The News of the World is to close

The News of the World is to close on Sunday. See Guardian blog post. That's excellent news! Thank goodness we still have some ethical newspapers, among them the Guardian.

The Guardian reports that less than half of doctors and nurses in the NHS intend to have the swine flu vaccine.

The Guardian reports that less than half of doctors and nurses in the NHS are intending to have the swine flu vaccine. "There are growing signs that large numbers of workers will shun the jabs because they see them as unnecessary and potentially unsafe."

See Might Swine Flu Vaccine increase Risk of Cancer?
Concerns about safety of swine flu vaccine
Drug firms dodge swine flu liability

You can boost your immunity to infection by cutting down on salt and salty food. Good nutrition has no adverse side-effects.

Free flights, meals and match tickets given to doctors by drug companies can damage patient care, say critics

Drug giants accused over doctors' perks
Article from the Guardian

Extracts:

"Drug companies are spending millions of pounds every year on all-expenses-paid trips to conferences around the world for doctors and other hospital staff, in what critics say is a massive marketing exercise dressed up as medical education.

The Guardian can reveal the scale of pharmaceutical company sponsorship following an examination of the registers of gifts and donations to doctors that all hospitals are required to keep. They show considerable largesse - from drug companies regularly picking up hefty bills for travel to international conferences in Europe, Asia and America, to specialist nurses' salaries, and weekly sandwich lunches for hospital staff training sessions.

All-expenses-paid trips to conferences in the US, Vietnam or Hungary are a regular feature of the registers, costing the companies up to £5,000 per doctor. Many of the declarations by doctors do not put a price on the trip. The total amounts received by staff at individual hospital trusts with complete registers are substantial - Sheffield's staff received funding of more than £105,000 from pharmaceutical and medical devices companies in the 12 months to last June.

Examples of the firms' hospitality include:

· Astra Zeneca paid £2,500 for a doctor at the Royal Bournemouth trust and £1,500 for a doctor at Sheffield teaching hospital to attend a cancer conference in Texas

· Sanofi-Aventis, the world's fourth biggest pharmaceutical company, paid for doctors at the Countess of Chester trust to go to conferences in Cape Town, New Orleans and Barcelona. At Gateshead trust, their reps gave a breakfast for 30 staff "to discuss drugs for the treatment of breast cancer". The trust's register records that "the donor was seeking to secure business".

· Roche spent £2,000 for an oncology consultant at Addenbrooke's hospital in Cambridge to go to a conference in May last year.

· GSK, the biggest British pharmaceutical company, paid £1,200 for a consultant at Sheffield teaching hospital to attend the 11th international congress of Parkinson's disease and movement disorders in Turkey last June."

"Joe Collier, the recently retired professor of medicines policy at St George's hospital, London, a former member of the Medicines Commission and an adviser to the select committee, said: "Through its orchestrated campaigns affecting all those involved in the use of medicines, the pharmaceutical industry enormously influences what patients are prescribed. On the whole these influences are detrimental to best practice."

Payments to doctors are far from transparent. The Department of Health requires NHS trusts to compile registers of their medical staff's and directors' possible conflicts of interest and to make them available to the public. Only a minority do so. The Guardian requested the registers for 90 hospital trusts under freedom of information legislation. Only around a quarter returned data that included the names of the doctors and the sponsoring companies and the amounts of money received. Some refused to give any information at all.

Collier said this was unacceptable. "Declarations of interest are a key way to help break the pharmaceutical industry's stranglehold. It is not a trivial issue. Public declarations by doctors are essential if prescribing is to be sensible and appropriate and according to patients' needs.""

"Labour MP Paul Flynn described as "codswallop" the companies' claim that their only intention was to help educate doctors. "It's not true. It's part of a huge marketing budget. It's all about maximising their profits, not helping people in life-threatening situations," he said. "The influence of these companies is enormous."

Doctors who receive funding believe they are not influenced by it. Robert Storey, a consultant cardiologist at Sheffield involved in drug trials, took four trips to conferences in the year to June 2007 courtesy of Astra Zeneca at a total cost of £12,000. However, he regards these as business trips because he is asked to disseminate research findings and are funded from the R&D budget. More junior doctors have their funding arranged through the drug rep and must fly economy class under Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry (ABPI) rules.

