I went to the doctors this morning because of an irritating bad chest I’ve had for weeks and while I was there I asked him about the swine flu vaccinations and whether they have a list of at-risk patients already (#2 has a heart condition so I’m naturally interested to know).  He said they do have a list of people who are high risk, #2 is low risk with his heart condition as it’s not chronic but as a young child he’ll be one of the first to be offered the vaccine.

Interestingly and perhaps a little unsurprisingly, he said they were being inundated with calls about swine flu and the majority of the calls were from people anxious about swine flu or convinced they had it when they didn’t.  This is presumably why I got an engaged tone for 15 minutes this morning trying to get an appointment.  Does it help that the British government has told the general public that up to 65k people could die from swine flu?  In his opinion it wasn’t the best move, let’s just leave it at that.

The thing is, for the amount of people who have contracted swine flu, the number of deaths has been low.  Lower than you would expect with seasonal flu.  Yes, swine flu is spreading round the population faster than seasonal flu but that’s because we don’t have an immunity to it.  Having said that, Europeans seem to have a better natural defence to swine flu than Americans which would suggest that it may be something we’ve had here before.  Tens of thousands of people already have immunity to swine flu by virtue of having contracted it in the last couple of months.  By the end of the year, if all goes to plan, the whole population will be offered a vaccine.

So why the panic?  Why are the NHS (or, more properly, the British government) putting out information that’s causing panic?  We’re in an era of unprecedented access to information, it’s possible to lay your hands on more information about virtually anything from your living room than ever before.  This is the first major domestic public health problem we’ve had since most of the population got access to Google so perhaps the British government is thinking that the best way to satisfy peoples’ thirst for information is to give it to them, warts and all.  Or perhaps not …

There is a theory (you might call it a conspiracy theory) which quite a few people have arrived at that the Prime Mentalist is behind this.  Not that he has unleashed a swine flu virus created in a secret laboratory in a disused tube station (although I bet you could find someone who thinks that) but that he has presided over mismanagement of the epidemic to give him a crisis that he can use to increase his popularity and stop talk of an election.  How could we have an election in the middle of a swine flu pandemic?  Think of the public health risks.  Think of the disruption when we’re in the middle of a potentially disasterous flu epidemic.  How could you call an election under such circumstances and claim to have the interests of the country at heart?

And, of course, there is the vaccine.  The UK is the only country in the world to order enough vaccine for the whole population.  If and when the vaccine materialises – and assuming it doesn’t kill more people than swine flu does like the vaccine the Americans used in 1976 – then El Gordo will have been the Prime Minister that saved us all from the killer flu that would have killed up to 65k people but for his intervention.

The theory that he has allowed swine flu to take hold and spread scare stories in the media just so he can avoid an election and look good when it fails to wipe out half the population hinges on whether El Gordo’s insanity is so pronounced that he would sacrifice the lives of hundreds of people for personal gain.  I’m quite prepared to believe that he would do it, the only question for me is whether he will get caught out.

Technorati Tags: Swine Flu, Gordon Brown

A few weeks ago, I emailed Andy Burnham’s office at the Department of Health after watching him talk to the BBC for 5 minutes about the English NHS without once mentioning England.

Dear Mr Burnham,

I just listened to you talk about the English NHS for 5 minutes yet you didn’t mention the word England or English once.  You talked about “the NHS”, “the health service” and “the country” but all the time you were talking about the English NHS, the English health service and England.

You are an English Secretary of State for an English government department talking on national TV, broadcast to the whole of the UK and didn’t once point out that you were only talking about England.

I wonder how many Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish people you worried that they might be losing their free prescriptions, free hospital parking and expensive life-saving cancer drugs that your department says we can’t afford in England and how many English people you misled into believing that the rest of the UK would be helping to plug the gaping hole in the British budget when that’s not the case.

Is there any chance of you using the word England at any point during your job as Secretary of State for the English NHS?

Stuart

They replied a week and a half later …

Dear Mr Parr

Thank you for your email dated 10 June to Andy Burnham about England and the NHS.  I have been asked to reply.

The Department appreciates that not everybody in the UK will be aware that most matters of health policy have been devolved, and that Mr Burnham will generally only comment on the NHS in England.

I would like to thank you for your comments, which have been noted.

I hope this is helpful.

Yours sincerely,

Martin Gatty
Customer Service Centre

Right, so they appreciate that he’s been misleading the entire population but they’re going to do chuff all about it?

Hi,

Thank you for acknowledging my concerns and making note of my comments.

