Labour expels three members over attempt to unseat Jeremy Hunt

Labour has expelled three senior members in Surrey for trying to unseat the health secretary, Jeremy Hunt, by forming a progressive alliance with local Greens and Liberal Democrats to unite behind an NHS doctor standing against him.

Kate Townsend, the South West Surrey party secretary who stood in last week’s local elections, and Steve Williams, a party member for 46 years who sits on the constituency party’s executive committee, were notified of their expulsion this week.

Robert Park, a Labour member for almost five decades who chaired the Surrey Fabians and ran the regional remain campaign, has also been expelled.

Townsend and Williams have been leading figures in the campaign for a progressive alliance between local parties, where the Conservative cabinet minister has a 28,000 majority.

Williams has been working on behalf of Compass, the centre-left thinktank and champion of grassroots progressive alliance initiative, in defiance of the national party, which has said it will not entertain any notion of local party cooperation at election time. Party rules state that members must not support any other candidate for election who is running against Labour.

“We have massive support from the local party,” Williams told the Guardian. “It is such an overkill reaction to a group of people who are trying to unseat the health secretary. There was a campaign meeting last night, we only found out a few hours before that we had been expelled from the party so we weren’t able to go. People were storming out of the meeting, really very, very upset and angry.”

In a letter from the party’s head of disputes, Sam Matthews, Williams was told: “It has been brought to our attention with supporting evidence that you have publicly stated your support for a party that is standing against the Labour party in the 2017 general election, which is incompatible with membership of the Labour party.”

Williams was “ineligible to remain a member of the Labour party and have been removed from the national membership system”, the letter said, adding that he was no longer entitled to attend local Labour party meetings.

The party will consider an application for readmission only after five years, the letter said, though Williams said he was planning to appeal. The letter included supporting evidence, including Williams’ appeal for signatures for a letter to the Guardian supporting Irvine’s candidacy.

“We have been doing our best to unseat Jeremy Hunt, to hold him to account on his record because of what he has done to the health service over the last five years,” Williams said.

The initiative to back the National Health Action party’s Dr Louise Irvine, who received just over 8% of the vote in 2015, has the backing of local Labour leaders, including Townsend. Irvine, a GP, was the chair of the Save Lewisham hospital campaign, which defeated the government in court over the proposals to downgrade A&E and maternity units.

Williams said Irvine was “able, articulate, very capable of being able to hold Jeremy Hunt to account, when the NHS is such a key issue in his constituency”.

Local Lib Dem activists have also agreed not to campaign, after a meeting in Farncombe organised by Compass with members from progressive parties. The Green party has said it will not field a candidate.

Neal Lawson, chair of Compass, said: “Steve Williams has given 46 years of service to Labour and was backing a local doctor to take on Jeremy Hunt and defend the NHS. For this he got expelled by email. Labour is a tribal party in a non-tribal age.”

Park, who also stood for election for Labour last week, told the Guardian he had been expelled after an interview with the BBC’s Today programme in which he expressed cautious support for Labour standing aside.

“I have to say, I was upset,” he said. “It was a blunt, legalistic email message, I joined the party as student in 1963, I had thought particularly that somebody might have phoned to talk to me first, I’ve spent most adult life helping the cause.

“The irony is that [we are] three most loyal Labour members you could hope to get; when people were attacking [Labour leader Jeremy] Corbyn, we’ve stuck by him. Now we’re all out on our neck.”

Park said he still intended to volunteer to help Labour MPs in marginal seats, as well as considering campaigning to help the Lib Dem former cabinet minister Vince Cable regain his seat in Twickenham, south-west London.

“Whatever we do, the likelihood is that Jeremy Hunt going to win,” he said of his constituency. “Nonetheless we’re tired of having a small share of the vote and we do feel that if we get behind one candidate we can stand some chance of denting his majority.”

Labour has selected IT manager David Black to fight the seat for the party after the CLP chair, Howard Kaye, the party’s candidate in 2015, has said he would not stand again. The Lib Dems have also selected a candidate, Ollie Purkiss.

The Green party co-leader Caroline Lucas has called for talks with Corbyn, and the Lib Dem leader, Tim Farron, to make a “series of electoral alliances” in some areas against the Conservatives before the election, though both have publicly rejected her entreaties.

Local Greens made the decision to stand down in the recent Richmond Park byelection, in which the Lib Dems’ Sarah Olney unseated the former Tory mayoral candidate Zac Goldsmith.

The party has also decided to stand aside in several seats at the general election in June, including Ealing Central and Acton, to bolster the chances of Labour’s Rupa Huq in the marginal.

Lucas has called for Labour and the Lib Dems to respond similarly to strengthen her party’s chances of taking the Isle of Wight, where the party hopes to capture the traditionally Conservative seat after its good showing in local elections.

Labour expels three members over attempt to unseat Jeremy Hunt

E-cigarette companies fined over false claims about toxic chemicals

Australia’s competition regulator has become the first in the world to successfully take legal action against e-cigarette companies for making false and misleading claims about the carcinogens in their products.

Federal court Justice John Gilmour ordered three online e-cigarette retailers – The Joystick Company Pty Ltd, Social-Lites Pty Ltd and Elusion Australia Ltd – and their individual CEOs and directors to pay penalties for breaching consumer law.

In separate proceedings the court found each of the companies had claimed their products did not contain harmful carcinogens and toxins, when this was not the case. It also found that the directors of Joystick and Elusion, and the CEO of Social-Lites, were knowingly involved in this deception.

Joystick and Social-Lites have been ordered to pay a penalty of $ 50,000, while the company heads have been ordered to pay $ 10,000. Elusion has been ordered to pay $ 40,000 and its director $ 15,000.

All three retailers admitted the conduct alleged by the ACCC and consented to the amounts of the penalties.

According to the case brought by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), statements on the company websites led consumers to believe they would not be exposed to the harmful chemicals found in ordinary cigarettes.

However independent testing commissioned by the ACCC identified the presence of carcinogens and toxic chemicals, such as formaldehyde, acetaldehyde and acrolein in the products of Joystick, Social-Lites and Elusion, as well as acetone in Social-Lites’ products.

Formaldehyde is classified by the World Health Organisation International Agency for Research on Cancer as a Group 1A carcinogen, meaning it causes cancer, while acetaldehyde is classified as possibly carcinogenic. Acrolein is classified as a toxic chemical.

Dr Becky Freeman, a tobacco control researcher with the University of Sydney’s school of public health, said some consumers thought e-cigarette companies were “small artisan companies interested in improving health” when in fact most were owned by big tobacco.

Many advertisements for e-cigarettes and related products claimed they were less toxic and therefore less harmful than tobacco, she said. “But I’d challenge you to find something that isn’t less toxic than tobacco,” Freeman said. “We have no long-term data on e-cigarettes to show that they’ve help people quit for good or that they’re safe.”

The federal court ruling was “enormously significant”, said Simon Chapman, an emeritus professor of public health. He was aware that other complaints about e-cigarette advertising have been made to the ACCC. “These are by no means isolated examples,” Chapman said.

“Tobacco companies want to walk on both sides of the street. They try to argue that e-cigarettes are simply an ordinary consumer product and not a therapeutic device and therefore shouldn’t be subject to the same regulations, yet they often make statements that these things are excellent ways of quitting.”

He said it was “insulting to science” to claim the products were harmless or safe given the lack of evidence about long-term effects.

“Of course they don’t have all the products of combustion that tobacco products have, as they are vaporised and not burned. So while they’re likely to be less harmful, we do not yet know the magnitude of their harm, we just have no accurate way of estimating that yet,” said Chapman.

The ACCC’s acting chair, Delia Rickard, said businesses, including those online, must ensure they provide accurate information to customers and have a reasonable basis for making any claims. “This is particularly important for products that may cause harm to the health of consumers,” she said.

