.

A close friend and former colleague of mine, Professor Jonathan Waxman of the Hammersmith Hospital, reviewing the evidence for these drugs, writes that they provide real hope' for patients with kidney cancer.

His only complaint is that although the American authorities have licensed them, Britain's NICE hasn't yet approved them. He concludes that UK patients should not have to wait any longer for them to be used here. Let's hope that his influence makes a difference.

Reading last week's BMJ, with all these innovations in medicine that will make such a difference to millions of people, was a joy. There was an air of optimism about it that was in so much contrast with all the political and financial news around the world. I wonder why these advances in health care seldom reach our news programmes?