"If it is done through the local rep, who may expect some sort of favour in exchange for that sponsorship, there is more stringent regulation," said Dr Storey. "[Those doctors] are seeing reps on a regular basis and although it is explicitly stated in the ABPI rules that there shouldn't be any conflict or conditions [on the funding], it probably does influence doctors' behaviour because they are unsure whether they will get further sponsorship for going to further meetings, so it is useful to them to engender good relationships with different reps."

I personally regard most of these expenses-paid junkets as bribery.

Tranquillisers are putting children's lives at risk

I don't understand why doctors who prescribe recklessly are not severely punished... I have copied the following from the latest Dr Rath Health Foundation newsletter
http://www4.dr-rath-foundation.org/Newsletter/archive/newsletter_2008_04_apr_18.html

Tranquillisers putting children's lives at risk
· Anti-psychotics may cause long-term harm, say critics
· Youngsters under 6 being given unlicensed drugs
New evidence has shown children's lives are being put at risk by a surge in the use of controversial tranquillising drugs which are being prescribed to control their behaviour, the Guardian has learned. The anti-psychotic drugs are being given to youngsters under the age of six even though the drugs have no licence for use in children except in certain schizophrenia cases, the report says. The number of children on the drugs has doubled since the early 1990s as the UK begins to follow a trend started in the US, but critics say they are a "chemical cosh" that could cause premature death.
Read article in The Guardian (UK)

2.5m children on drugs in US
Anti-psychotic drugs for children have taken off in the US on the back of a willingness to diagnose those with behavioural problems as having manic depression. Even children barely out of babyhood are getting a diagnosis of bipolar disorder, the modern term for the condition.
Read article in The Guardian (UK)

Easing of red tape by scrapping most Government-imposed public sector targets

Public sector targets to be scrapped - Guardian

Extract:

"A bonfire of government targets to ease red tape affecting schools, hospitals and town halls will be ordered tomorrow as part of a sweeping reform of public services, the Guardian can reveal. Most of the 110 Whitehall-imposed priorities that have dominated the public sector for the past nine years will be abandoned .

Andy Burnham, the chief secretary to the Treasury, is coordinating a move to end one of the defining characteristics of the Blair years by scrapping all but 30 top-down targets used to vet performance.

The targets - from raising the GCSE pass rate to reducing the fear of crime - helped to drive through the big pledges in Labour's election manifestos. But they rankled with doctors, teachers and other public servants who felt their professional discretion had been curtailed.

In an interview with the Guardian today, Mr Burnham set out a new approach, making local service chiefs responsible for setting performance objectives and answering to local communities if they are not ambitious enough. He said: "This is the opening of a new chapter ... If we get this right, the style of government will feel different. We want to give out a message of more trust in public bodies."

Under the system, there will be no more than 30 public service agreements, committing Whitehall departments to use their budgets over the three years to 2010/11 to achieve the government's goals."


Lose weight by eating less salt! Go on! - Try it! - You will feel so much better!
How to Lose weight!

Drink driving limit may be reduced from 80mg alcohol to 50mg to reduce road accident deaths.

Drivers face big cut in drink limit and random tests - Guardian

Extracts:

"Drivers face a drastic reduction in the drink-drive limit and the introduction of random roadside breath tests in a government crackdown on alcohol-related road deaths.

Stephen Ladyman, the roads minister, said a cut in the alcohol limit for motorists from 80mg to the European average of 50mg could be introduced, limiting drivers to a half pint of beer or small glass of wine.

Speaking after the publication of a Europe-wide study which showed the UK falling behind France and Sweden in reducing road deaths, Mr Ladyman said a public consultation this year would propose a reduction in the drink-drive limit.

At the same time, the government will consult on increasing police powers to enable officers to stop drivers at random. At present, police are limited to stopping motorists who are driving erratically or who have committed a moving traffic offence."

"Road safety campaigners have urged the government to introduce random breath tests, which they say will heighten drink-drivers' fears of being caught. The introduction of roadside tests in New South Wales, Australia, halved the drink-drive death rate. Figures from the European Transport Safety Council (ETSC) showed France had reduced road deaths by a third between 2001 and 2005, compared with a 7% drop in the UK."

"A spokesman for the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents said: "We would be delighted if the drink-drive limit was lowered. Between 50mg and 80mg, you are six times more likely to be involved in a fatal accident than someone with no alcohol. Reducing the limit from 80mg to 50mg would save around 65 lives and 230 serious injuries on the roads each year."