E-cigarette companies fined over false claims about toxic chemicals

Baby boomers warned over alcohol intake as hospital admissions soar

Alcohol-related hospital admissions in England have increased by 64% in a decade and are at their highest ever level, prompting experts to warn that baby boomers are continuing to risk their health through frequent and excessive drinking.

There were an estimated 1.1m admissions where alcohol was the primary or secondary issue in 2015/16, compared with 670,000 in 2005/06, according to NHS Digital data published on Wednesday.

Separate data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) for England shows people aged 45 and over are frequently drinking at more hazardous levels.

Married and cohabiting couples are more likely than single people to consume alcohol on five or more days a week, though they are slightly less likely to binge drink.

Surveys found 60% of women aged 45 to 64 and 69% of men of the same age had drunk alcohol in the last week – the highest proportions of any age group.

Prof Sir Ian Gilmore, a liver doctor and chair of the Alcohol Health Alliance UK, said the figures proved the UK continued to have a dysfunctional relationship with alcohol.

He said: “We know that over the long term, rates of binge drinking are falling and more people are choosing to abstain from alcohol. Worryingly, however, these trends do not appear big enough to stop alcohol harm from continuing to rise, and the sharp increase in alcohol-related hospital admissions over the last few years means hundreds of thousands more people each year are experiencing the misery associated with harmful alcohol consumption.”

Dr Tony Rao, co-chair of the Older People’s Substance Misuse working group at the Royal College of Psychiatrists, said: “These figures show that alcohol abuse is not a ‘young person problem’. While the rest of the population reduces its alcohol intake, it is very concerning that baby boomers are drinking at a similar rate as before and are exceeding recommended guidelines.”

Alcohol figures

The ONS data also shows that the proportion of adults who say they drink alcohol is at the lowest level for more than a decade.

The trend has been largely driven by an increase in the proportion of younger people abstaining, but there has been no decline in the proportion of over-65s drinking, and they are the age group most likely to have consumed alcohol on five or more occasions in the week before they were interviewed.

Such regular drinking is more than three time more likely among over-65s than in the 16-24 age group, the data shows.

Alcohol is linked to more than 60 illnesses and diseases including heart disease, liver disease, cancer and dementia. Hospital admissions due to liver disease have gone up 57% over the last decade, and the number of people diagnosed with alcohol-related cancer has risen by 8%, according to the AHA. The World Cancer Research Fund has said that if nobody drank alcohol in the UK, 21,000 cases of cancer could be prevented each year, including nearly 12,000 cases of breast cancer.

NHS Digital cautions that a narrower measure of alcohol-related hospital admissions is more reliable for tracking changes over time than the broad measure – which the 1.1 million figure relates to – because it is less affected by improvements in recording of secondary diagnoses. But even under the narrow measure, hospital admissions have risen by 22% since 2005/06, to 339,000.

The ONS data shows that 7.8 million people admit to binge drinking – defined for men as consuming more than eight units and for women more than six units – on their heaviest drinking day.

Men are more likely to drink than women and to binge drink. Higher earners, on £40,000 and above annually, are more likely to be frequent drinkers and to binge drink than the lowest earners.

Gilmore said: “The data released today should be sobering reading for whoever wins the upcoming general election, and we would urge the next government to make tackling alcohol harm an immediate priority to save lives, reduce harm, and reduce the pressure on the NHS.”

The Alcohol Information Partnership, which is funded by global drinks companies, said binge drinking and harmful drinking had declined by 17% and 23% respectively since 2005.

Baby boomers warned over alcohol intake as hospital admissions soar

When my neighbor got a heart attack everyone fussed over him. How can I have that?

When I was a kid, if I were told that I’d be writing a book about diet and nutrition when I was older, let alone having been doing a health related radio show for over 36 years, I would’ve thought that whoever told me that was out of their mind. Living in Newark, New Jersey, my parents and I consumed anything and everything that had a face or a mother except for dead, rotting, pig bodies, although we did eat bacon (as if all the other decomposing flesh bodies were somehow miraculously clean). Going through high school and college it was no different. In fact, my dietary change did not come until I was in my 30′s.

Just to put things in perspective, after I graduated from Weequahic High School and before going to Seton Hall University, I had a part-time job working for a butcher. I was the delivery guy and occasionally had to go to the slaughterhouse to pick up products for the store. Needless to say, I had no consciousness nor awareness, as change never came then despite the horrors I witnessed on an almost daily basis.

After graduating with a degree in accounting from Seton Hall, I eventually got married and moved to a town called Livingston. Livingston was basically a yuppie community where everyone was judged by the neighborhood they lived in and their income. To say it was a “plastic” community would be an understatement.

Livingston and the shallowness finally got to me. I told my wife I was fed up and wanted to move. She made it clear she had to be near her friends and New York City. I finally got my act together and split for Colorado.

I was living with a lady in Aspen at the end of 1974, when one day she said, ” let’s become vegetarians”. I have no idea what possessed me to say it, but I said, “okay”! At that point I went to the freezer and took out about $ 100 worth of frozen, dead body parts and gave them to a welfare mother who lived behind us. Well, everything was great for about a week or so, and then the chick split with another guy.

So here I was, a vegetarian for a couple weeks, not really knowing what to do, how to cook, or basically how to prepare anything. For about a month, I was getting by on carrot sticks, celery sticks, and yogurt. Fortunately, when I went vegan in 1990, it was a simple and natural progression. Anyway, as I walked around Aspen town, I noticed a little vegetarian restaurant called, “The Little Kitchen”.

Let me back up just a little bit. It was April of 1975, the snow was melting and the runoff of Ajax Mountain filled the streets full of knee-deep mud. Now, Aspen was great to ski in, but was a bummer to walk in when the snow was melting.

I was ready to call it quits and I needed a warmer place. I’ll elaborate on that in a minute.

But right now, back to “The Little Kitchen”. Knowing that I was going to leave Aspen and basically a new vegetarian, I needed help. So, I cruised into the restaurant and told them my plight and asked them if they would teach me how to cook. I told them in return I would wash dishes and empty their trash. They then asked me what I did for a living and I told them I was an accountant.

The owner said to me, “Let’s make a deal. You do our tax return and we’ll feed you as well”. So for the next couple of weeks I was doing their tax return, washing their dishes, emptying the trash, and learning as much as I could.

But, like I said, the mud was getting to me. So I picked up a travel book written by a guy named Foder. The name of the book was, “Hawaii”. Looking through the book I noticed that in Lahaina, on Maui, there was a little vegetarian restaurant called,” Mr. Natural’s”. I decided right then and there that I would go to Lahaina and work at “Mr. Natural’s.” To make a long story short, that’s exactly what happened.

So, I’m working at “Mr. Natural’s” and learning everything I can about my new dietary lifestyle – it was great. Every afternoon we would close for lunch at about 1 PM and go to the Sheraton Hotel in Ka’anapali and play volleyball, while somebody stayed behind to prepare dinner.

Since I was the new guy, and didn’t really know how to cook, I never thought that I would be asked to stay behind to cook dinner. Well, one afternoon, that’s exactly what happened; it was my turn. That posed a problem for me because I was at the point where I finally knew how to boil water.

I was desperate, clueless and basically up the creek without a paddle. Fortunately, there was a friend of mine sitting in the gazebo at the restaurant and I asked him if he knew how to cook. He said the only thing he knew how to cook was enchiladas. He said that his enchiladas were bean-less and dairy-less. I told him that I had no idea what an enchilada was or what he was talking about, but I needed him to show me because it was my turn to do the evening meal.

Well, the guys came back from playing volleyball and I’m asked what was for dinner. I told them enchiladas; the owner wasn’t thrilled. I told him that mine were bean-less and dairy-less. When he tried the enchilada he said it was incredible. Being the humble guy that I was, I smiled and said, “You expected anything less”? It apparently was so good that it was the only item on the menu that we served twice a week. In fact, after about a week, we were selling five dozen every night we had them on the menu and people would walk around Lahaina broadcasting, ‘enchilada’s at “Natural’s” tonight’. I never had to cook anything else.

