Jacqui Smith’s decision to upgrade cannabis to Class B from Class C is pure political posturing designed to persuade Middle England that the Government is tough on drugs. Classification is irrelevant. How many 14 year olds, about to puff on their first joint, will have any idea whether the drug they are ingesting is class C or B or what it means?
Far more helpful to parents and to those young people bent on trying the drug would be clear advice about how to minimise the risks. Cannabis is Britain’s most popular illegal drug used by 2.5 million people a year. Threatening users with an increase in the maximum prison sentence from two years (under Class C) to five years (Class B) for possession will not stop them experimenting.
The big question raised by today's latest scare about vitamin pills increasing mortality is: why? How could a simple vitamin supplement, boosting what is found naturally in the diet, shorten life? The researchers, whose findings based on a review of 67 trials involving 232,000 subjects were published by the highly respected Cochrane Library, do not offer an explanation. But in previous research by the same group, led by Goran Bjelakovich, published in the Lancet in 2004, they did come up with a suggestion.
Vitamins are organic nutrients, essential for normal metabolism and good health. But there is a difference between the life-long physiological effects of small amounts ingested in the diet from childhood and pharamcological doses of the same micronutirents taken over a few years in early adulthood or middle age.
Make no mistake, the Government's plans to offer checkups to everyone over 40 is not just about saving lives - it is about saving the NHS. Of course ministers are good and altruistic beings who care deeply about the welfare of their fellow citizens. But behind their concern lie some hard nosed calcultations about the escalating cost of provioding health services to an ageing nation.
When it comes to sex the biggest risk is complacency. That is what lies behind the 1,200 per cent rise in syphilis cases in the UK over the last decade – and similar rises in all sexually transmitted infections (Chlamydia, herpes, gonorrhoea, HIV). In the 1980s, fear of HIV compelled young people to approach sex with caution, choosing their partners and their method of contraception – condoms – with care. But once HIV became treatable, with antiretroviral drugs, sex appeared less risky than it had.
In the last decade a more relaxed attitude to casual sex, an increase in drug taking, binge drinking and risky behaviour has contributed to what has become an epidemic of sexual infections. What can be done?
As if we didn't know, today's survey by the Food Standards Agency shows when it comes to food, gut instincts rule. Scientists may tell us that GM foods are just as safe, or just as risky, as non-GM foods, but we don't believe them and the "Frankenstein" creations are consigned to outer darkness - or dumped in the rubbish. Advice from experts that chicken, if properly cooked, is safe to eat even when it comes from a factory infected with bird flu is rejected in favour of neighbourhood gossip that says don't touch it with a barge pole.
In the food debate, the opinion of friends and family often carries more weight than the science and worries about safety outrank worries about health.
The revelation today that antidepressants don’t work – from the first study of published and unpublished trials submitted when the drugs were licensed - raises an immediate question. Why is it that the authorities responsible for licensing the drugs – the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency in the UK – have access to this unpublished data while the body that decides whether it should be used by the NHS – the National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE) – does not? NICE only gets what the drug companies agree to give it – yet our lives and our health and the health of the NHS depend on its handing out the right advice. It is an extraordinary - and worrying - state of affairs.
Why are doctors so opposed to the idea of polyclinics? As my colleague, Ben Chu, has pointed out, the medical profession is lining up against the idea proposed by Lord Darzi to modernise primary care in large cities like London. Steve Field, chairman of the RCGP, is the latest to damn the idea as "Martini" healthcare - anytime, anywhere, any doctor - in a speech today. Unlike Ben, however, I am left entirely puzzled by their arguments.
The BMA has missed a trick in its dispute with the Government over extended opening hours. We live in a consumer age when patients expect to be able to see their doctor at a time convenient to them - just as they have long been accustomed to at the bank, supermarket and garage. But the BMA seems reluctant to move with the times. Doctors have dramatically improved standards of care in recent years, but less so standards of service - reception in many surgeries is still seen as a barrier to be overcome rather than as an aid to gaining access to care. Now the Government has tired of the foot dragging and is taking the profession on - with the threat of privatisation if they don't play ball.
Alan Johnson gave a spirited defence today of the Government’s much criticised “deep clean” strategy which will see every hospital scrubbed from top to bottom by next April. Rejecting an attack by the Lancet that there was no scientific justification for the move, which is costing £57m in England, he replied that there was “plenty of evidence” that it was what people wanted.
People who beg for the NHS to be “taken out of politics” should ponder his remark – and lament the impossibility of what they seek.
Churlish is the word that springs to mind to describe the UK Government’s determination to oppose EU plans to open up its borders to medical tourists. This is a Government supposedly committed to extending choice in health care, as a lever for change. But when it comes to patients choosing between the NHS and other countries' health systems, the Government wants to pull up the drawbridge.
How many patients are likely to take advantage, if and when the plans take effect? You would have to have a very strong reason indeed to travel from say Hull to Hanover for your operation, with all the travel costs and inconvenience involved. Long waits were a key reason for dissatisfaction with the NHS a few years ago, but they have fallen spectacularly and are set to fall further, so the gain for the “tourists” is diminishing.
Might patients travel to escape infection with MRSA? Perhaps – the Netherlands has very low rates – but against that are the drawbacks of going abroad for treatment, including language and cultural barriers (beware of the nurse bearing a suppository in France – the favoured way of administering drugs) and the difficulty of organising follow-up treatment (who patches you up when things go wrong?)
The long running feud between Mohammed Taranissi and the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority has been something to behold. Today's settlement of Mr Taranissi's libel action, with a complete retraction of the allegations that he had inflated his live birth rate and promoted a worthless treatment, is a humiliation for the HFEA. But that is unlikely to be the end of it.
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