Perhaps you could now explain what you intend to do to ensure that most people do understand that Andy Burnham is only talking about England?

A simple solution would be to use the word “England” when he’s talking about England rather than “Britain” or “this country”.  I’m sure that would help people understand which country he is talking about.  Or perhaps the Minister has a better solution?

I look forward to hearing of your plans.

Regards,

Stuart

I got another reply shortly afterwards …

Dear Mr Parr,

Thank you for your further email to Andy Burnham about England and the NHS.  I have been asked to reply.

I regret that the Department cannot add to its previous reply to you dated 18 June or comment any further on this issue.

I am sorry I cannot be more helpful.

Yours sincerely,

Martin Gatty
Customer Service Centre

Right, so they appreciate my concerns, don’t answer my questions and then refuse to comment further.  That’s not on …

Thank you for your further response.

Can I assume, then, that the English Health Minister and English Department of Health will continue to pursue a policy of deliberately omitting the word “England” from publications or to refer to England as “Britain” or “the country”?

Stuart

And their predictable response …

Dear Mr Parr,

Thank you for your further email to the Department of Health about England , the UK and the NHS. I have been asked to reply.

As you are aware, the Department has already written to you previously regarding this matter, and I can only reiterate to you that there is nothing further the Department can add, and it will not be corresponding further with you on this issue.

Should you have any new concerns in the future that you wish to raise with the Department, then we will be happy to address those issues. I am sorry I cannot be more helpful.

Yours sincerely,

Martin Gatty
Customer Service Centre

Tossers.  I’ve just found Andy Burnham’s parliament email address so I’ll forward the email trail on to him and see if he thinks his department dealt with my email in an appropriate manner.

Technorati Tags: Andy Burnham, NHS

The Scottish couple who were the first in the UK to be diagnosed with swine flu have gone home today, covering their faces so as not to spoil their newspaper deal.

The Chief Medical Officer for England says that they won’t be routinely screening people returning from Mexico, even though that’s where the virus is coming from.  This is really quite unacceptable – we’re an island, we can close our borders and isolate ourselves rather than risk letting a virus that we don’t understand take root in the population.  Stopping British Airways from continuing its flights to Mexico City would be a good start.

There are now 8 confirmed cases of swine flu in the UK, 2 of which are no longer infected.  Most people have little or nothing to fear from swine flu, it’s really just the elderly and infirm and the very young that are at risk and there is plenty of medication available to treat it as long as any epidemic remains manageable.  But there is no excuse for sitting back and letting the virus spread whether we’re geared up to cope with it or not.

Technorati Tags: Swine Flu

At first I thought this swine flu thing was just scaremongering by the media but now I realise that it’s serious – probably more serious than even the Daily Mail could imagine.

Check your spam folder for online pharmacy emails and order in as much Tamiflu as you can lay your hands on.  Get down to your local hardware store and buy all their stocks of face masks.

The prime minister has said Britain is “among the best prepared countries in the world” to deal with the outbreak

As if Jonah talking about swine flu wasn’t dangerous enough, this is almost exactly the same thing he said as the recession kicked in and now we’re being told that we’re probably going to be hit the hardest.

We’re doooooooooooooomed.

Being serious for a moment, there are very few cases of swine flu and no deaths outside of Mexico and the British government reckons it has enough flu medication to treat 30m people.  Four UK airlines have stopped flying to Mexico, two are flying holidaymakers out of Mexico but British Airways is still flying to Mexico City 4 times a week.  Banning travel to and from Mexico for a bit might help prevent the spread of swine flu, as would banning anyone who’s recently been to Mexico from coming into the country.  The technology is there at all ports, it is possible to enforce such a ban if one was ordered.

On a number of occassions recently I have speculated that El Gordo would cancel the election next year “in the interests of national security”.  He’s certainly got the ambition to do it, Liebour have passed legislation to allow it, all he needs is an excuse.  The recession and a few carefully engineered riots about rampant unemployment would give him the excuse to declare a state of emergency.  There’s an EU election in June which Liebour may finish as badly as fourth in.  An outbreak of swine flu with an exaggerated statement on the risk of congregating in public places or unnecessary travel from some sock-puppet health quango would give him an excuse to postpone the EU elections in June.

I’m naturally cynical, especially where the one-eyed Scottish idiot is concerned, but is his obsessive lust for power so great that he would allow a highly infectious disease to spread around the country through inaction and criminally stupid policies just to stay in Downing Street?  Is he that insane?  I wouldn’t put it past him.

