Unclean Unclean

During the Black Death, while plague killed a huge proportion of the World's population there were some places that managed to escape mass outbreaks all together- Poland and Milan most notably. Milan adopted a rather brutal but effective strategy of walling up the homes of anyone infected with the disease with the occupants inside, there seems to be less clarity over how Poland avoided it, but one theory is that they pretty much close the borders as well as a medieval state could.

The most effective strategies for countering the plague were the most offensive to individual rights and personal liberty. A major outbreak of an infectious disease is one of the few times where it is justifiable to put the collective good above individual rights. The outcry over a relatively minor quarantine period for those people who have been at the heart of the Ebola infected region of West Africa is not based on "the science" which is contentious, but on knee jerk ethical preening.

The Good Die Young

A couple of weeks ago Johannes Heesters, described as "Hitler's Favourite Actor" died at the age of 108. Now the world's oldest person famous for a reason other than being old is probably the Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer who is 105. He was and probably still is an unrepentant supporter of Stalin. Both men were working past their 100th birthdays.

So clearly the key to a long and healthy life is to cosy up to a genocidal mass murderer.

George Galloway will probably live to celebrate his 120th birthday.

What's Up Doc?

'Half GPs say sex with patients ok'

The other half think there needs to be more foreplay.

We Were All Thinking It.

Disabled people to march in London against cuts to benefits and services

They can't be that disabled then.

Joined Up Government

Two of today's headlines which were juxtaposed on google news earlier today:

No more nanny state on health: Andrew Lansley

And also this:

Minister to set minimum prices in war on cheap drinks and force tobacco firms to sell cigarettes in plain packets

The minister in question is Andrew Lansley.

It's for your own good..

Risky Business

Okay she's got a deadly sexually transmitted virus and likes unprotected sex but I still would though.

George Monbiot Has A Point

Kind of. His column on speed cameras does make a good argument as to why they are a good thing and the coalition is making a mistake by not funding them:

In every other sector, Conservatives insist that it is daft for human beings to do the work machines could do. In every other instance they demand that police officers be freed from mindless tasks to spend more time preventing serious crime. In all other cases they urge more rigorous enforcement of the law. On every other occasion they insist that local authorities should raise revenue and make their schemes pay for themselves. But it all goes into reverse when they are exposed to the beams of a fiendish instrument of mind control.

The moment they pass through its rays, Conservatives turn from penny-pinching authoritarians into spendthrift hoodie-huggers. They demand that a job now performed consistently and cheaply by machines should be handed back to human beings, who will do it patchily and at great expense. They urge that police officers be diverted from preventing serious crime to stand in for lumps of metal. They insist that those who break the law should not be punished or even caught. They clamour for councils to abandon a scheme that almost pays for itself, and replace it with one that requires constant subsidies.

Whilst it is true that some speed cameras are sited in such a way as to make it difficult to see how they contribute to safety many do genuinely slow traffic down in areas where high speeds are dangerous.

In 13 years of driving I've been caught by a speed camera once, so they are fairly easy to cope with if you drive sensibly aren't they. They do cut accidents when they are in the right place and don't require a huge amount of funding.

Naturally Moonbat being Moonbat he does throw in some idiocy at the end of his column:

The real reason why Conservatives hate the enforcement of speed limits is that this is one of the few laws which is as likely to catch the rich as the poor: newspaper editors and council leaders are as vulnerable as anyone else.

Yes that's exactly what Conservatives do, gather in secret places to plot to punish the poor at the expense of the rich....

Coroners- A Request

If I should happen to die in a bizarre masturbation related incident, could you maybe respect my dignity and be discreet about it and maybe not let the national press know how I popped my clogs?

The Fragility Of Life.

A neighbour died of cancer last Monday, she was only in her early 40s. I didn't know her well but from what conversations I had with her she seemed very friendly. The most terrifying thing is that she was diagnosed less than 4 weeks before she died.