A year later the restaurant closed, and somehow I gravitated to a little health food store in Wailuku. I never told anyone I was an accountant and basically relegated myself to being the truck driver. The guys who were running the health food store had friends in similar businesses and farms on many of the islands. I told them that if they could organize and form one company they could probably lock in the State. That’s when they found out I was an accountant and “Down to Earth” was born. “Down to Earth” became the largest natural food store chain in the islands, and I was their Chief Financial Officer and co-manager of their biggest store for 13 years.

In 1981, I started to do a weekly radio show to try and expose people to a vegetarian diet and get them away from killing innocent creatures. I still do that show today. I pay for my own airtime and have no sponsors to not compromise my honesty. One bit of a hassle was the fact that I was forced to get a Masters Degree in Nutrition to shut up all the MD’s that would call in asking for my credentials.

My doing this radio show enabled me, through endless research, to see the corruption that existed within the big food industries, the big pharmaceutical companies, the biotech industries and the government agencies. This information, unconscionable as it is, enabled me to realize how broken our health system is. This will be covered more in depth in the Introduction and throughout the book and when you finish the book you will see this clearly and it will hopefully inspire you to make changes.

I left Down to Earth in 1989, got nationally certified as a sports injury massage therapist and started traveling the world with a bunch of guys that were making a martial arts movie. After doing that for about four years I finally made it back to Honolulu and got a job as a massage therapist at the Honolulu Club, one of Hawaii’s premier fitness clubs. It was there I met the love of my life who I have been with since 1998. She made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. She said,” If you want to be with me you’ve got to stop working on naked women”. So, I went back into accounting and was the Chief Financial Officer of a large construction company for many years.

Going back to my Newark days when I was an infant, I had no idea what a “chicken” or “egg” or “fish” or “pig” or “cow” was. My dietary blueprint was thrust upon me by my parents as theirs was thrust upon them by their parents. It was by the grace of God that I was able to put things in their proper perspective and improve my health and elevate my consciousness.

The road that I started walking down in 1975 has finally led me to the point of writing my book, “A Sane Diet For An Insane World”. Hopefully, the information contained herein will be enlightening, motivating, and inspiring to encourage you to make different choices. Doing what we do out of conditioning is not always the best course to follow. I am hoping that by the grace of the many friends and personalities I have encountered along my path, you will have a better perspective of what road is the best road for you to travel on, not only for your health but your consciousness as well.

Last but not least: after being vaccinated as a kid I developed asthma, which plagued me all of my life. In 2007 I got exposed to the organic sulfur crystals, which got rid of my asthma in 3 days and has not come back in over 10 years. That, being the tip of the iceberg, has helped people reverse stage 4 cancers, autism, joint pain, blood pressure problems, migraine headaches, erectile dysfunction, gingivitis, and more. Also, because of the detoxification effects by the release of oxygen that permeates and heals all the cells in the body, it removes parasites, radiation, fluoride, free radicals, and all the other crap that is thrust upon us in the environment by Big Business.

For more, please view www.healthtalkhawaii.com and www.asanediet.com.

Namaste!

When my neighbor got a heart attack everyone fussed over him. How can I have that?

Ministers under fire over bid to delay publication of air pollution plan

The government is facing renewed pressure after a last-minute attempt to delay the publication of its plan to tackle the UK’s air pollution crisis.

Ministers were under a court direction to produce tougher draft measures to tackle illegal levels of nitrogen dioxide pollution, which is largely caused by diesel traffic, by 4pm on Monday. The government’s original plans had been dismissed by judges as so poor as to be unlawful.

But following the announcement by Theresa May of a general election on 8 June, ministers lodged a lengthy application to the court late on Friday. It is understood it asked judges to allow them to breach the Monday deadline to “comply with pre-election propriety rules”.

The new draft would be submitted in June, after the election, with a full policy not produced until September.

Lawyers from environmental law group ClientEarth, which successfully took the government to court over its air quality plans, said the move was unacceptable, adding it was discussing its next move.

James Thornton, the group’s CEO, said: “The unacceptable last-minute nature of the government’s application late on Friday night, after the court had closed, has meant that we have spent the weekend considering our response.

“We are still examining our next steps. This is a question of public health and not of politics and for that reason we believe that the plans should be put in place without delay.”

The government lodged the lengthy application shortly before 7pm on Friday, which was too late for the court to accept. It was due to be considered by the court on Monday.

But ClientEarth said it was unlikely there would be a hearing on Monday as they would need time to respond to the government’s arguments, although the judge could order an emergency session.

The scale of the air pollution crisis was revealed in a joint Guardian-Greenpeace investigation this month showing hundreds of thousands of children were being educated within 150 metres of a road where levels of nitrogen dioxide from diesel traffic breached legal limits.

Last week figures obtained by Labour showed that more than 38 million people, representing 59.3% of the UK population, were living in areas where levels of nitrogen dioxide pollution were above legal limits.

Research consistently shows that exposure to traffic fumes is harmful to children and adults. Children are more vulnerable because their lungs are still developing and exposure to nitrogen dioxide reduces lung growth, causes long-term ill-health and can result it premature death.

Nitrogen dioxide emissions from diesel traffic cause 23,500 of the 40,000 premature deaths from air pollution each year, according to figures from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra). In April last year, MPs said air pollution was a public health emergency.

Thorton said: “Whichever party ends up in power after 8 June will need this air quality plan to begin finally to tackle our illegal levels of pollution and prevent further illness and early deaths from poisonous toxins in the air we breathe. The government has had five months to draft this plan and it should be published.”

A Defra spokesman said: “We are seeking an extension to comply with pre-election propriety rules.”

Ministers under fire over bid to delay publication of air pollution plan

NHS and medical watchdog tried to suppress scandal over vaginal mesh implants

NHS bosses and the watchdog that oversees medical devices tried to limit public exposure of the scandal over vaginal mesh implants that have harmed hundreds of women.

Minutes of a meeting held in October 2016 show that NHS England and the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency agreed to “avoid media attention” over the implants, despite the fact they were seeking to encourage patients to report any complications.

The document, obtained by the Press Association, records an agreement to “take the press element out” of the “yellow card” campaign to record adverse reactions experienced by vaginal mesh patients, suggesting that it could be folded into a wider effort, “of which mesh is one element, to avoid media attention on mesh”.

The apparent cooperation between NHS England and the MHRA to minimise media focus on the debilitating problems increasingly associated with the implants appears to breach the NHS’s duty – reiterated regularly by health secretary Jeremy Hunt – to be open and transparent over patient safety failings.

NHS England and the Department of Health both refused to comment on the minutes of the meeting.

One possible reason for the NHS to want to limit exposure of the issuecould be to reduce the number of potential lawsuits faced by the health service.

More than 800 women are suing the NHS and the manufacturers of vaginal mesh implants after suffering serious complications, it emerged this week. Some women reported that implants had cut into their vaginas, with one woman saying she was left in so much pain that she considered suicide. Others have been left unable to walk or have sex, according to the BBC.

Vaginal mesh implants are used to treat incontinence after childbirth or pelvic organ prolapse, where the womb or bladder bulge against the walls of the vagina. Between 2006 and 2016, more than 11,000 women in England were given the implants to treat prolapse or incontinence, NHS data shows.

Around 11%-12% of users have reported problems, while lawsuits in the US have already seen around $ 2bn (£1.5bn) paid to affected women.

Campaigners say that hundreds more women have come forward after learning of the group planning to sue.

Kath Sansom, who runs the campaigning website and Facebook group Sling the Mesh, says the number of women contacting her has risen from a few people a day to more than 200 in the past 24 hours.