According to the ETSC, drink-drive deaths have fallen sharply in European countries apart from Britain and Spain. Drink-drive deaths in Germany and the Netherlands have fallen by more than 50% since 1998, but Britain has seen a 17% increase over the same period, from 410 in 1998 to 480 in 2005.

According to figures from the Department for Transport, 1,050 17- to 19-year-olds were involved in drink-drive accidents in England and Wales in 2005, compared with only 810 in 1995. For 20- to 25-year-olds, the figure increased from 2,170 to 2,280 in the same period."


Lose weight and improve mental alertness by eating less salt! - Go on! - Try it! - You will feel so much better!
See my website www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk
(The site does not sell anything and has no banners or sponsors or adverts - just helpful information.)

Expert patients failing to relieve NHS burden...

Expert patients failing to relieve NHS burden, report says - Guardian

Extract:

"So-called "expert patients", who are trained to coach people with illnesses including asthma, diabetes and pulmonary diseases, are giving patients confidence but are not reducing the strain on the NHS, the report says.

The expert patients programme is key to the government's plan to reduce reliance on hospital care for people with chronic illnesses. Launched in 2001, it has had £18m in funding and will involve 100,000 people by 2012.

The report finds that patients on the programmes are more confident about living with their conditions, but emergency admissions of the long-term ill have remained "stubbornly unaltered".

Stephanie Taylor, senior clinical lecturer, Centre for Health Sciences, Barts and The London, Queen Mary's School of Medicine and Dentistry, said: "The people who fund the programmes should be aware of the lack of evidence supporting their use.""

Most chronic illness is caused or exacerbated by salt sensitivity, which in turn is mostly caused by overprescribing of powerful drugs like steroids, HRT and antidepressants, coupled with misinformation from the medical profession about the causes of obesity. - See http://www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk/conditions.html
http://www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk/story.html
http://www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk/vulnerable_groups.html
http://www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk/socio.html

Lose weight by eating less salt! Go on! - Try it! - You will feel so much better!
See my website www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk
(The site does not sell anything and has no banners or sponsors or adverts - just helpful information.)

Nursing mothers may gain the right to breastfeed their babies in cafes and shops.

Equality laws enshrine mothers' right to breastfeed in public - Guardian

Extract:

"New mothers will gain the right to breastfeed their babies in cafes and shops under proposed changes to equality laws announced yesterday.

The move to rationalise 40 years of piecemeal equality legislation, unveiled by the communities secretary, Ruth Kelly, would extend protection against discrimination for pregnant women and mothers with young babies beyond employment rights for the first time.

It would mean that women breastfeeding infants of up to a year could no longer be told to leave cafes, shops and other places - still a relatively frequent occurrence according to campaigners.

In Scotland the law was changed more than two years ago to make it an offence for any venue that normally admits children to prevent a mother breastfeeding.

The planned reform banning discrimination against pregnant women and new mothers in goods and services is contained in a green paper aimed at streamlining and plugging gaps in the UK's complex equality law. But the paper was attacked by a range of campaigners yesterday for failing to go far enough."

If these plans become law, the removal of some difficulties re: breastfeeding in public bodes well for child health. High salt/sodium intake is the main cause of obesity (because of fluid retention) in children. And breast milk, apart from the usually extolled virtues tha benefit the baby, is very low in sodium content and therefore does not set the baby on the road to obesity. The longer the breastfeeding continues, the better the protection from obesity. And since obesity brings in its wake the risk of a host of attendant health deficits - high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, depression, heart disease, etc etc - all of which are currently increasing in children. - You can read more about this on page http://www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk/children.html and
My Mensa article on Obesity and the Salt Connection

Lose weight by eating less salt! Go on! - Try it! - You will feel so much better!
See my website http://www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk/
(The site does not sell anything and has no banners or sponsors or adverts - just helpful information.)

A government consultation paper aims to change and rationalise some of the UK's discrimination legislation, e.g. relating to golf club membership.

Equality bill set to curb golf club discrimination - Guardian

Extract:

"Golf clubs and other private members' establishments will no longer be able to ban women members from their bars or discriminate in any other way on gender grounds under a shakeup of equality laws unveiled today.

