Bad Brexit deal would be disaster for the NHS, says Jeremy Hunt

A bad deal on Brexit would be “a disaster” for the NHS, Jeremy Hunt has said, as he accused the European commission of deliberately interfering in the general election to undermine the Conservatives.

Ramping up the rhetoric of Theresa May, who last week accused the commission of leaking an unflattering account of talks at Downing Street to disrupt the election, the health secretary warned that a good Brexit negotiation was vital for the NHS.

“We’ve got 27 countries lined up against us,” Hunt told BBC1’s Andrew Marr show. “Some of them appear to think that for the EU to survive, Britain must fail.”

He said of the impact on the health service: “If we don’t get a good Brexit outcome, and we don’t protect the economic recovery, the jobs that so many people depend on, whose taxes pay for the NHS, if we get a bad Brexit outcome, that would be a disaster for the NHS.”

However, pressed on the issue, Hunt refused to specify what sort of bad deal this might involve, or to say whether the UK leaving the UK with no deal and defaulting to World Trade Organisation tariffs, would also affect the NHS.

“We’ve been very clear that no deal is better than a bad deal,” he said, adding: “I’m saying that a good deal would be best for the NHS, but obviously, a bad deal would be the worst possible outcome for all our public services. It would be bad for the country.”

On Wednesday, May used an address outside Downing Street launching the election campaign to accuse the European commission of seeking to influence the election.

“The European commission’s negotiating stance has hardened. Threats against Britain have been issued by European politicians and officials. All of these acts have been deliberately timed to affect the result of the general election which will take place on 8 June,” she said.

May did not specify who this interference was intended to assist. But pushed on the matter, Hunt said he assumed the commission wanted to undermine the Conservatives and help Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party.

“Well, you’ll have to ask them why they chose to do that, but I think the answer is very clear, that they are trying to leak reports that undermine Theresa May’s position,” he said, when asked who the commission favoured.

Asked specifically if the aim had been to harm the Conservatives, he said: “That must be the presumption, and what we’re saying is that they should not be doing that, because it’s an election for the British people to decide.”

May’s accusation baffled Brussels, where the European commission’s chief spokesman, Margaritis Schinas, dismissed the allegations as electioneering.

“We here in Brussels are very busy, rather busy, with our policy work,” he said. “We have enough on our plate.”

The European council president, Donald Tusk, said the stakes of the Brexit talks were “too high to let our emotions get out of hand”.

He added: “We must keep in mind that, in order to succeed, we need today discretion, moderation, mutual respect and a maximum of goodwill.”

Bad Brexit deal would be disaster for the NHS, says Jeremy Hunt

Will Geoengineering be Used to Help Avert an Oroville Dam Disaster?

Oroville Dam in California has a major problem with a possible failure due to an unseasonable amount of rain and damage to it’s emergency spillway. Evacuations have been ordered for effected counties. The potential for major damage and loss of life exists if the area receives more heavy rain. This an emergency that geoengineering can help alleviate in the short term. Pros and cons of this technology set aside to get to the deeper question.

Why isn’t this decades old technology being used to save lives or avert disaster?

The answer may be obvious. This would call public attention to ongoing geoengineering programs by the U.S government. Leading to questions about the nature of the entire drought situation in California as a hole and the real capability and risks of geoengineering.

Geoengineering in it’s many forms has been used for decades by governments and corporations around the world. Pieces of evidence and government documents on weather modification are numerous. Available through private websites and the government itself. Why wouldn’t this technology be used to avert a major disaster? Although it is not fully admitted by the United States. The capability exists to easily help the situation in California if more heavy rain is expected. Other nations openly admit some of their programs and ours.

The Indian government issued a report stating that out of control geoengineering by the U.S. was ruining the planet. According to the India Times.

US DEVELOPED WEAPON SYSTEM MAY CAUSE GLOBAL WARMING: GOVERNMENT

China admittedly has a Weather Modification Office and engineered the weather for the 2008 Olympics games. Firing 1000 rockets with desiccating chemicals to make sure it did not rain for the ceremonies. Easily modifying the weather for national holidays  using only 18 jets and 432 small rockets filled with myriad of different chemicals. Making sure it was a clear blue sky when the natural forecast was for rain.

A Guardian Newspaper environment blogger witnessed this admitted geoengineering first hand in 2009 at the National Day Parade in Beijing. May sound familiar to other people witnessing unadmitted geoengineering. With small fleets of jetliners making passes high in sky releasing miles long plumes of chemicals behind them. Forming or dispersing cloud formations.