“It’s always the same story,” she said. “There are so many women who were told it was just them, that they were a one-off. They can’t believe there are others out there. So many people are told it’s back pain, endometriosis, gall bladder pain, scar tissue. And so many of them accept it, you trust medical professionals.”

Data from the MHRA, which has been looking at the issue since 2011 following complaints from women, shows more than 1,000 adverse incidents have been reported in the past five years.

Despite the problems that have emerged the MHRA insists that the best current evidence supports the continued use of the implants to resolve health conditions that could themselves cause serious distress to patients.

A report into the issue from a working party led by NHS England admits there is a huge lack of data on complications from the devices. Published studies on mesh implants do “not tell the whole story” and there are gaps in NHS knowledge about their safety, it added.

NHS and medical watchdog tried to suppress scandal over vaginal mesh implants

Sanofi epilepsy drug linked to over 4,000 child deformities

The epilepsy medication valproate is responsible for “severe malformations” in up to 4,100 children in France since the drug was first marketed in the country in 1967, according to a preliminary study by health authorities.

Women who took the drug during pregnancy to treat epilepsy were four times more likely to give birth to babies with congenital malformations, said the report, jointly issued by the medicines regulator ANSM and the national health insurance administration.

The study confirmed that the drug was “highly teratogenic”, which means it is capable of causing birth defects, said Mahmoud Zureik, scientific director of ANSM and a co-author of the report.

He said the estimated number of babies born with severe malformations, which ranged between 2,150 and 4,100 was “very high”. The types of birth defects attributed to the drug included spina bifida – a condition in which the spinal cord does not form properly, and can protrude through the skin – as well as defects of the heart and genital organs.

The risk of autism and developmental problems was also found to be higher, and will be quantified in a follow-up report later this year.

An earlier estimate suggested that 30-40% of children exposed in the womb could suffer such disorders.

From 1967 to 2016, between 64,100 and 100,000 pregnancies in France were exposed to valproate, resulting in 41,200 to 75,300 live births, according to the report.

The vast majority of the birth defects occurred for women under treatment for epilepsy.

But starting in the late 1970s, valproate – marketed around the world including the US, UK and Australia as Depakine, Depakote, Stavzor and other trade names – was also prescribed in France to treat bi-polar disorder.

Bi-polar women taking the drug were twice as likely to give birth to children with major birth defects, the study found.

The lower risk compared with women treated for epilepsy probably stems from the fact that for pregnant bi-polar women doctors stopped prescribing valproate early in the pregnancy, Zureik said.

“The risk of severe malformation is limited to the first two trimesters of pregnancy,” said Alain Weill, a researcher at the French health insurance administration and a co-author of the report.

The risk of birth defects associated with valproate has been known since the 1980s, especially for spina bifida, which occurs 20 times more frequently in foetuses exposed to the medication.

But the drug can still be prescribed to pregnant women when all other forms of treatment for epilepsy fail. That ruling, however, was put in place only in 2015.

Valproate is sold in France under the brand name Depakine by pharmaceutical company Sanofi, but is also available in generic forms.

Some French families of children with birth defects born to women who took the drug while pregnant – grouped under an umbrella association called APESAC – have sued the company, claiming that it did not adequately warn about the risks.

“The number of victims is potentially huge,” said APESAC president Marine Martin, who says two of her children – a girl and a boy – suffered physical defects brought on by valproate.

“We need to take into account children with malformations and autism, as well as families that lost a baby due to treatment during pregnancy,” she told AFP.

Her association estimates a total of 30,000 to 50,000 victims – children and families included.

In a statement, Sanofi said it had been “totally transparent with health authorities”

“We are aware of the painful situation confronting the families of children showing difficulties that may have a link with the anti-epileptic treatment of their mother during pregnancy,” the drugmaker said.

Sanofi epilepsy drug linked to over 4,000 child deformities

More than 800 women sue NHS and manufacturers over vaginal mesh implants

More than 800 women are suing the NHS and the manufacturers of vaginal mesh implants after suffering serious complications.

Some women reported that implants had cut into their vaginas, with one woman saying she was left in so much pain that she considered suicide. Others have been left unable to walk or have sex, according to the BBC.

However, the medical regulator said that the best current evidence supports the continued use of mesh implants to resolve health conditions that could themselves cause serious distress to patients.

The implants are used to treat incontinence after childbirth or pelvic organ prolapse, where the womb or bladder bulge against the walls of the vagina.

Between April 2007 and March 2015, more than 92,000 women had vaginal mesh implants in England, NHS data shows. About one in 11 women suffered complications. The issue reached prominence in Scotland last year after women with painful and debilitating complications formed a support group.

Claire Cooper began to experience pain three years after her operation. Doctors initially thought the discomfort was related to the removal of her womb, a procedure she had undergone aged 39.

When the pain continued, she said a GP told her she was imagining it. This, and the severity of the pain, resulted in suicidal thoughts, which she said she only overcame because of her children. Her constant pain has forced her husband to become her carer.

Cooper said she and her husband have not had sex for more than four years. “This stuff breaks up marriages,” she told the BBC. “I wouldn’t at all be surprised if there are mesh-injured women that have taken their own lives and didn’t know what the problem was.”

Another woman, Kate Langley, described the surgery as “barbaric”. She told the BBC that a surgeon who examined her “could see the [mesh] tape had come through my vagina – protruding through”.

Data from the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) for 2012 to 2017 shows there were 703 adverse incidents relating to patients who had been given the implants to treat stress urinary incontinence, where urine leaks when the bladder is under pressure. A further 346 adverse incidents were reported for patients who had been given a mesh support to prevent pelvic organ prolapse.

The MHRA said the figures did not necessarily indicate a fault with any particular device and said evidence supported the continued use of vaginal mesh surgery for certain conditions.

A spokesman said: “What we have seen, and continue to see, is that evidence supports, and the greater proportion of the clinical community and patients support, the use of these devices in the UK for treatment of the distressing conditions of incontinence and organ prolapse in appropriate circumstances.”

A study published in the Lancet in December found that women who were given mesh implants were roughly three times more likely to suffer complications and twice as likely to need follow-up surgery compared with women who had the traditional version of the surgery, where stitches are used to provide support for the organs.

Rachael Wood, a consultant in public health medicine for NHS National Services Scotland and the lead author of the Lancet study, said: “The results were quite clear that women do suffer a higher complication rate and that it is no more effective. You can make quite a clear recommendation that it shouldn’t be the first line of treatment for prolapse.”

However, Wood said that the results on incontinence surgery were less clear, and for incontinence the study found fewer short-term complications when mesh surgery had been used compared to traditional treatment, which involves major surgery.

She said: “There’s no doubt that some women have had very poor outcomes. It is worth saying that nothing is without risk. There are also bad outcomes from traditional surgery and from doing nothing.”

More than 800 women sue NHS and manufacturers over vaginal mesh implants

Cancer Cells Die In 42 Days: Famous Austrian’s Juice Cured Over 45,000 People From Cancer

Cancer Cells Die In 42 Days: Famous Austrian’s Juice Cured Over 45,000 People From Cancer

When will public anger over the NHS reach a political tipping point? | Polly Toynbee

There is an ebb and flow in reporting on the NHS as Trump, Syria and Brexit dominate front pages. But the pressure-cooker state of the entire service still worsens. This morning’s latest figures are just a snapshot of deterioration – but every target is missed, for A&E, ambulance response times, for treating psychosis within a week, for cancer waiting times, blocked beds and diagnostic tests.

“Demand” is rising, the government says, as if serious illness were a choice, though the pressure comes from well-predicted rapidly increasing numbers of old, sick people: this February’s A&E figures are, as ever, better than deepest winter January, but worse than February last year, as this crisis ratchets up. Major A&E centres are treating 81.2% of patients within four hours, against a target of 95% that used to be hit before 2010. The government likes to blame frivolous users of A&E, but those are easily triaged to on-site GPs. Serious delays are due to very ill people needing to be admitted with no empty beds: bed occupancy is at dangerous levels, as Chris Hopson of NHS providers warns, where doctors often have to decide “one in one out”, discharging those who still need more care too early.