The change is outlined in a government consultation paper aimed at rationalising the UK's complex web of discrimination legislation, some of which dates back 40 years, and introducing new protection for some groups.

Planned reforms include compelling private landlords to put in ramps and stairlifts for disabled tenants who request it, although the tenant would have to pay.

Changes to rules affecting private clubs and associations would mean those with mixed membership could no longer treat women differently.

Some golf clubs give female members limited access to club facilities or bar them from the running of the club.

The Carlton Club, the Conservative party's gentleman's club of choice, rejected a move last month to elevate women from "half member" status to full membership.

A source at the Department of Communities and Local Government, which is publishing today's green paper, said: "We firmly believe that people being treated as second class citizens when a club is open to all is simply not on."

However, in a move that will spare gentlemen's clubs without female members and the few remaining all-male working men's clubs, the government will also make clear it will not prevent the setting up of private clubs aimed solely at one gender or group.

While women's groups are expected to welcome the reform, campaigners believe the government must go far further in tackling more fundamental equality issues."

It is so much more important to outlaw the sex discrimination within the medical profession, that results in a woman with the same symptoms (e.g. of heart disease) as a man, finding that she is less likely to be physically examined and less likely to be offered tests and/or treatment than a man. Medics are inclined to regard a woman's reported physical symptoms as imaginary/psychogenic/exaggerated/hypochondriacal, etc despite their physicality, and this is very damaging to women's health. There is a wealth of research that bears this out, but nothing is done to legislate against this harmful practice. We all, male and female, pay taxes that fund the health service, but women usually get an inferior service.

Similarly, the most damaging ageism is practised by health professionals. - It is so blatant as to be a national scandal and it intermittently receives widespread coverage in the press. - But we still lack legislation to outlaw it.

Many doctors are also, in practice, discriminating against disabled people, e.g. people with learning difficulties, and this too tends to get quite widely reported, but nothing is done to prevent it by law.

How does equal membership of a golf club matter compare in importance to equality of access to appropriate health care and equal courtesy from our grossly overpaid, prejudiced medical profession?


Lose weight by eating less salt! Go on! - Try it! - You will feel so much better!
See my website www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk
(The site does not sell anything and has no banners or sponsors or adverts - just helpful information.)

Here's a rare thing: an honest doctor who admits to mistakes! - Atul Gawande

You can't get it right every time - Guardian

Extract:

""Most of the time, they are patients whom I think I've done all I possibly could for, so I can accept it. But there are always the others. Six months ago, I was performing a thyroid operation on a teacher my age and damaged a nerve that led to her vocal cords. This woman can no longer talk and has had to give up work. The only way I can live with myself is to try to do all I can for her and understand what I did wrong and do better next time. Being sorry is not enough."

Gawande is a general surgeon at the Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston and assistant professor at Harvard Medical School. And he still makes mistakes. It's this uncomfortable wound that he has opened up, first in Complications - his bestselling book that was shortlisted for the National Book prize in the US and became the inspiration for the TV series Grey's Anatomy - and now in his follow-up, Better.

"What I'm interested in is failure," he says, "as it's the one area of medicine with which the professionals are often reluctant to engage because the stakes we are playing for are so high. We can fail by putting a decimal point in the wrong place and by not asking the right questions. If you ask any doctor when he or she last made a misdiagnosis, the truthful answer would always be in the last month. We get things wrong and we try to put them right. And, of course, we can fail with a slip of the hand. I once performed an emergency trachaeotomy in which I did everything wrong. I had the wrong knife, the wrong lights and I made the wrong incision. There was blood everywhere and the patient would have died if a colleague hadn't stepped in to help. It was horrific."

If his call for willingness to ruthlessly examine what goes wrong and why is not always shared by other doctors, then neither will be the second part of his prescription for demystifying failure. Mention league tables to most doctors and they start spitting blood, but Gawande is adamant that there is a value in open accountability. "You have to be careful you are comparing like with like," he says, by way of a caveat, "because otherwise the data can be meaningless. For instance, death rates for cardiac surgeons can vary hugely, depending on the age of their patients and the difficulty of the procedures they are undertaking. But we shouldn't allow this to disguise the fact that some surgeons and some hospitals get better results than others. And unless we are prepared to admit this, we'll never improve the overall success rates."