But was it? By 5.30am, when I arrived at the media centre for the National Day parade, the skies had cleared sufficiently to be able to see a star. But there were still thick clusters of cloud and some mist. It might rain again, I thought.

We were bussed to the press gallery outside the Forbidden City by about 7.20am. A band of cumulus lingered over the Great Hall of the People. They had darkened when I called a friend an hour later.

Just before I rang off, I described the skies to him. “It might still rain on the parade, but I think the odds are now on their [the organisers’] side,” I said.

Once the march started, I concentrated on that, but I recall being impressed by the unusual vividness of the sky on some of the images on the giant screens.

Other colleagues told me they found it remarkable that the clouds seemed almost to be held back from the square, even though there were still some around the edges.

By the time of the fly-past around 11am, the skies were clear until air force jets left behind lines of coloured smoke-trails. Now, six hours later, Beijing is still enjoying perfect conditions.

What happened? According to Chinese Meterology News, there were four attacks on a bank of clouds that approached Tiananmen from the south-west between 7.30am and 9.05am. In total 432 rockets were fired to achieve the desired result.

Xinhua news agency reports that the authorities also had the capacity to delay rainfall.

“Only a handful countries in the world could organise such large-scale magic-like weather modification,” it quoted Cui Lianqing, a senior air force meteorologist as saying

China could do this with precision back in 2008. Even making it snow in Beijing due to mild drought.

The United States still can’t even muster an effort or even discuss the subject. What is going on?  The public is being lied to at every turn about the current state of technology. Possibly because if the U.S. government admitted it could use geoengineering to help in this situation. Then it may come to the public’s attention that it has been going on for years with all the associated risks.

Sources:

http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/defence/us-developed-weapon-system-may-cause-global-warming-government/articleshow/53268090.cms

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2009/nov/04/controlling-the-weather-china

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/blog/2009/oct/01/china-cloud-seeding-parade

http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2009-10/01/content_12139802.htm

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Will Geoengineering be Used to Help Avert an Oroville Dam Disaster?

Extinction By Standard Chinese Medication - An Environmental Disaster

As China’s substantial power and economic improvement spawns the greatest middle class in background, it’s also making the greatest upper and middle class population on the planet. And they are leading to an additional kind of environmental disaster – extinction of endangered species via poaching.

An epidemic of poaching is sweeping the globe (Nature Conservancy) fueled by the increasing wealthy of China and Asia. Endangered species are getting killed at an growing fee for the sole crime of becoming the core of bizarre cultural traditions. Caught in this frenzy of nasty rituals are animals like the rhinoceros, which as a species could not be prolonged for this globe (Save The Rhino).

In spite of entreaties from the United Nations and a lot of western governments, there is a dense silence from the governments on the obtaining end of these entire body components. We see this in excess of and over in developing countries on each issue from worker rights to environmental destruction. “The West had its way on this, so why can’t we?”

True. Europe had the original spoiled-rotten wealthy folks who for centuries could acquire no matter what, and whomever, they needed. Then came the United States and its nouveau riche and robber barons who wanted even more trophies of their wealth. Then the Japanese in the 2nd half of the final century did their obnoxious newly-wealthy things. All of these individuals, and even the not-so-wealthy, want symbols or rewards for what they see as their achievement in growing to a degree previously reserved only for the aristocracy.

And now the Chinese and other rising economies are making an even larger population with disposable incomes enough to feed their tastes for the traditions that are forbidden or just pricey, things like mixed bat blood and monkey’s milk, meat of a camel’s hump, or plain outdated hedgehog’s genitals (Travel and Leisure).

An epidemic of poaching is sweeping more than Africa, paid for by the growing quantity of wealthy Chinese and Asians, fueled by the growing energy manufacturing from coal. Caught in this frenzy of nasty rituals are endangered animals like the rhinoceros, which as a species could not be lengthy for this globe. Supply: Conserve The Rhino

I really don’t suggest to imply that cultural variations reflected in uncommon customs are necessarily primitive or horrible but…uh, in fact I do indicate that. Traditions concerning ingesting unusual things like powdered rhinoceros horn or the eggs of endangered sea turtles are primitive and horrible.

Several of us believed that the rise of Viagra would lessen the poaching of several of these animals. Regrettably, most of these physique components are not utilised as aphrodisiacs, as numerous in the West presume, but as medicinal cures for a host of ailments, real or imagined.