Take the temperature in virtually every part of the NHS and the wonder is how the heroically overstretched staff keep the wheels on the trolley. Take this week alone: the Royal College of Physicians says 84% of doctors have to cope with staff shortages and gaps in rotas. GPs? Two years after a government promise of 5,000 more GPs, numbers are still falling. They dropped by 400 just in the last three months of last year: as doctors find the workload unmanageable some escape abroad, take earlier retirement or become locums. Too few new doctors want the burden of running a GP partnership, so 92 practices closed last year, tipping hundreds of thousands more patients on to already overloaded neighbouring GP lists.

Today the Royal College of Nursing starts consulting its members on whether to hold a strike ballot, the traditionally most reluctant of unions to take action. But with public sector pay frozen yet again at 1%, when inflation will shortly hit 3%, nurses are departing, like doctors, for less stressful, better-paid work. Recruitment from the EU is plummeting, as predicted.

As everyone firefights, all the preventative services are being cut that might prevent patients needing a crisis bed

As everyone firefights, hand to mouth, all the preventative services are being cut that might help keep patients from needing a crisis bed. The government has lines to take but no answers, and some of those “lines” are fictions. No, the NHS has not had £10bn, as Theresa May keeps claiming: it’s more like £4.5bn over four years, says the Kings Fund.

No, the £2bn given to social care will not ease the beds crisis, for all the exhortations to councils to use every penny of it in releasing bed-blocking patients with new care packages at home. NHS Providers, representing NHS hospitals, mental and community trusts, says councils are using that money to stem the collapse of existing care services and care homes, as the higher minimum wage and rising costs cause multiple closures. Cuts leave at least half a million old people getting no care, who would have done, and that risks falls, neglect and extra hospital visits. The care crisis is seeing 900 care workers a day leaving underpaid and overworked jobs.

Money, you might think, comes last in hospital managers’ priorities. But they are being severely harried and punished by NHS England to rein in ballooning debt by plundering capital funds and selling bits of land to cover running costs, one-offs many say they can’t repeat this year. An NHS England-commissioned report says £10bn is needed to cover this depleted capital: that’s not for grand new projects, but for basics like outworn dialysis machines.

A chair of a leading teaching hospital tells me “heroic assumptions” are being made by most trusts agreeing their “control totals”, their spending limits for this year. Debts will swell again. This year the NHS gets just a 1% increase, next year an unprecedented zero.

One of the Labour’s NHS triumphs was to cut waiting times for operations from 18 months to 18 weeks – but now that totemic 18-week limit has been abandoned. However, that only adds to hospitals’ financial woes as they rely on income from elective surgery, while every extra emergency costs them money.

This is the dismal background to the reorganisation that NHS England head Simon Stevens is attempting, almost undercover. His state of play review of his five-year forward plan passed hardly noticed, announcing a first tranche of England’s 44 STPs, (sustainability and transformation plans) to reconnect local services fragmented by the Lansley 2012 act.

Most observers think it the right way to go, putting the NHS and social care under a united structure with one finance hub, ending destructive and expensive competition and tendering of services. But hardly anyone thinks this can be done with no new money: every STP calls for capital for new beds and units. Virtually all involve closures and mergers stirring a local political outcry.

Jeremy Hunt, who always presented himself as the patient’s ally, rooting out poor quality, wallowing in the Labour disaster at Mid-Staffs, has fallen uncharacteristically quiet. He has nothing much to say about patient safety in A&Es or elderly patients turned out of beds too soon. Not even deaths on trolleys in A&E corridors in Worcester roused his usual righteous ire.

Concern about the NHS has risen high in recent polling: what no one knows is when public anger will reach a political tipping point. May and Hammond stay iron-clad adamant: all this is NHS shroud-waving and there will be no more money. Lack of any opposition helps, but can they really tough it out where Thatcher, Major and Blair all bent in the face of NHS crises?

When will public anger over the NHS reach a political tipping point? | Polly Toynbee

Bereaved families bring case against government over prisoner suicides

Relatives of prisoners at HMP Woodhill who have taken their own lives are to bring a legal challenge against the institution’s governor and the justice secretary for allegedly failing to introduce basic safety measures. Eighteen prisoners have killed themselves at the jail in Milton Keynes since early 2013 despite repeated recommendations and guidance from coroners’ reports and official bodies that investigate deaths in custody.

The most recent death at Woodhill was before Christmas, shortly after the high court granted permission for the case to be heard. Deaths in custody reached a record high in England and Wales last year. In 2016, there were 119 self-inflicted deaths; the previous year there were 89.

The action has been brought by Pearl Scarfe and Julie Barber, the mother and sister of Ian Brown, who took his life in his cell in Woodhill on 19 July 2015, and Jamie Blyde, the brother of Daniel Dunkley, who died on 2 August 2016, four days after he was found hanging in his cell.

The families are seeking to persuade the court to order that the governor of Woodhill prison and the justice secretary, Liz Truss, take urgent action to reduce the risk of self-inflicted deaths in the future. Woodhill had the highest suicide rate of any prison in 2016; seven prisoners killed themselves there last year.

Barber said: “Ian was much loved. Our loss has been unimaginable. We all miss him every day. I believe if he’d had the help and support he needed he’d still be here. Every time I hear about another death in the prison, I think: ‘Why?’

“If lessons had been learned when my brother died, all those families would not have had to go through what we have had to go through. It’s hard for us to hear about more deaths. It makes me angry that suicides have happened that could have been prevented if changes had been put in place, as they should have been.”

The judicial review, to be heard at the Royal Courts of Justice in central London, is being supported by Inquest, the organisation that helps relatives at coroners’ courts. Inquest says it is concerned about the lack of a national oversight mechanism to monitor, audit and follow up actions taken in response to recommendations by the Prisons and Probation Ombudsman and coroners.

Deborah Coles, the director of Inquest, said: “The number of self-inflicted deaths occurring in prisons in England and Wales is currently at record levels. It is therefore more vital than ever that preventative actions are identified, changes implemented, and sustained improvements enforced to prevent future deaths.

“The current system for learning lessons and implementing changes arising from deaths in custody is not fit for purpose; it does not adequately prevent future deaths, meet the hopes and needs of bereaved families, or satisfy the wider public interest.

“The deplorable situation at HMP Woodhill is just one stark example of a much wider national problem. Deaths occur time and again as a result of repeated failings. Families are told that lessons will be learned, but nothing changes. The reality is that the Ministry of Justice has wholly failed to address the unacceptable rise in self-inflicted deaths.”

Jo Eggleton, a solicitor at the law firm Deighton Pierce Glynn, who represents the families of Brown and Dunkley, said: “[They] have shown great strength in bringing this claim. Despite the awful ordeal they have been through, they have put themselves on the line to try and protect others and prevent future deaths.

“They and the other families of men who have died at Woodhill that I represent share this common goal and have worked together to try and make it possible. They should be recognised and applauded for that. It’s just a shame that this claim has had to be brought at all.”

In a letter to Truss last week, the Labour MP Harriet Harman, the chair of parliament’s joint committee on human rights, called for a national oversight mechanism “with a duty to collate, analyse and monitor learning outcomes and their implementation arising out of deaths in prisons”.

In the UK, the Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123. In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Hotline is 1-800-273-8255. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is on 13 11 14.

Bereaved families bring case against government over prisoner suicides

Belle Gibson hit with $30,000 in court costs over false cancer claims

Disgraced health blogger Belle Gibson has to pay $ 30,000 towards the legal costs of Consumer Affairs Victoria and has been banned from making deceptive claims about her health in connection with wellbeing advice.