As an example, Gawande cites both the case of the paediatric team at a hospital in Cleveland, Ohio, who virtually single-handedly raised the average life expectancy of cystic fibrosis patients from three years old in 1957 to 33 in 2003, simply by providing aggressive preventive treatment before sufferers became visibly sick from it. You could argue that such successes are largely a matter of money, but Gawande disagrees. "We spend huge amounts of cash on healthcare in the US," he says, "and not all of it is very effective. Infection rates in hospitals are proof of this. Some hospitals have spent a small fortune on portable $5,000 hand-washing machines [superbugs are as rife in America as they are in Britain], but their infection rates have remained as high as before.

"The one hospital in the US that has managed to reduce infection to almost zero did so not by spending money but by analysing procedures. They asked doctors and nurses how they used the system and found that the alcohol gel dispensers were in the wrong place, the gowns they needed for the 3pm ward rounds were in the wrong place and that it was better to have a single stethoscope designated for each patient's sole use than for a doctor to carry his own from patient to patient.""

It's heart-warming to read, "This woman can no longer talk and has had to give up work. The only way I can live with myself is to try to do all I can for her and understand what I did wrong and do better next time. Being sorry is not enough." - Sadly Atul Gawande is rare among doctors in having this moral attitude. - Victims of medical error are mostly abandoned by the health professionals who have harmed them. That is certainly the norm in Britain. - See http://aboutsalt.blogspot.com/search/label/Andrea%20Carey and http://aboutsalt.blogspot.com/search/label/NHS%20Complaints
http://www.sin-medicalmistakes.org/
http://www.patientprotect.org/

I regard the failure of doctors to tell the truth about the causes of obesity as probably the most colossal group negligence in the history of medicine.

Obesity is not caused by overeating. It is caused by fluid retention in people who are vulnerable to salt. - See Mensa article about Obesity and the Salt Connection

Lose weight by eating less salt! Go on! - Try it! - You will feel so much better!
See my website www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk
(The site does not sell anything and has no banners or sponsors or adverts - just helpful information.)

One in four children overweight by age three

One in four children are overweight by age three - Guardian

Extract:

"Almost one in four children are overweight or obese by the age of three, a UK-wide survey reveals today.

The study, the biggest of its kind, measured the height and weight of 14,000 children aged three. Preliminary results reveal that 18% were overweight and a further 5% obese.

The head of the research, Professor Carol Dezateux, said the findings were "of great public health concern".

The government has made cutting childhood obesity a priority after research showed levels had trebled since the 1980s. It is committed to improving diet and boosting physical activity to halt the year-on-year rise in child obesity by 2010.

Today's study found children in Northern Ireland and Wales were more likely to be overweight or obese than those living in England and Scotland. But those in less advantaged areas of England and Scotland were slightly more likely to be overweight or obese than those living in more advantaged areas."

It's incredible that the 'experts' still do not realise that child obesity is caused by children eating food with a high salt content. They become bloated with excess water. Exercise does not reduce obesity in children. - See http://aboutsalt.blogspot.com/2006/10/exercise-has-little-effect-on.html

See http://www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk/children.html

Lose weight by eating less salt! Go on! - Try it! - You will feel so much better!
See my website www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk
(The site does not sell anything and has no banners or sponsors or adverts - just helpful information.)

New meningitis vaccine may end meningitis epidemics in west Africa

New meningitis vaccine may end epidemics in west Africa - Guardian

Extract:

"The deadly meningitis epidemics that sweep across Africa killing many thousands of children could be ended by a new vaccine which has just been successfully trialled, scientists say today.

The vaccine has been developed by a Seattle-based non-profit organisation called the Programme for Appropriate Technology in Health (Path), together with the World Health Organisation and an Indian vaccine producer.

Collectively they call themselves the Meningitis Vaccine Project. Preliminary results of a trial amongst 600 toddlers aged 12 to 23 months in Mali have shown that it is substantially more effective than other vaccines against the meningitis A strain that periodically ravages west Africa. It produced levels of antibodies that were 20 times higher than anything before in the children."

Britain's soil is becoming less polluted

Carcinogen levels in soil falling thanks to tough rules, says study - Guardian

Extract:

"Britain's soil is getting cleaner, with levels of cancer-causing pollutants dropping in the last 20 years because of strict regulation of chemical emissions into the environment, according to a study.