Powdered Rhino horn in Classic Chinese Medication is prescribed for fevers and convulsions, typhoid, rheumatism, gout, headaches and hallucinations, vomiting and foods poisoning, as nicely as very good ole possession by the devil (Compendium of Materia Medica by Li Shih-chen, A.D. 1597).

But Rhino horn is made of keratin, meaning it is just as effective as grinding up your own fingernails and consuming them. (Note to self – may be a great business method for when rhinos are gone)

Studies have proven that all of these healthcare claims for all of these unusual physique parts are false and useless. But this has not stopped TCM from getting its own “scientific” journal, the Chinese Medicine Journal. This new journal is published by BioMed Central which is owned by Springer Verlag, a science publishing giant who has decided that embracing a new large audience is far more essential than rigorous scientific integrity or the preservation of endangered species.

To the hundreds of thousands of people who practice Conventional Chinese Medicine, rhinoceros horn is a medical necessity, they think it works and are inclined to fund the poachers as properly as any drug cartel. The dwindling quantity of rhinos only increases the price tag and assures their extinction.

An even a lot more tragic illustration is death by association. The extinction of the Vaquita marina, the world’s smallest porpoise and Mexico’s only native marine mammal, is imminent. But not since anything at all about them is poachable (Tri-City Herald). These creatures get caught in Mexico’s northern Sea of Cortez in the course of the illegal gillnet fishing for totoaba, a huge fish whose swim bladder is very valued by Chinese chefs, and is itself protected.

A single totoaba bladder brings more than $ 10,000 in Asia. So it is no wonder that the poachers just kill the porpoises and depart them to rot. Since there are only 100 individual Vaquita left, they will be gone permanently in just 3 or 4 years. You’d think the Chinese government would outlaw this cuisine just as a matter of principle, but no 1 ever accused the Chinese of getting nature-lovers.

We all know that the wealthy are more very likely to be selfish (The Guardian), but this variety of narcissism is beyond the standard pale of destructive human behavior. I comprehend clearing outdated growth forests to plant crops – it’s counter-productive and incorrect, but I recognize it if people’s livelihoods are at stake – but to extinct noble beasts simply because you are anxious about erectile dysfunction or a cough is beyond belief and must be punishable by obtaining to rot in prison or turning out to be premature organ donors themselves. This planet does not require stupid selfish people to strain an currently stressed-out Earth.

But poaching doesn’t just destroy stunning animals that will never return to this globe, it threatens the lives and communities of men and women who reside close to them (Nature Conservancy). Poaching produces corruption and crime. It drives away tourism whose renewable revenue far exceeds the a single-time shell out-off from killing an animal.

Extinction By Standard Chinese Medication - An Environmental Disaster

Antibiotic resistance is an avoidable disaster

We really do not want the inconvenience of even the mildest infection, believing that medication is there to deal with our each ailment, and yet at the very first signal of improvement, we quit taking it.

Final week, the chief medical officer, Dame Sally Davies, suggested the public not to argue with medical professionals who really don’t want to prescribe antibiotics. As well usually, medical professionals tire of arguing, and simply give in and dish them out. There’s a element of all of us that desires a quiet life. In just a generation, we have forgotten the worth of antibiotics, taking them for granted and as a correct.

There is also the law of unintended consequences. We want cheap meat and yet we fail to see that this relies on trying to keep animals in unnaturally close proximity, so infections spread like wildfire and hefty doses of antibiotics are required to end them. It takes a certain kind of idiocy to convince ourselves that we can buy an complete chicken, for example, for just a number of lbs, with out there getting another price even more down the line.

Yet again, in just a generation our expectations have dramatically changed. Whilst 50 years in the past meat was a treat, eaten when or twice a week, now we expect it every day. Our greed for low-cost, plentiful meat has fuelled the rise in antibiotic resistance.

David Cameron’s answer is to push for far more antibiotics to be identified. The unsightly truth is that this is a Sisyphean job. Unless we reduce demand for antibiotics, we will want a by no means-ending stream of new medication.

We want to consider far more drastic action. That is not to say we have to become vegan. But there is a valid argument that all varieties of factory farming ought to be banned and that antibiotic use in animals ought to stop. Surely, the price of meat and dairy would rise. But I’d rather some folks could dwell than afford to consume meat every single day. We’ll also have to accept that when we have a minor infection, we should allow our body to deal with it.