Federal court justice Debra Mortimer made the orders on Friday against Annabelle Natalie Gibson, who claimed she had brain cancer and healed herself with natural remedies.

The judge said Gibson was prohibited from claiming, in connection with the development and promotion and sale of her wellness advice:

• that she had been diagnosed with brain cancer at any time before 24 May 2016
  


• that she was given four months to live
  


• that she had taken and then rejected conventional cancer treatments in favour of embarking on a quest to heal herself naturally

Consumer Affairs Victoria took Gibson to court last year alleging she had lied about a 2009 brain cancer diagnosis and subsequent recovery.

It was also alleged that she had lied to consumers about donating to charities from the sales of her Whole Pantry app.

Last month Mortimer found the allegations against Gibson to be mostly true, saying she had “played on the genuine desire of members of the Australian community to help those less fortunate”.

An excerpt from Gibson’s Whole Pantry Book describes her journey from being told she had four months to live, to finding out she was pregnant, to rejecting medical intervention and travelling the country in search of non-medical advice.

If Gibson refused to obey Friday’s court order, she would be liable for imprisonment, sequestration of property or other punishment, the court documents said.

She has been absent from court since the case began and has not defended herself through lawyers.

Belle Gibson hit with $30,000 in court costs over false cancer claims

Labour challenges Hunt over dropping NHS waiting times target

Labour has challenged the health secretary over the legal basis for dropping a commitment on NHS waiting times.

The shadow health secretary, Jon Ashworth, wrote to Jeremy Hunt claiming the government and NHS England were acting unlawfully by accepting that the 18-week target would be missed.

NHS England’s chief executive, Simon Stevens, said he expected waiting times to rise slightly as a “trade-off” for improvement in other areas such as hitting the four-hour A&E target and better cancer care.

Longer waits can be expected for planned operationssuch as hip and knee replacements, cataract removal, hernia operations and laparoscopies.

The NHS target is for 92% of patients to be treated within 18 weeks of referra. Ashworth said: “The absolute nature of this legal duty to meet the 92% is reflected in the NHS constitution.

“The NHS constitution isn’t just a pledge by politicians; it’s a legal guarantee about the standards of care that patients can expect to receive in the English NHS. That includes a guarantee to treatment within 18 weeks, which NHS England have now said they can no longer provide because the government has denied them the funding they need.

“Government ministers need to urgently clarify they are not breaching the NHS constitution and must outline the consequences of denying patients their legal right to treatment within 18 weeks.

“As a first step, the secretary of state must publish his department’s legal advice urgently.

“Earlier this week NHS chiefs announced – without any public consultation or changes to the law – that the NHS will no longer be required to meet the 18-week treatment target because the financial crisis has got so bad. It’s utterly unacceptable and a striking admission of how badly the Tories are running the NHS.

“Since Theresa May became prime minister standards of care for NHS patients have been in a rapid downward spiral. She might be prepared to ignore NHS staff and the public but she can’t just ignore the NHS constitution based on legislation voted upon by parliament.”

On Sky News’ Sophy Ridge on Sunday Ashworth said he thought the NHS needed up to £5bn extra funding this year, suggesting the government should scrap tax cuts in order to pay for the health service.

“We can afford the NHS if the government is prepared to put the money in and make different decisions on tax,” he said.

Asked if he was prepared to consider tax increases to fund the NHS, he said: “I am ready to have that discussion with people about how we fund the NHS.”

But he added that money was being wasted because of the “privatisation agenda” and a failure to deal with public health problems such as obesity.

Labour challenges Hunt over dropping NHS waiting times target

I thought my career as a doctor was over. It was the arts that saved me

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I used to ignore my creative side, but after I was signed off work with depression and anxiety, I made space for the things I loved

As a hospital doctor I am used to working under pressure, and had always felt I thrived on it. But when I took time out of clinical training to pursue a PhD, I found I was intensely unhappy. I suffered a range of physical symptoms: palpitations, early morning waking, nausea, severe headaches, poor appetite, diarrhoea, dizziness, breathlessness and tremors.

My day was constantly interrupted by intrusive negative thoughts; I once walked for 30 minutes with “I hate my life, I hate my life” on a loop of internal monologue that I feared had no end. I listened to podcasts and audiobooks fanatically but could not drown out these thoughts, and no rationalisation of all the wonderful things I had in my life could make them stop.

Continue reading…

I thought my career as a doctor was over. It was the arts that saved me

Anti-abortion activists charged over undercover Planned Parenthood videos

California prosecutors have charged two anti-abortion activists who made undercover videos of themselves trying to buy fetal tissue from Planned Parenthood with 15 felonies, saying they invaded the privacy of medical providers by filming without consent.

State attorney general Xavier Becerra announced the charges on Tuesday against David Daleiden of Davis, California, and Sandra Merritt of San Jose. The two operate the Irvine-based Center for Medical Progress.

The allegations say the pair filmed 14 people without permission between October 2013 and July 2015 in Los Angeles, San Francisco and El Dorado counties. One felony count was filed for each person. The 15th was for criminal conspiracy to invade privacy.

Becerra says they used a fictitious bioresearch company to meet with women’s healthcare providers and covertly record them.

Daleiden, in an email to the Associated Press, said the “bogus” charges were coming from “Planned Parenthood’s political cronies”.

“The public knows the real criminals are Planned Parenthood and their business partners,” Daleiden said.

Planned Parenthood – which has previously said the videos were “heavily edited to deceive the public” – welcomed the charges, saying they sent “a clear message: you can’t target women and healthcare providers without consequences”.

Planned Parenthood (@PPact)

CA Attorney General filing criminal charges sends a clear message — you can’t target women & health care providers without consequences. https://t.co/dFT42uZUyq

March 29, 2017

In April of last year, Daleiden said in a Facebook post that California department of justice agents had raided his home, seizing all of his video footage along with personal information.

Since then, the case had gone largely quiet, with virtually no revelations about the investigation and no indication that the charges were coming before they were filed on Tuesday in San Francisco superior court.

The prosecution got a new leader this year in Becerra, a longtime Congressional Democrat, who took over for Kamala Harris when she became a US senator.

Daleiden and Merritt had previously been indicted in Texas on similar charges in January 2016, but all of the charges were eventually dropped by July as prosecutors said a grand jury had overstepped its authority. The grand jury had originally been convened to investigate Planned Parenthood, but after finding no wrongdoing indicted Daleiden and Merritt instead.

Anti-abortion activists charged over undercover Planned Parenthood videos

America rose to defend healthcare. But Trump’s attack on the poor is not over | Mary O’Hara

Obamacare will be the law of the land for the “foreseeable future”, the speaker of the US House of Representatives, Paul Ryan, admitted in the aftermath of the abject failure of Donald Trump or the Republican party to “repeal or replace” Obama’s flagship Affordable Care Act (ACA) after seven years of bleating about it. The colossal and humiliating collapse of the proposals was met with jubilation last Friday by millions of people, especially the poorest and disabled, who were in line to lose access to healthcare if the American Health Care Act had been successful.

Watching the events unfold I wondered: what if there had been a similar sudden downfall of the austerity programme in the UK in those early days when the dire warnings of the harm it would unleash were being shouted from the rooftops? How many people would not now be turning to food banks or battling to access social care if austerity had been stopped in its tracks?

The political rollercoaster in the US as the new health bill failed to garner the necessary votes to be passed in the house (partly because rightwing hardliners wanted an even harsher version) was stunning. The debacle came against a backdrop of months of anxiety and fear at what would unfold if it were passed and, the closer the vote deadline got, the more it hit home how much ordinary citizens would suffer. Across the country, individuals and groups rose to oppose it, highlighting the potentially devastating consequences for access to reproductive health services and the disproportionate impact on low-income women and children. Disabled campaigners worked tirelessly to draw attention to the particular injustices they would face if the law passed. Last Wednesday, more than 50 disability rights activists were arrested in Washington DC for protesting against it.