The UK soil and herbage survey provides the first comprehensive picture of the concentrations of the most significant contaminants in soil and vegetation across the country."


Lose weight by eating less salt! Go on! - Try it! - You will feel so much better!
See my website www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk
(The site does not sell anything and has no banners or sponsors or adverts - just helpful information.)

Hospitals fail to meet waiting times in over half of cases

NHS trusts fail on waiting times - Guardian

Extract:

"Less than half of NHS patients are receiving hospital treatment within the government's flagship waiting-time target of 18 weeks, new figures revealed today.

Only 48% of patients in England are treated within 18 weeks and 12.4% have to wait more than a year for treatment, according to figures published by the Department of Health today.

The results cast doubt on whether the government can meet its promise that all patients would be treated within this time by the end of 2008.

Patients in south-east England suffered the longest waits for hospital treatment with only a third seen within the target time."


Lose weight by eating less salt! Go on! - Try it! - You will feel so much better!
See my website www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk
(The site does not sell anything and has no banners or sponsors or adverts - just helpful information.)

Stem cells have been created from ordinary skin cells...

Stem cell breakthrough paves way for tailor-made new treatments - Guardian

Extract:

"Stem cells capable of making any tissue in the body have been created from ordinary skin cells, a world first that paves the way for revolutionary new treatments tailored to individual patients.

The pioneering research overcomes one of the most pressing ethical issues faced by stem cell scientists today - that the most promising variety of stem cells known can be obtained only from embryos, which are cannibalised when the cells are collected.

Researchers claim the new technique can produce stem cells without harming embryos. In a series of papers published today, they describe experiments in which skin cells were plucked from adult mice and "reprogrammed", turning them into cells that are indistinguishable from embryonic stem cells, the only kind thought to be able to grow into all of the body's tissue types.

The breakthrough is expected to overcome a major hurdle that has severely hampered progress in stem cell research. For any stem cell treatment to be useful, it has to work without causing an immune reaction in patients. This means scientists must either create enormous stockpiles of different stem cells, which can then be matched to patients, much as organs are before transplant operations. Or, scientists have to perfect a technique called therapeutic cloning, in which a cell taken from a patient is cloned to produce stem cells that are an exact genetic match. Neither is simple.

The research points to a new way around the problem, suggesting it may be possible to take any cell from a patient and convert into an embryonic stem cell. This could then be used to grow batches of other tissues for future operations, such as neurons and heart cells.

Two teams, one lead by Shinya Yamanaka at Kyoto University and the other by Rudolf Jaenisch at the Whitehead Institute at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, announced details of their research in the journal Nature today.

Both groups took skin cells from adult mice and injected them with a harmless virus that was genetically modified to carry four carefully selected genes, known as Oct4, Sox2, c-Myc and Klf4. Together the genes rewound the clock on the adult cells, returning them to a youthful state in which they could then grow into any other cell type."


Lose weight by eating less salt! Go on! - Try it! - You will feel so much better!
See my website www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk
(The site does not sell anything and has no banners or sponsors or adverts - just helpful information.)

Contaminated Aids drug, Viracept, recalled.

Contaminated Aids drug is recalled throughout Europe - Guardian

Extracts:

"An unprecedented emergency recall of all stocks of an Aids drug in the UK and the rest of Europe was ordered last night because the tablets contain a dangerously high level of a cancer-causing chemical.

All those taking the drug Viracept are being asked to see their doctor immediately so that they can be prescribed an alternative medicine.

Investigators are trying to find out what happened at the plant in Switzerland where Viracept is manufactured. It is understood that the contamination could have occurred in March and affected supplies of the drug for three months. That would mean large quantities of contaminated drugs have already been consumed."

"Roche, the Swiss manufacturers, said last night that some 550 people were on Viracept in the UK. It is one of the earlier antiretroviral drugs and most people who were on it will now have been switched to something newer. But there will still be many thousands on Viracept across Europe, particularly in less wealthy countries.

It is also widely used in Africa since campaigners fought a long battle in 2002 to persuade Roche to drop the price there. They succeeded in the following year."

"Roger Pebody, treatment adviser of the Terrence Higgins Trust, said that anybody taking the drug should not miss a dose, because it can lower the effectiveness of the virus suppression, but should contact their doctor immediately.