No Bloodbath

The coalition are looking to Canada as an example of how to make necessary budget cuts. In the early 1990s the Canadian government was running a huge deficit and had been doing so for years before the Liberal government instituted huge budget cuts that set the stage for a prolonged period of growth that continues to this day.

However there is a crucial point that indicates things won't be as effective here:

The following year, Jean Chrétien, the Liberal prime minister, unveiled what became known as the "bloodbath budget", in which departmental spending was reduced by an average of 20 per cent.

By 1997 the deficit had been eradicated. However, health and education budgets were slashed and thousands in the public sector lost their jobs.

That's the point, when Canada looked at its over spending problem there were no areas of spending that were sacred cows that couldn't be touched even politically sensitive things like health and education. This government has decided to ring fence NHS spending, purely to give the Tories political protection in an area where the public don't trust them enough.

Essentially the Conservative Party gave up trying to make the argument that public spending was in and of itself a good thing some time after 2005, and their efforts since 1997 had been insipid, so they are not in a position to make the argument that cuts aren't necessarily a bad thing.

In Praise Of The Heretical Lib Dems

They are the only party willing to dissent from the cult of the NHS, arguing that no department can be ring fenced from spending cuts. The Tories don't believe in the cult either but they are terrified of being exposed like an atheist in Saudi Arabia. Ring fencing the NHS's vast budget inevitably means that other services have to endure deeper cuts in order to maintain millionaire consultants in the style to which they have become accustomed.

Locked In

This is another reminder of why starving people in a vegetative state to death is a horrendous act:

One cannot even begin to imagine the despair, frustration and fear that was Martin Pistorius's life for more than a decade. After contracting meningitis at the age of 12, he found himself locked inside his body and spent 14 years with no form of communication and completely unable to control his body.

His parents were told that their only option was to allow him to die and that he had the brain function of a three-month-old baby. That, however, was not the case. While the illness had wreaked havoc on Martin's body, his mind remained largely intact. Day after day he lay motionless on a bed, or strapped to a chair, all the while desperate to communicate but unable to do so.

........

That today Martin could be working as a website developer, be about to embark on a BSc in computer science and be married to a beautiful blonde is something he, and everyone who knew him, once would have imagined impossible.

It looks to me that when laws were drawn up regarding whether to allow people to die, we severely overstated just how much we knew about what happens to those in a vegetitive state. If someone wanted to euthunise me I'd much prefer it to be with a morphine overdose or a hammer to the head than through starvation.

Smoking Prevents Heart Attacks (Not Really)

Remember back in February when medical researchers made the improbable claim that the ban on smoking in public was responsible for a 26% reduction in heart attacks? It turns out that using pretty much the same methodology* a ban on smoking in public in Indianaoplis has led to a 16% increase in the number of heart attacks.

Clearly we must start smoking like chimneys in order to help fellow members of the public.

Via the Agitator.


* I say methodology, but what I actually mean is finding two things occurring at the same time and claiming that one caused the other without any evidence whatsoever.

Comas & Consciousness

The news that a patient who was thought to have been in a vegetative state was in fact fully conscious for quarter of a century is horrifying.

Currently the procedure for allowing people in that state to die is to withdraw feeding, as it is a more passive form of death than simply pumping them full of morphine or suffocating them with an inert gas, even though the latter two methods are clearly more humane. If we have been starving conscious people to death then this is worse than horrifying.

Aids Denialism.

The Spectator's editor Fraser Nelson is flirting with HIV-Aids denialism which is unfortunate for two reasons. Firstly it means that Sunny Hundal is largely correct about something and secondly it gives credence to dangerous psuedo-science.

It is dangerous, several converts to Aids denialism have ended up dying because they refused treatment for their illness, denialism is understandably quite high among those infected with the HIV virus, as have the children of those who deny a causal link between HIV and Aids. When this crazy idea makes its way into public policy, as with Thabo Mbeki's South Africa, the results can be horrendous.

Furthermore in the case of the documentary Nelson is promoting, House of Numbers, there is enough information around to demonstrate the mendaciousness of the film.