I keep in mind a buddy of mine, a burly, rugby-enjoying medic, currently being brought close to tears as he watched an elderly lady die of a superbug she’d caught in hospital – and his horror at realising that there was nothing at all that present day medicine could do for her. He stopped consuming meat the night she died. How numerous far more will have to die prior to we all realise the predicament we are in?

Time for yet another size- debate

First we had the dimension- debate, in which the prominence of style models in dimension- clothes (dimension 6 in Britain) was criticised for encouraging unrealistic entire body images in younger girls. It would seem not everyone was listening to the chorus of disapproval.

US garments producer Abercrombie &amp Fitch was, until finally recently, marketing dimension-000 clothing (British size ) so tiny that only an individual with less than a 23in waist can put on them.

It looks extraordinary that as girls acquire much more prominence in public existence, the ideal body image is obtaining smaller sized. Ladies are vanishing to a zero.

The craze is fuelled by the emaciated photos posted on the web by designs and celebrities, this kind of as Alexa Chung. I at present operate in an consuming-disorder unit in north London, and see on a every day basis the outcomes of this pernicious view of women’s bodies. Quite significantly anybody who can fit into a 000 dress is severely underweight.

I challenge anyone who can match into a size 000 to show they really do not have an abnormal partnership with meals. That social media and celebrities can endorse this kind of an unhealthy entire body shape strikes me as utterly repugnant. Remember: there are 3 billion women who don’t look like supermodels and only eight who do.

New Great tips on cot death are clear and proof-based mostly

Cot death dominated headlines for considerably of the Eighties and Nineties. It appeared to be the distillation of every parent’s worst nightmare that, in spite of taking every precaution, your infant could die with out any discernible lead to. The mystery manufactured it all the far more horrifying.

Nevertheless cot death seemed to slip from the front webpage. I recently asked on Twitter whether it still occurred. I was surprised to find out that costs had dropped right after a public well being campaign named Back to Sleep (now Risk-free To Sleep), which developed on investigation linking cot death – or Sudden Infant Death Syndrome – to babies sleeping on their fronts, and encouraged dad and mom to place young children to sleep on their backs.

Even now, 250 infants a yr carry on to die of this situation in England and Wales. The National Institute for Well being and Care Excellence (Great) has now warned parents against making it possible for their infants to fall asleep in their arms, and known as for much better awareness of protected sleeping routines.

Generally, I am wary of overly prescriptive suggestions, specifically for younger parents. They are bombarded with contrary tips from all method of “professionals”, generating early parenthood an anxious sufficient time. But right here, Nice is carrying out what it need to: giving dad and mom clear suggestions primarily based on study and evidence.

I hope it will mean that cot death stays off the front pages forever.

Max Pemberton’s most current guide, ‘The Doctor Will See You Now’ is published by Hodder. To order a copy, call Telegraph Books on 0844 871 1515

Antibiotic resistance is an avoidable disaster

We threat disaster if drugs giants don"t invest in investigation | Will Hutton

Microscopic view of bacterial pneumonia: ‘Science is shedding the battle we are accustomed to it winning.’ Photograph: Alamy/Stocktrek Pictures Inc. /

We could now be getting into an alarming “submit-antibiotic era”, warned the Globe Health Organisation final week. The relief that humanity has won by means of antibiotics that battle off attacks on our overall health appears to be operating out, as bacteria are developing ever much better defence mechanisms. We thought the era of infectious diseases lay behind us alternatively, is it coming back?

Presently 25,000 men and women die every single year in the European Union from ailments of the blood and urinary tract, from pneumonia, TB and diarrhoea, all of which could have been treated by powerful antibiotics. And this is in a area exactly where there is widespread vaccination against infections and the place public wellness is robust.

The bugs behind TB or gonorrhoea now routinely fight off antibiotics ever more quickly, and these mutating bugs travel globally. All over the place people are obtaining to keep in hospital for longer and encounter a increasing chance of infection by other individuals. Death charges are beginning to rise rather than fall.

Nor is the situation likely to get any much better. Element of the problem is that men and women are as well informal more than how antibiotics are prescribed and used so the bugs aren’t eradicated, but rather produce greater defence mechanisms. On leading, over the previous 30 many years the drug firms have created no new major antibiotic kinds. The final 1 was carbapenem – a so-referred to as last resort antibiotic – back in 1980. Now more than half the situations of K pneumoniae that employed to be treatable by carbapenem medicines no longer reply. Dr Keiji Fukuda, the WHO’s assistant director basic for overall health safety, spelled out the danger: “With no urgent, co-ordinated action by a lot of stakeholders,” he said, “common infections and small injuries, which have been treatable for decades, can after again kill.”