"It is essential that people who are taking it go to their doctor immediately in the next day and work out with their doctor the best way to proceed," he said. "That is putting people under a lot of pressure but you would not want to leave off one or two doses.""


Boost your body's natural defences against infection by cutting down on salt and salty food!

Lose weight by eating less salt! Go on! - Try it! - You will feel so much better!
See my website www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk
(The site does not sell anything and has no banners or sponsors or adverts - just helpful information.)

Pros and cons of taking HRT - mostly cons...

The truth about HRT - Guardian

Extract from a l-o-n-g article:

"In 1966, one of those epoch-changing books was launched on a generation of women around the age of 50. It told them that they did not have to lose out on the hormonal revolution. In fact, it implied it was their duty not to lose out. Forever Feminine, by In 1966, one of those epoch-changing books was launched on a generation of women around the age of 50. It told them that they did not have to lose out on the hormonal revolution. In fact, it implied it was their duty not to lose out. Forever Feminine, by Dr Robert Wilson, a gynaecologist in Manhattan, told them that the menopause was a disease that could be treated. They could stay well, beautiful and sexually active - they could, in fact, continue to please their husbands - if they took hormone therapy. They must simply replace the oestrogen their bodies had stopped producing.

It was the beginning of a myth that has resolutely refused to die - that HRT will undo the ageing process. Over most of the past four decades, women have been prescribed HRT for all sorts of reasons, not just to stop menopausal hot flushes and night sweats and strengthen their bones, but to improve their sex life, their hair, their skin and their morale. For a long time it was almost a case of, well, why not?

Wilson's book was funded by Wyeth, one of the biggest manufacturers of HRT. But that fact did not emerge until 2002, when his son admitted it to the New York Times just the day after a major trial - astonishingly, the first randomised controlled trial on the effect of HRT on women - was stopped three years early. The trial, known as the Women's Health Initiative (WHI), was set up after repeated calls from women's health activists to find out whether, as drug companies and doctors believed, HRT prevented heart disease. Shockingly, it found the opposite to be true. By far the most common form of treatment, which combines oestrogen and progestin, actually increases the risk of heart attacks, blood clots and strokes. The investigators pulled the plug when they found that women taking it also had a greater chance of invasive breast cancer. The WHI is one of the two biggest and most important studies ever carried out on the effects of HRT. The other is the Million Women Study in the UK, which has published a series of papers on breast cancer and other risks with HRT. The latest bad news from this hugely respectable study, published in the Lancet in April, is that HRT must have caused 1,000 deaths from ovarian cancer between 1991 and 2005.

So that means HRT has now been linked to ovarian cancer, invasive breast cancer, womb cancer (if you just take oestrogen), stroke, blood clots and coronary heart disease. This is just not an elixir of youth. Oh yes, there is a medical case for taking it if you are having a miserable menopause, flushing beetroot red at embarrassing moments and waking up with the sheets soaked - when you can sleep at all - at night. But the relief you get for those things, which don't in themselves kill you, has to be set against the alarming array of pretty nasty possible side effects., a gynaecologist in Manhattan, told them that the menopause was a disease that could be treated. They could stay well, beautiful and sexually active - they could, in fact, continue to please their husbands - if they took hormone therapy. They must simply replace the oestrogen their bodies had stopped producing.

If only doctors warned women to avoid eating salt and salty food while taking HRT (and many other drugs with the harmful side-effects of causing sodium and water retention) the majority of the possible and actual ill-effects would not happen.

See my webpage:
http://www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk/obesity_and_the_salt_connection.html
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The Nigerian government is suing the world's largest drug manufacturer, Pfizer, over trials of anti-meningitis drug that killed and disabled children

Nigeria sues Pfizer for £3.5bn over 'illegal' child drug trials - Guardian

Extract:

"The Nigerian government is suing the world's largest drug manufacturer, Pfizer, for £3.5bn in damages for allegedly carrying out illegal trials of an anti-meningitis drug that killed and disabled children.

The children died or suffered serious side effects when the antibiotic Trovan was administered in Kano during a meningitis outbreak in 1996.

The government of Kano, a northern state in Nigeria, also has civil and criminal cases pending against Pfizer.

The Nigerian authorities say 200 children were involved in the Trovan experiment, without the approval of local regulatory authorities. They allege that as many as 11 died because of the treatment and that others developed deformities, including brain damage and paralysis.