It also instantly undermines anyone who has a serious point to make about Aids infection rates, for example those who point out that infection rates in Africa appear to have been wildly overstated.

Scaremongering About Vaccines.

The coverage of the cervical cancer jab has been ridiculous, with a flood of speculation that the girl who died was killed by the jab followed by a trickle of reporting that she probably wasn't.

Of course it it possible that some people will have bad reactions to some vaccines even if that doesn't appear to have occurred here. However as Theodore Dalrymple points out we have become so accustomed to the benefits of vaccination that the minuscule risks are no longer weighed against the dangers of infectious diseases.

The comments on this Daily Mail thread have to be read to be believed, with a solid majority of commentators peddling psuedo science, hypochondria and conspiracy theories (I'm not a fan of the government but anyone who thinks they are covering up the mass poisoning of children to protect the pharmaceutical industry's profits is insane).

Although deaths among 14 year old girls are very rare they do happen, the risk of death at that age is around 1 in 5000. So if there are roughly 500,000 14 year old girls in the UK then around 100 will die each year. If they have all received a jab that year then it is highly likely that once every couple of years someone will die with 24 hours of being vaccinated. These will be heavily publicised whereas the far more frequent deaths from HPV related cancers among adults will be ignored, unless it's Jade Goody.

As there are several routine vaccinations at around that age, it is amazing that more deaths don't get spuriously linked to vaccinations.

Faith Healing.

Regardless of what the optimal health policy is, it should be a matter for rational discussion in the same way than any other public policy ought to be.

Yet when someone criticises the NHS the response isn't what one would expect from people who simply have a policy disagreement over how best to deliver a public service, but instead resembles the calm detached level of dispassionate analysis more commonly found in a Pakistani mob who have heard rumours of a Koranic desecration.

Take the reaction to Daniel Hannan's criticism of the NHS:

'Daniel Hannan is a national disgrace', for criticising our health system! Other politicians routinely suggest that Britain kills Muslims for the hell of it or that the IRA were heroes yet this is all within the bounds of reasonable opinion but to suggest that we have a sub optimal system of healthcare delivery render one a national disgrace.

Elsewhere Hannan's criticism of the NHS is seen as uncivilised (presumably mainland Europe and the USA are barbarian lands since their benighted leaders haven't seen fit to institute NHS style systems).

There are many ways of comparing healthcare systems and what criteria are used is a value judgement but after deciding what a health system is meant to accomplish it really should be an empirical question over which country does it best and not a cause for insular and myopic national cheer leading, insisting that the NHS is 'the Envy of the World' (EotW)is not a statement of fact it is a profession of faith unsupported by any evidence whatsoever (I even heard an Labour drone on Newsnight claim that the National Institute for Clinical Excellence was the EotW.


PS- This post isn't about what policy I favour, but suffice to say I don't think either the USA or the UK are close to the top of the table when it comes to health provision.

I also don't agree with everything Hannan says (the NHS isn't particularly 'Marxist' for example).

A Communist Plot

I can't believe some people still support putting fluoride in the water more than twenty years after P.J. O'Rourke demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt that it causes communism:

Localism & Postcode Lotteries.

Tory spokesman Grant Shapps has been criticised for denouncing the 'postcode lottery' of IVF treatment because he also advocates "localism" of which "Postcode lotteries" are an inherent part.

However localism is about devolving power down to elected local bodies not to unelected quangoes. Whilst I dislike the cliche "postcode lottery", there is every reason to be aggrieved when one receives an inferior service than people living in a different area because of the decisions of unelected appointees- like the people who sit on health boards.

Shapps is therfore quite right to highlight the wildly uneven level of service being delivered in different places.

Why Institutions Exist.

Markets, the mechanism of choice, are designed to allocate the spoils to the winner. That's OK with supermarkets and car makers – it's not OK for the state. We can't have and can't allow schools and hospitals to fail and be replaced by the fittest.

Yes we can. Hospitals and schools don't exist for their own benefit but for that of patients and of students. If patients can be treated more effectively by closing down a hospital and replacing it with a new one then why not do it?