The affect is felt across all of medicine. The effectiveness of drugs is interdependent. Cancer individuals undergoing high-priced chemotherapy need low-cost antibiotics to manage the otherwise potentially fatal side effects as their immune methods reel from the impact of the poison to destroy the cancer.

We are employed to the notion that health-related science is receiving greater there is no want to dread an infected finger, allow alone the conditions that traumatised earlier generations. Now it seems science is dropping the battle we are accustomed to it winning.

But the crisis is considerably less in science than it is in the approaches it is directed and organised. It is no accident that the failure to produce any major new antibiotics above the previous 30 years has coincided with the roll back of the state and the accompanying collapse in self-self-assurance in public initiatives or in the useful influences of public investing.

Drug discovery, and with it the evolution of the entire complicated health care ecosystem along with the science that supports it, has been driven by revenue signals in the business marketplace. Since the simple to locate antibiotic chemical compounds have been found, new investigation is complicated and pricey – yet antibiotics are priced as minimal-margin commodity medication. Worse, regulators – particularly the FDA in the US which, as the gatekeeper to the richest medicines industry in the globe, is of pivotal importance – only license antibiotics for specific rather than generalised makes use of.

For a revenue-maximising drug organization this kind of as Pfizer, there is an clear conclusion. Don’t waste worthwhile R&ampD on reduced-margin antibiotics that are never ever going to become super-profitable blockbusters. As an alternative, produce, say, Viagra (as it has), which is a large-margin, global income spinner. Exploit your economic muscle by keeping away from as considerably tax as feasible – other mutts can fund the infrastructure from which you right benefit – and try out to buy up other drug firms, such as AstraZeneca, which has been foolish ample to invest in medicines that are far more integral to the entire health care ecosystem. You can harvest the outcomes of their efforts, pocket your huge meta-bonus and buy an island in the Pacific. You could even be fortunate sufficient to encounter a misguided, weak government – like the UK’s – that believes this is the way to do organization.

In the 19th century, 1 of the most significant catalysts to end laissez-faire was the lived experience of infectious conditions, lack of sewers, dirty air, contaminated food and unregulated quack medicine. The upper middle class built their pavilions on the windward west of English cities to consider to limit their exposure not just to the stink but the risk of infection: is it no accident that the operating class lived downwind on the east of cities?

But infectious illness does not respect the boundaries of class and wealth. Beginning with the 1840 Vaccination Act, the Victorians made the decision that public wellness had to come ahead of personal freedom, and launched the interlocking efforts to create sewers, vaccinate infants and marshal ever better science to help their efforts. Anti-vaccination movements protesting against the extension of the state – the equivalent of today’s Ukip – had to drop their resistance just before the well being require and bodyweight of the evidence.

The WHO is invoking that exact same spirit nowadays. Antibiotics are valuable and the gains to public health precarious. Our culture does not respect these lifestyle-offering medication adequate we use them like aspirin, not finishing the programs we are prescribed or even providing unused medication to pals or family for whom they have been not diagnosed.

Nature is wreaking its revenge. Now we need a new collective effort to react. It starts with every single person recognising and treasuring the miracle of antibiotics, but it also indicates that new antibiotics have to be developed quicker and far more effectively. We need to have smarter, far more open varieties of research collaboration among a multiplicity of drug organizations around well being strategies that understand that drugs are worldwide public wellness products, and that the medical ecosystem stands and falls as a whole. Antibiotics are as essential as drug blockbusters to our overall health, if not to drug companies’ earnings. Governments want to reset the incentives and drug companies their priorities. The best scientists and universities know this and want their science to be deployed in that way.

Britain could take a lead but over the subsequent number of weeks we are to be robbed of one particular of our key pharmaceutical assets, AstraZeneca, which will most likely be taken in excess of by Pfizer, 1 of whose prime strategic objectives is tax avoidance. The WHO need to call for changes in not just how antibiotics are used, but how they are researched and created if the globe is not to confront devastating consequences. Unsafe bacteria even infect the ideologues in Variety ten so anxious to promote out to US interests, and the AstraZeneca shareholders who declare no loyalty except to the highest, brief-term share cost. Our well being demands a new seriousness of intent, and a recognition that it is a public great not a private plaything. Saying no to Pfizer would be a wake-up contact for everyone.

We threat disaster if drugs giants don"t invest in investigation | Will Hutton