Swine flu alarm

This is a post to allow readers to discuss the swine flu public health emergency.

Here's a list of our reports on this issue to date:

Full story of the swine flu epidemic here:

Early stories:
Complacency warning as swine flu spread slows
Swine flu cases pass thousand
Pigs catch swine flu from man
Hundreds in flu testing
Swine flu alerts raised as spread continues
Swine flu spreads - causes mild illness
Swine flu travels the globe
New flu vaccine hope
swine flu alarm.



Englemed has no more information about this item than is reported in the stories or is available in other related news items and cannot give advice.

Music - the food of the heart

This is a post to allow readers to discuss the item:

Music - the food of the heart

Englemed has no more information about this item than is reported in the story or is available in other related news items and cannot give advice.

Broccoli and the stomach

This is a post to allow readers to discuss the item:
Broccoli fights deadly stomach bug

Englemed has no more information about this item than is reported in the story or is available in other related news items and cannot give advice.

Bananas and blood pressure

This is a post to allow readers to discuss the item
Banana boost for blood pressure

Englemed has no more information about this item than is reported in the story or is available in other related news items and cannot give advice.

Tanning injections

This is a post to allow readers to discuss the news item:

Tanning injections bring health risks

Englemed has no more information about this story than is reported in the news item and cannot give any advice.

Comment

This is a post to allow readers to post comments on the news service in general or ask for a discussion thread on a particular news topic. We're going to set up some discussion threads on some of our most popular news items.

We're on Facebook!

I've never been sure about this thing, Facebook, but recently took a tentative step into it. On my personal page friends rapidly accumulated and chit chat flowed. So there's now a page for Englemed on Facebook. It brings together some of our material - mainly that of interest to the youngish group who use Facebook - so the emphasis will be on family health news.

We'll also add occasional links to other articles of interest. For instance Andrew Wadge of the UK Food Standards Agency runs an impressive blog - which we link to from here.

You find it simply by searching for "Englemed" within Facebook. If you're a Facebook regular it's an easy way to check out some of our material - stories will simply appear on your "wall" if you sign on as a fan.

April Fools?

So far no sign of a good medical April Fool today. Perhaps everyone has learnt their lessons.

Reading the daily welter of health and medical headlines, you can of course never be sure.

Doctors may be feeling their pay rise announcement is a joke - but strictly speaking that was announced yesterday.  Both our lead stories - an allergenic substance in shampoo and a new treatment for MRSA - were announced yesterday so they also are safe.

There's a welter of announcements from the UK Department of Health to mark the new financial year. I think they are meant to be serious although most wise people are avoiding making announcements today.

The BMJ has published a deadly serious story today - no chance of it being a spoof - and I happen to know that the lead author Chris Ham is a real person.

Aah, now here's a possible spoof on the Beeb: donkey milk and nine other ways to live to 100. The tips include fried egg and sausage sandwich. They've covered themselves by quoting from apparently real centenarians - so no evidence that these diets will help the ordinary Joe Bloggs.

Lifestyle the key - it's a secret!

There's new evidence this week that European medicine is failing to tackle unhealthy lifestyles. Back in September we had a big grumble about the state of British medicine.

Now European researchers have concluded that just one third of high risk patients are referred to lifestyle programmes - by that they mean people with high blood pressure, high cholesterol and too much weight.

Instead doctors and health systems rely on treating patients by drugs, according to the EuroAspire report. This was my comment back in September.

It is in fact the same team whose work formed the basis of my September posting and at the time they did not mention the over-reliance on drugs. But they could already see evidence that European medicine, including Britain, has not taken on board the evidence about lifestyle collected by the Americans.

I still think they are right. British primary care is now finely organised to find high risk patients and this is likely to get better. But the answer, when a problem is found, is usually pills. To be fair, not always. Where I live they are now giving people free passes for the gym and swimming - but not much dietary advice. And the free passes are being snapped up by the worried well.

Are Professor David Wood and his team wrong? What do you think?

Another embargo break

Where now for embargoes? Today sees another major break in the dam. The culprit so far as my monitoring can tell is The Times - that is the Times of London, for non-UK readers.

Another indication that something is afood is that The Times has gone to a lot of trouble to break a non-story. Their headline today - published at 11.11pm GMT on the web, is "Vitamin D is ray of sunshine for multiple sclerosis patients". This is not new and the latest research, which was due to be published at 10pm GMT on Thursday seems to be merely a scientific study explaining why this seems to be the case. Vitamin D generally requires sunshine and those of us who live in the northern half of the northern hemisphere do not get as much exposure as others.