Technorati Tags: Swine Flu, Jonah

My father-in-law is disabled because of an über-rare disorder caused by a brain tumor when he was a child.  He is now deaf, has no balance and has no short-term memory.  My mother-in-law is his carer – he can’t go out without a wheelchair any more, he doesn’t feel pain and if left to his own devices he would either eat 10 times in a day or not eat at all because he can’t remember if he’s eaten even a few minutes after doing so.

My father-in-law has fallen over 4 times today and cut his head open which required stitches.  Caring for an adult is hard work as I’m sure you’ll apppreciate and it’s important she gets a break once in a while.  Last year she didn’t get one but this month it’s her 50th birthday so she’s booked to go away to a hotel for a weekend with my wife and some friends and relatives.

She booked my father-in-law in for a couple of days of respite care months ago at the only respite care room in the whole of Telford that will take under-60’s.  One room for a town with a population of around 160,000 people.  This morning social services phoned her to say they had cancelled the booking because the hospital in Telford is full and they’re sending their patients to the care home that the respite room is in and they’re going to use the respite room.

The reason why the hospital in Telford is full is because the hospital in nearby Shrewsbury has closed three wards because of an outbreak of norovirus.  This wouldn’t be a problem if Telford hospital wasn’t already full because it’s winter and there’s been a minor flu epidemic in the county.  So Shrewsbury hospital are paying Telford hospital to look after their patients while Telford hospital is paying private care homes in Telford to look after their patients.  But what really takes the piss is that social services in Telford have offered to put my father-in-law into respite for the same dates that they’ve just cancelled in Telford – in a home on the other side of Shrewsbury!

If Shrewsbury hospital is full and Telford hospital is full but the care homes in Shrewsbury aren’t then why is the hospital in Shrewsbury sending their patients to Telford instead of sending them to the care homes in Shrewsbury?  And why aren’t they cancelling elective surgery in Oswestry hospital which is run by the hospital in Shrewsbury and sending their patients there?  The hospital in Oswestry no longer has an A&E department, a sizeable proportion of their patients aren’t emergency cases and could wait a few weeks – as inconvenient as that is – while the current crisis is dealt with.

This is the problem when a service is run like a business – people lose out when there’s a profit to be made.  I wouldn’t mind so much if Telford and Shrewsbury hospitals weren’t run by the same Primary Care Trust.

Technorati Tags: Telford, Shrewsbury, Hospital

The Scottish government ban on hospital parking charges came into effect on the 1st of January leaving England the only part of the UK where everyone has to pay to park on hospital car parks.

Hospital car parks have been free to use in Wales since April and in Northern Ireland, chronically ill patients and their visitors were also expempted from parking charges last year.  Now Scotland has joined them by abolishing parking charges in all but three hospitals north of the border where the car parks are covered by a PFI agreement.

The cost of being ill in England is increasing year on year thanks to the indifference of the British government to the needs of the English while the Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish governments look after their own people.  The price of prescriptions is rising every year in England but in Wales they are free, in Scotland they will be free this year and in Northern Ireland they will be free from next year.

A spokesman for the British Department of Health said that abolishing parking charges in England wouldn’t be a “sensible use” of limited NHS resources yet in December the NHS in England reported a budget surplus of £2.1bn for the 2007-08 financial year.  That’s £2.1bn of profit made by the NHS in England from charging cancer patients for life-saving medication and charging relatives of terminally ill patients to park when they visit their loved ones in hospital.  The NHS in England raises £430m a year in prescription charges.

What the accountants, managers and consultants at the British Department of Health think is a “sensible use” of English taxes isn’t necessarily (or often) what the English taxpayer thinks their money should be spent on and what most of us think is not a “sensible use” of our taxes is subsidising hospital car parking and prescriptions in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland while we still have to pay ourselves.

The other day I went to the doctors and saw the triage nurse to ask for some antibiotics to sort out the infection in my gum.

I know I’ve got an infection in my gum because I had it about a month and a half ago and I know I need some antibiotics because that’s what the dentist prescribed me last time.  But could I get a doctor to give me a prescription?  Could I bollocks.

The nurse looked at my gum and agreed that it was red and looked infected.  She went and talked to a doctor but the answer from the doctor was “take ibuprofen and if it gets worse go to the dentist”.

Doctors aren’t dentists and I accept that but they are capable of diagnosing an infected gum, just as they are capable of diagnosing an infection anywhere else in the body.  There is no reason why I should have to pay to spend two minutes in the dentists chair just to get a bloody prescription for some antibiotics.