As longtime campaigner Bruce Darling from the disability rights organisation Adapt explained, many people risked being placed in institutions rather than supported in their own homes if proposed cuts of $ 880bn (£705bn) to Medicaid, the government-funded programme that assists the very poorest and disabled people, went ahead. “Disabled people will die,” Darling told me.

Leading up to the healthcare vote I talked to people who were terrified about the impact of the new act. One of these was Marta Conner, a charity consultant from Virginia whose seven-year-old daughter, Caroline, has Rett syndrome, a neurological condition that severely limits her control over her body and means she needs round-the-clock care, expensive medication and specialist equipment. Conner was like many of those speaking out. She told me she felt “it was important to have our voices heard” because children like Caroline and millions more disabled and seriously ill people could lose a lifeline.

Paul Ryan on failed healthcare bill: ‘This is a disappointing day’

According to independent analysis from the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, the AHCA would have seen 24 million people lose health cover in the next decade – and sent insurance premiums for older people rocketing. And, just to rub salt in the wounds, it would have meant a doling out of tax breaks to the rich.

Nevertheless, despite the healthcare reprieve, if you are poor or disabled in the US right now, the fight for rights to support and quality care is far from over. For a start, the healthcare debate isn’t going to disappear: health insurance remains prohibitively expensive for many and even with the advances of Obamacare, it is not a universal system.

But there are other reasons why complacency is not an option. The attack on the poorest is coming on multiple fronts. Trump’s “blueprint” budget, which was also published this month, is a source of widespread anxiety. It has been overshadowed somewhat by the healthcare issue, but with clear echoes of cuts in Britain, initiatives that help the most vulnerable could be decimated if Trump gets his way.

In a similarly absurd vein to Tory claims of “compassionate Conservatism” while they slash budgets, preside over soaring levels of child poverty and pummel the NHS, Republicans have had the gall to argue that culling anti-poverty programmes such as after-school nutrition initiatives and Meals on Wheels are acts of compassion towards taxpayers. The question now is, can these radical proposals come crashing down as the healthcare bill did? For the sake of the most vulnerable, let’s hope so.

America rose to defend healthcare. But Trump’s attack on the poor is not over | Mary O’Hara

Doctor admits misleading medics over Pauline Cafferkey temperature

A doctor has admitted misleading other medics by concealing Pauline Cafferkey’s raised temperature before she became seriously ill with Ebola.

Hannah Ryan, who volunteered in Sierra Leone in her first year after graduating from medical school, was one of the medics who assessed Cafferkey following the Scottish nurse’s return to the UK in 2014.

Ryan wrote down a temperature 1C lower than it actually was during a “chaotic” screening process at Heathrow airport on 28 December 2014, a medical practitioners tribunal heard on Monday.

A raised temperature can be the first sign of Ebola, which can kill within five days. Cafferkey, who twice nearly died from the virus, went on to develop one of the worst cases on record for people treated in the west.

Cafferkey was cleared of misconduct over the recording of her temperature in September.

The tribunal in Manchester heard on Monday that Ryan recorded Cafferkey’s temperature as being 37.2C despite knowing it was at least 38.2C – above the average body temperature of 37C and higher than the 37.5C threshold requiring further assessment by a consultant in infectious diseases.

She later told another doctor there were no abnormalities in the temperatures of Cafferkey’s group of returnees, according to a written summary of the allegations by the General Medical Council.

Dr Bernard Herdan, the tribunal chair, was told Ryan’s conduct was “misleading and dishonest” and that her “fitness to practise is impaired because of [Ryan’s] misconduct”.

Ryan admitted misleading others and “acquiesced” in the wrong temperature being given but denies misconduct by her actions at the airport and during a subsequent investigation by Public Health England.

Fraser Coxhill, representing the General Medical Council, said Ryan and Cafferkey were one group among many British medics who put their own lives at risk by volunteering their medical skills and going to west Africa to help fight the outbreak.

Deployed on 22 November 2014, they were based at an 80-bed treatment centre in Kerry Town, working “tirelessly in dangerous and highly pressurised conditions” during which they “formed a strong bond of friendship”, Coxhill said.

But about a month later when they returned to the UK on the afternoon of 28 December, the Ebola screening area at the Heathrow terminal was “crowded, noisy and chaotic”.

In the queue to get clearance from PHE medics to be allowed to leave “murmurings of discontent and frustration” grew, the tribunal heard. There were concerns some Scottish medics would miss connecting flights to Glasgow due to delays in the screening process.

Trying to help PHE staff with the process, they agreed to take and record their own temperatures. Ryan took Cafferkey’s temperature, which was 38.2C – a warning sign for the Ebola virus.

The two medics and another nurse with them, Donna Wood, discussed the reading, “during which someone said, ‘Let’s get out of here’,” Coxhill told the tribunal.

Cafferkey’s temperature was then recorded as 37.2C, the form was passed to PHE staff and the medics went on their way.

However, in baggage reclaim there was further discussion between the medics, and PHE staff were contacted.

When Cafferkey’s temperature was taken again it was below the threshold. However, by this time she had taken paracetamol, which lowers body temperature. Cafferkey returned to Glasgow but the next day fell seriously ill with Ebola.

Four days later, Dr Nick Gent, from PHE, called Ryan to investigate what had happened at the airport. Ryan later admitted not telling him she had taken Cafferkey’s temperature and that it was above the threshold for possible Ebola infection.

Coxhill added: “Whilst there is no doubt that Dr Ryan is a practitioner of hitherto unblemished character who undertook important selfless work in Sierra Leone, it is submitted that the events of 28 December 2014 and 2 January 2015 appear to demonstrate someone whose first instinct is to mislead and be dishonest.”

Ryan’s involvement emerged during a misconduct hearing for Donna Wood, another volunteer medic who was suspended for two months in November after being found to have concealed Cafferkey’s raised temperature.

In evidence to the Nursing and Midwifery Council, Ryan said she was in shock after taking Cafferkey’s temperature in her left and right ears and finding it raised.

She told the NMC hearing in a written witness statement: “I asked Pauline if she was feeling OK. She said she was feeling fine.

“I stood there in shock. It was like I was paralysed. I had no clear thought process. Ebola is such a horrible disease that every time you have a high temperature you worry, even when you know there’s no reason to.”

Ryan said only the three medics were present and that Wood “broke the inertia by saying something like, ‘I’m just going to write it down as 37.2 degrees’” so they could “get out of here and sort it out”.

The tribunal is expected to last 10 days.

Doctor admits misleading medics over Pauline Cafferkey temperature

My ambulance crew is forced to put a plaster over society"s failure

However good the NHS is, it is not a lot of things; it isn’t social care, it isn’t a hotel and it most certainly isn’t a miracle worker. I work as an emergency care assistant on ambulances at the weekend. I can see the amazing things the health service does, but also why it sometimes appears to be falling apart at the seams. The NHS is stretched to breaking point every day. There are a lot of reasons for this and some of them are easy to see.

I’ve lost count of the number of times I have been called to patients who aren’t really patients at all. They are desperately in need of help, but not medical help. They need social care. Or social housing. They need their basic needs to be met, but not an ambulance crew. It’s just that there is no one else who they can call on a Sunday afternoon when, for example, they are at the end of their tether. When the loneliness hits hard, the prospect of not seeing a friendly face for another week is more than they can bear.

In the past this would have been dealt with by ringing another family member, or by a carer or a respite centre to give the family a break. These days, though, families are spread far apart and cuts to local authority budgets mean social care has been decimated. There is no one to call. There is no relief or respite in sight for a lot of these people and so, in desperation, they call an ambulance.

In turn, because the ambulance crew can see that the family cannot cope, that it’s just too much, we have no choice. We take them to hospital in the hope that given a few hours of space the family feels better, more able to continue in the thankless task of caring. We put a plaster over society’s failure.