A sad memo arrives from the publisher PLos Genetics: "Dear Colleagues, Please note that the embargo on this article has now been lifted due to an embargo break. We apologize for any inconvenience.
*****************************************************************************************************************
* * * * * EMBARGO: Thursday, 5th February 2009 * * * * * *
2PM PDT/ 5PM ET/ 10PM GMT ."

Please don't apologise. It's not your fault! As the release had been posted in the embargoed section of Eurekalert! you have to wonder what the fall out will be.

Dog eats dog over embargo row

Last year we predicted that embargo policies were going to come under increasing pressure because of on-line news (Englemed respects embargoes but with difficulty) and also because of the difficulty of observing US Time zones.

Yes, that's what has happened - and an almighty transatlantic row has broken out. The American Association for the Advancement of Science is affronted at European and British, in particular, attitudes and has been busy suspending or removing local outlets from access to its well-established Eurekalert! database. I'm told that organisations as diverse as The Telegraph, Die Welt and Ansa News have been suspended. The biggest row seems to be over the removal of the tabloid Sun newspaper from Eurekalert! over a science story Life on Mars.The Sun was later reinstated as a freelance had supplied the story.

Now the Association of British Science Writers is apparently to conduct a review of embargo policies. The UK Press Gazette has the story and the ABSW blog has some insights into the whole saga. More on this later maybe.

Meanwhile here's another embargo breach today, this time by the venerable old BBC. Wonder whether they will have their access suspended? You have to look at the times and dates - there is a 90 minute discrepancy.

Christmas confusion lasts for decades

A curious example of the kind of confusion caused by those light-hearted Christmas medical journals cropped up this week.

The British Medical Journal printed a letter in which a doctor admitted making up a condition some 30 years ago. The condition, dubbed Cello Scrotum, was supposed to be an injury acquired by cellists. It was a fiction, a prank.

Nevertheless there it was in a respected medical journal. So in December it was recycled in a further light-hearted article in the BMJ about musical maladies. It must be hard enough being a cellist without having to worry about damage to your manhood.

So at last the authoress of the original letter owned up. By now she has risen to great heights and is Baroness Elaine Murphy, a member of the British House of Lords.

The Baroness owned up but in an unrepentant kind of fashion. She stated: "We have been dining out on this story ever since. We were thrilled once more to be quoted in 'A symphony of maladies.'"

Trusting the media?

A fascinating study from Japan today where researchers argue that the mass media actually improves health.

The press release was headed "Trust me, I'm a journalist." The implication is that where people have faith in their mass media, they tend to absorb healthy living messages and improve their health.

The findings come from a major survey of 29 Asian countries involving tens of thousands of people, so they should not be sneezed at. In fact you would expect me to agree with them. After all the whole point of a health news service is to ensure everyone is better informed - and that readers and users learn to make sensible judgements about what's good and bad for you.

However there's a question of cause and effect here. Do the people of the Maldives trust the media because it is trustworthy - or because they are a little naive? And what makes the people of Hong Kong cynical? Their history?

So what's not clear from this study is whether it is the quality of the local media that makes a difference. Or whether it is the willingness of the public to take in the messages disseminated by mass media of all kinds that improves health. After all in Britain the experience is that the "mass media" can do enormous harm as well as good. Measles is currently on the rampage because of a false scare about the MMR vaccine.

You would have thought that a certain amount of informed scepticism would be the right way to treat media messages. Certainly not outright cynicism. Intelligent readership will recognise that every breakthrough, every scare, every bit of new advice may be wrong - but it also may be right. Without the mass media, people might not recognise the dangers of obesity, of poor diet and of smoking. It's no coincidence that the Asian researchers also linked health to educational levels.

Recognising that no single report can be taken in isolation, we try to present a complete news service here.

Merry Christmas?

No I didn't forget it was last week. I wanted to point out there is a tradition of jollity in the world of medical news that is in danger of being fractured by the advent of e-publishing.

The way it worked was this. The press releases for each week's British Medical Journal and Lancet would be issued, embargoed, for publication every Friday. It meant that both eminent journals released their Christmas issues the Friday before Christmas - and the Christmas issue was traditionally pretty wacky.

Over the last year the embargoed Friday press releases have all but ceased. Articles are published on the internet first. Embargoes are enforced but they can be any day of the week.

This year's Christmas British Medical Journal stories were released on Thursday 18th and they were certainly a crazy mixture. We headed the story Head-bangers, texting, Twist and Slam.There was a second one about common medical myths. It is true that some of the reports contain a germ of seriousness - but it was interesting that so far ahead of Christmas a number of reporters seemed to report some of these items with po-faced seriousness.

And of course the Lancet did not come out the same day. In fact it does not seem to have had a comparable collection of stories - although a series of reports trickled out. There was the one about the woman who fainted after eating sandwiches. And another one about sneezing emerged so late that we did not bother to report it.