In case you’re wondering, it’s getting better now after 3 or 4 days of pain and enough ibuprofen and paracetamol to sedate a bull elephant.

Technorati Tags: Dentists, Doctors, NHS

English PCTs are to send parents letters telling them if their children are overweight.

According to the British government, most parents of fat children don’t think their children are overweight and sending a letter from the local NHS trust using data collected by schools will prompt them to take action.

However, the NHS have told PCTs not to use the word obese or tell parents the BMI of their children because it will confuse them.  Condascending arseholes.

The problem with the BMI measurement is that it’s just another arbitrary one-size-fits-all measurement and as such, is fairly meaningless unless you are at the extremes.  According to the BMI guidance I am somewhere between class 1 and 2 obese and am at risk of heart disease, infertility, arthritis, stroke and cancer.

My heart is fine, I certainly don’t suffer from fertility problems, I have had chronic juevenile osteoarthritis since I was a (thin) child, I can’t comment on strokes but I’m more worried about the number of people in my family who’ve had cancer upping my risk than I am over being fat.

Don’t get me wrong, I know that being fat is unhealthy and it certainly doesn’t do my dodgy knees any good and I’m losing weight slowly.  But the BMI isn’t an accurate measure because it doesn’t take into account your natural build.  Thanks to my paternal gene pool, I’m 6’1″ tall and if I wasn’t fat I’d be “stocky”.  My old man has got barely an ounce of fat on him yet he’s as wide as me.  He’s 6’4″ tall and falls into the overweight category on the BMI.  If he got to a weight that fits the “normal” range on the BMI you’d see his ribs.

By contrast, my youngest son is horribly thin but he’s tall for his age.  His BMI probably puts him in the underweight bracket but he’s perfectly healthy – he’s just tall and thin.

I remember visiting the doctor a year or two ago who decided to do a spontaneous asthma check up.  My peak flow was above average for someone without asthma yet when she used a different method of calculating my body mass she told me I was border-line morbidly obese.

Anyway, this isn’t about my medical history, it’s about these letters to parents telling them that their kids are fat.  As I’ve hopefully demonstrated above the BMI is flawed and it’s quite possible to get it wrong.  A lot of parents are going to be getting letters from their local NHS trust telling them that their child is “very overweight” or underweight and this letter will be sent by a computer somewhere analysing a set of data that actually needs to be interpreted by a human being or at least be complimented by additional information about the child.

The parents getting the “very overweight” letter will presumably put their child on a diet and the parents getting the “underweight” letter will presumably start trying to fatten their kids up.  Both sets of parents, you would hope, will be fretting over the health of their child.

But what if the BMI is wrong and the child isn’t obese or underweight but is a perfectly healthy child that simply has a large or small frame?

Too much faith is put in statistics and arbitrary scales and targets and not enough in common sense.

Technorati Tags: Health

Researchers at Cardiff University reckon they can “cure” osteoarthritis using stem cells.

I have quite bad osteoarthritis in both my knees.  On my left knee, parts of the joint have no cartilage at all and the rest is poor quality, rough cartilage.  On my right knee, it’s poor quality, rough cartilage.  They both make some very interesting noises and my surgery scars are an ice breaker.

The treatment doesn’t actually cure the arthritis, it allows new cartilage to be grown in large enough quantities to be able to provide an adequate transplant.

So, there’s hope for me yet just as long as we can keep the Christian fundamentalists from getting the ban on stem cell research they keep fighting for.  I respect their right to have an opinion but my right not to wake up in pain and go to bed in pain is more important so they can fuck off, I’ll take my chance on going to hell.

Technorati Tags: Osteoarthritis, Stem Cells

The following article appears in tonight’s Shropshire Star:

Concern grows on ‘health apartheid’

A member of a Shropshire political group has criticised the “health apartheid” of the NHS, which he claims is responsible for county patients receiving poorer services that those in Scotland and Wales.

Stuart Parr, of the Shropshire branch of the Campaign for an English Parliament, says people who live in the county are being discriminated against and claims that it is even tantamount to a form of racism.

He has written to all five Shropshire MP’s asking for support for a fairer system.

It comes as Shrewsbury MP Daniel Kawczynski has written to the Health Minister asking for hospital trusts to be banned from charging Blue Badge holders.

Mr Parr’s letter refers to the announcement by the Welsh Assembly Government that Welsh hospital parking charges will end, while patients in England will pay.

Technorati Tags: Health, Medical Apartheid, Shropshire