- 09 September 2008 Mumps Protection: Everything Under Control
- Official policy is to offer two doses of MMR, at 1 and 4 years, and that's that. Apart from leaving some uncertainty whether all three items have been effective, no account is taken of the life of these protections. Measles does not need boosting but rubella does in girls, and mumps does in everyon...read more
- 09 September 2008 Best Advice on Mobiles
- Our thanks to Dr Philip Michael of Irish Doctors Environmental Association for access to an analysis of recent studies on mobile phones. The language of the 20 expert analysts is a bit technical, but hereis the gist oftheir conclusions.
· Electric fields from mobile receivers do penetr...read more
- 10 June 2008 Chapter One
- Prelude
People say that a picture is worth a thousand words. I cannot say, but I know is that a vision is worth millions. Mine occurred in September 1971 and I have been acting it out, writing and talking about it ever since. Yet I have come nowhere near doing it justice.
I am rapidly appro...read more
- 09 June 2008 Chapter Two: What Health Is Not
- I need now to clear away some of the ideas that are wrongly attached to the word “health”. Most educated people probably feel they understand it, but I don’t think they do.
To illustrate why, I remember a remote spot on the edge of the town where I lived until recently. By a si...read more
- 08 June 2008 Chapter Three: So What IS Health?
- This has been hard. I have tried out the idea on several small group situations, mainly of intellectually gifted people, and been dismayed to find how hard it was for them to grasp the essential, simple nature of health – at least according to me. I set about writing the chapter from first pr...read more
- 07 May 2008 WHAT PROTECTS THE FRENCH?
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The French do everything wrong, according to British public health messages. They drink more than twice as much alcohol as we do, smoke more and eat more saturated fat. Yet they suffer only half as much premature coronary disease as we do, have half the level of obesity seen in Britain, and live...read more
- 02 May 2008 VACCINE CRUNCH COMING?
- News is managed very tightly in the UK. If it were not for a few news sites on the internet, I would not be aware that there have been deaths related to MMR or measles vaccine in India and in Bolton, Lancashire; that Merck has been asked to clean up its factory or risk loss of its vaccine producer ...read more
- 04 February 2008 FAT IN THE NOUGHTIES
- I remember washday in the 40s. My mother would get all the dirty linen out for the previous week and we spent the whole of Monday sorting it, washing it with a scrubbing board, rinsing, mangling by hand and then hanging it out to dry. The day we bought our first labour-saving hot tub with agitator ...read more
- 28 December 2007 RISK OR OPPORTUNITY?
- A recent report by the Royal Society of Arts on Risk in Childhood was disappointing, but provoked these thoughts.
Risk is a concept from statistics, and statistics are easily abused. They are calculated from the experience of a large population of individuals, and can only be used with confidenc...read more
- 30 October 2007 CERVICAL CANCER: Is Vaccination Wise?
- Suddenly the news is dominated by HPV – the human papilloma virus. Girls from age 12 are to be offered a vaccine called Gardasil™, manufactured by Merck in the USA and licensed for use in this country. It contains killed representatives of four types of HPV, two allegedly responsible fo...read more