Trovan was approved in the US in 1997 for use by adults but not by children. Two years later the US Food and Drug Administration warned that the drug could cause liver damage. The medicine has since been discontinued."

A terrible tragedy...

And there are equal and lesser tragedies every day from prescription drugs...

There are so many pharmaceutical drugs that do terrible harm to patients, even when they have been fully tested and even when they have been being prescribed to patients for many years. - Prednisolone, another drug that Pfizer makes, harms many, many people in a host of ways - destroys their lives, in fact. As a steroid victim myself I have earned the right to give my opinion, and my opinion is this: pharmaceutical drugs do far, far, far more harm than good, and if you can possibly avoid taking them, I would advise that. - See http://aboutsalt.blogspot.com/search/label/dying%20patients and other blog entries I have made. - Have a look through my blog.

See also my website pages http://www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk/steroids.html
http://www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk/ami.html
http://www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk/story.html

Further gross negligence is revealed at the public inquiry into Britain's haemophilia HIV transfusion scandal

HIV transfusion victims unaware of virus for decades, inquiry told - Guardian

Extract:

"People infected with HIV after receiving contaminated blood transfusions are still unaware of their status and are at risk of infecting others with the disease, the public inquiry into Britain's haemophilia scandal was told yesterday.

The government has done little to follow up such victims - many of whom contracted the disease after just one blood transfusion in the mid-1980s and have lived with the condition for more than 20 years. In the cases which have come to light, patients have only been diagnosed following years of ill-health. It is feared they may have unwittingly infected others. Though the numbers affected may be small, it is a "serious problem", said Peter Stevens, who chairs the Eileen Trust support fund.

The revelation of a hidden group of people who contracted HIV through contaminated blood transfusions between 1983 and 1986 emerged as an independent public inquiry into how haemophiliacs were given contaminated blood sat for a third day of evidence yesterday.

A total of 4,670 people with haemophilia were infected with hepatitis C between the late 1970s and mid-1980s, of whom 1,200 were also infected with HIV. So far, 1,757 people with one or both of these viruses have died in a scandal the Labour peer Lord Winston has described as the "worst treatment disaster in the history of the NHS".

But people without bleeding disorders were also infected. It is not known how many have not yet been diagnosed - but seven people have come forward in the last five years, including an eight-year-old girl infected at birth by her mother, who had received a contaminated transfusion.

Mr Stevens told the inquiry: "We have people who have been HIV-positive for over 20 years and have received no medical attention for that condition until quite recently ... I cannot believe the latest registrant is the last. There are others out there who have HIV and are in the community, who may be married. They are a source of further infection. I think it's a very serious problem.""

The government is failing to act on a plan to tackle tuberculosis as cases of the disease increase.

Ministers accused of failing to act as TB cases grow - Guardian

Extract:

"The government is failing to act on a plan to tackle tuberculosis amid evidence that cases of the disease are rising, according to medical experts. They claim that officials are failing to give priority to controlling the potentially fatal disease in spite of a promise in October 2004 from the chief medical officer that he would aim to cut the number of cases within three years.

In 2005, there was an 11% rise in TB in the UK compared with 2004. In 2006 there was a further increase of 2%, with a total of 8,500 cases. In London, which has the highest number of infections each year, TB cases increased by 11.2% last year. Britain is the only country in western Europe experiencing a sustained rise in TB cases. The British Thoracic Society says nine out of 10 TB specialists believe the number of cases is likely to rise over the next five years. It is demanding that the Department of Health "takes more leadership on this issue".

About 400 TB patients die each year in the UK, mainly due to late diagnosis or complications of other illnesses. It usually affects the lungs, but sometimes other parts of the body, and can be spread when somebody with the infection coughs or sneezes. It cannot be caught by sharing items such as towels and cups or through someone spitting, and it cannot be passed on genetically. Symptoms include fever and night sweats, a persistent cough, losing weight and coughing or spitting blood. Just over 10% of people exposed for long enough to an infectious person will go on to develop the disease."

You can strengthen your immunity to infectious disease by cutting down on your salt intake. This improves your health in many other ways too.

Lose weight by eating less salt! Go on! - Try it! - You will feel so much better!
See my website www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk and
http://www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk/conditions.html
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