And so there goes a hospital bed. A nurse, a doctor, all of whose time is taken up, instead of looking after the sick. There goes the protected NHS budget – the one that the government has pledged to increase. Only it’s not really an increase or protected at all, because now, instead of the money being spent on social care, and coming out of local authority budgets, it is coming out of the NHS one.

Then there are the lost souls. Those who drift, who sofa surf or sleep on park benches. Many of them mentally unwell but not acutely so. They don’t need a hospital, they just need somewhere warm and safe. It takes a cold-hearted person to leave someone on a park bench when you know they have nowhere else to go and it is -3C outside. Yet again we, the ambulance crew, paid for by the NHS, spend our time and your money phoning around charities, forgotten contacts in our patient’s phone, in the hope that we can find them a warm bed for the night. If not, due to cuts in social housing, there being no easy access hostels, we take them to the warm waiting room of the hospital. As we sit there sticking plasters on the plight of the homeless, another cardiac arrest call goes unanswered. Another person dies.

Other patients are just too old; their bodies far too weak. Sometimes it happens slowly, other times it is quick. I recently went to a patient who was in his 90s and barely lucid. His daughter insisted he had been fine until he got pneumonia and was taken into hospital for a month.

There was no point telling her that maybe it was just his time to go. That he had lived longer than most people, that the hospital she was blaming for the state of her father was probably to blame, only not in the way that she thought. Years ago, her dad wouldn’t have been taken to hospital to be treated for the pneumonia that nearly killed him. He would likely have just died at home. Instead we dragged him off to A&E for more interventions. When he isn’t restored back to full health, no doubt his daughter will claim that the hospital killed him. Blame, it would seem, is easier than the truth. Sometimes we just need to allow people to die and not play God and attempt miracles.

If you would like to write a blogpost for Views from the NHS frontline, read our guidelines and get in touch by emailing sarah.johnson@theguardian.com.

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My ambulance crew is forced to put a plaster over society"s failure

Residential care costs "can soak up over 50% of property values"

The cost of an average stay in a residential care home can swallow up more than half the value of an individual’s house in some parts of the country, according to new research.
The findings, which show that the typical person entering residential care will face a total bill of £50,000-£93,000 depending on where they live, will fuel the debate about social care funding.
The chancellor, Philip Hammond, announced in this month’s budget that an extra £2bn would be granted to social care in England over the next three years. He also said the government would produce a discussion paper later this year that looks into how to fund social care in the future.
The new research from the mutual insurer Royal London, whose director of policy is the former pensions minister Steve Webb, found that variations in house prices around the UK mean the cost of a typical residential care home stay could range from 18% to 56% of the value of the average house.

It described the situation as a lottery and said many people were at risk of losing “a large part of the value of their home” if they were hit with such costs.
It said that for most pensioners, their house was likely to be by far the biggest asset on which they would need to draw to meet care home bills. For many, that will mean selling the family home to pay the fees.
For people in north-east England, where the average house price at the end of 2016 was just under £129,000, an average stay of 30 months in a local home costing £554 a week would eat up 56% of the value of their home. The total bill would be £71,000.
For those living in London, where the average house price is around £484,000, 30 months of residential care at a typical cost of £666 a week would only account for around 18% of the value of their home. The total bill would be £86,000.
The equivalent percentages for south-east England, East Anglia and the Midlands were 29%, 32% and 40-41% respectively.
The research relates to residential rather than nursing care. For those who need nursing care, the total bill is likely to be smaller because average stays in nursing homes are significantly shorter than those for residential homes,which more than offsets the higher weekly costs of nursing care.
Webb, a former Liberal Democrat MP, said successive governments had “failed to grasp the nettle” when it came to care costs, and that urgent action was needed.

Residential care costs "can soak up over 50% of property values"

Warnings over children"s health as recycled e-waste comes back as plastic toys

Flame retardants used in plastics in a wide range of electronic products is putting the health of children exposed to them at risk, according to a new report (pdf).

Brominated flame-retarding chemicals have been associated with lower mental, psychomotor and IQ development, poorer attention spans and decreases in memory and processing speed, according to the peer-reviewed study by the campaign group CHEM Trust.

“The brain development of future generations is at stake,” says Dr Michael Warhurst, CHEM Trust’s director. “We need EU regulators to phase out groups of chemicals of concern, rather than slowly restricting one chemical at a time. We cannot continue to gamble with our children’s health.”

The issue poses questions about recycled products that have been imported from countries with less robust recycling rules, such as China.

In 2014 China generated 3.2bn tonnes of industrial solid waste, of which 2bn tonnes was recycled, recovered, incinerated or reused, according to a study in Nature. But concerns about its waste treatment standards were heightened by the discovery of some of the highest concentrations of PBDE chemicals (a group of brominated flame retardants) ever recorded in the food chain near the country’s e-waste recycling plants in the same year.

A trend towards using plastic parts instead of metals in electrical and electronic goods is also causing a headache for the circular economy because so many plastics use toxic flame retardants.

One 2015 study (pdf) found significant traces of two potentially hormone-altering brominated flame retardants in 43% of 21 children’s toys surveyed, including toy robots, hockey sticks and finger skateboards. The substances are often found in the recycled plastics first used in electronic products.

Last month the European commission moved to restrict the use of one such substance, DecaBDE, but also allowed exemptions for spare car parts and aviation, and longer deferral periods for recycled materials containing the substance.

A subsequent European Environmental Bureau report called on the commission to limit the amount of hazardous materials in circulation and ensure the appropriate decontamination of hazardous waste before recovery.

At high doses persistent organic pollutants (POPs) such as DecaBDE may have carcinogenic (pdf) effects and environmentalists have protested to the commission (pdf) about their potential reuse. POPs can accumulate in living bodies and be transported far from their places of origin by atmospheric circulation and ocean currents.

The Arctic, for example, has experienced a huge build up of POPs even though they are not produced there, with Innuit peoples in Nunavut recording extraordinarily high chemical concentrations in their bloodstreams.

That poses concerns for health professionals but also for European businesses. Under EU law companies must remove and send listed POPs to high-temperature incineration plants where they can be turned into salts and waters. However, this removes a plastic waste stream from revenue-generating recycling materials, making it more costly and difficult to meet recycling obligations.

Plastics in electrical goods may be safely incinerated en masse when disposed of by responsible hazardous-waste disposal centres.

But environmentalists argue that EU regulations allow the collection and recycling of material containing dangerously high levels of POPs, while information about chemical toxicity is not properly passed along the whole product lifecycle.

The substances may still be found in imported products that have been recycled in countries like China, according to Professor Olaf Wirth of the Okopol Institute, who has advised the German federal environment agency.

“Many big name toy-makers produce in China and don’t have a problem as they tell the producers what to do and what is forbidden in the EU,” says Wirth. “If you just buy something on the market because you like the design then you may bring products into the EU that contain substances that are not allowed.”

Wirth is sympathetic to environmentalists and firefighters who question the need for flame retardants in most electrical products, although national regulations often require them.

Philip Morton, the outgoing CEO of Repic, the UK’s largest e-waste producer compliance scheme, told the Guardian that handling POPs is “the next big thing” for manufacturers.

“Whereas steel is just steel, plastic is not just plastic,” says Morton. “There are a number of different grades and additives that should be on everyone’s radar. More things will soon start appearing on the ‘POP list’ and that has the potential to become very difficult [for industry].”

The commission is expected to bring forward an amendment of its POP regulation later this year, to update producer obligations. Meanwhile designers are in an ongoing race to turn out product models that are well labelled, easily dissembled and simple to recycle.

“Going forward there will have to be stronger connections between manufacturers and the designers of their products as it’s a closed loop and producers putting these products on the market will ultimately pay for recycling at the end of a product’s life,” says Morton.

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Warnings over children"s health as recycled e-waste comes back as plastic toys