A couple of weekends ago, I was invited onto BBC Breakfast News to review the Sunday papers. Arriving at the studio in Salford, Manchester, at 6am, the producer presented me with a foot-high pile of the day’s newspapers and instructed me to pick five stories to talk about on air. All should be from different papers, none could be from the front page, and two needed to be ‘serious’. The Munich shootings had happened just two days before, when 18-year-old Ali David Sonboly lured victims to a McDonald’s restaurant before going on a killing spree that left nine dead and 35 injured. It was a horrific news event that simply couldn’t be ignored. Taking a deep breath, I sat down on the red sofa and flicked open a copy of The Observer to discuss this baby-faced teenager’s murderous acts. It’s not the sort of thing any of us want to talk about, let alone in front of 2 million people, but trying to understand the mind of the young killer could actually help prevent such tragedies happening again. Read more
Spelling out the truth about dyslexia
We’ve all done it: mixed up our numbers and telephoned the wrong person. It’s an easy mistake that’s easy to forgive, but for one Starbucks employee, Meseret Kumulchew, getting her numbers in a jumble landed her in very hot water. While logging the temperature of fridges and water onto the duty roster, coffee shop worker Meseret accidentally wrote the numbers the wrong way round. Apparently accused of fraud and ordered to retrain, she was exonerated earlier this year when the courts ruled her employer had treated her unjustly. She, like an estimated half a million people in the UK, has dyslexia – a condition that many of us simply don’t understand. And the brew is made all the murkier because there is no accepted definition of what dyslexia is. Read more
Science shows that schools should start later, so why hasn’t the penny dropped?
The sun is shining, the birds are singing and it’s the start of a brand new day. Like many people, I love the mornings and consider myself an ‘early bird’ (after the first coffee, that is). It wasn’t always that way, however. During my teenage years, getting out of bed before 9 am was so difficult that the bed clothes might just as well have been made out of lead. Such slothful adolescent behaviour is common and the cause of endless parental exasperation. Youngsters may not be just being lazy, however, as something strange is happening in their brain. From around the age of 14, the childhood brain rapidly rewires as it matures and develops an adult mind. Throughout this turbulent time of mood swings and emotional angst the teenage body clock also steps back two time zones. Read more
It’s good to go to work on an egg, as long as it’s not Easter
As a child, I thought “go to work on an egg” was an advert for oval shaped cars. Starting soon after the end of World War II, “Go to Work on an Egg” was a long-running campaign that became one of the most successful food promotions of all time. Humorous television (see below) and newspaper ads encouraged the British public to eat an egg at breakfast and, by the 1960s, we were each dipping, scrambling and frying our way through five a week. Back then, every doctor in the land said eggs were good for health but come the 1970s our love affair with them started to crack. Medics warned that eggs could raise cholesterol levels and when Conservative MP Edwina Currie suggested that all British eggs might be infected with Salmonella in 1988, egg sales went splat – dropping by 60% overnight. Read more
Suck on this: Americans’ teeth are just as bad as Brits’
For a long time now, Americans have mocked us Brits for our terrible teeth. They have sneered with their gleaming pearly whites while we have shamefully hidden our crooked yellow fangs. British dental hygiene has been the laughing stock of the Developed World for a long time: in Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery, the goofy super-spy confessed: “All right, I get it, I have bad teeth – In Britain in the Sixties you could be a sex symbol and still have bad teeth!” While I’m not old enough to know whether this was actually true, it is clear that the buck-toothed Brit stereotype has stuck faster than chewing gum.
Our oral reputation decayed even further earlier this month when headlines blared: “Dental Care in England is ‘Third World.’” In an open letter written to The Daily Telegraph, 400 cheesed-off dentists said that dental care in the UK is “unfit for purpose” and has fallen to “Third World” levels. The letter was distinctly light on facts but they referred to a charity that operates in Africa, Asia and Central America, that has started to provide emergency dental care in West Yorkshire for those who unable to find a dentist on the NHS. The numbers of children with rotten teeth has also become a “national disgrace”, they say.
It sounds bad, but you American readers should wipe the smile of their face, because the situation may be even worse on your side of the pond. In a ‘world-first’ investigation published in the British Medical Journal in December 2015, a team of researchers compared the oral health of English and US citizens. Chewing through the over 20,000 adults’ data, the team concluded that Americans’ teeth really aren’t any better than ours. In fact, on average Americans have more missing teeth than the English do. Teeth whitening work is far more common Stateside, but the NHS means that more of us can get dental care without breaking the bank. Separate research has also found that dental health in British children has been steadily improving since the 1970s and today’s kids have fewer decayed or missing teeth than in most other countries, USA, Australia, Japan, and most of mainland Europe included.
It’s hard to argue with leading dentists who see a dental system that is crumbling through lack of staff and funding. They are the ones who care for the children whose teeth have decayed through too much sugar and not enough brushing. That said, the Austin Powers stereotype has grown very long in the tooth and it is time that our American friends admit that their oral hygiene really is no better than ours – even if they have to say it through gritted teeth.
Thanks for reading. Feel free to add your thoughts in the comments below.
Photo credit: Jim Sneddon via Flickr CCFlickr CC
Mystery symptoms? Get your lead levels checked
It’s every gardener’s nightmare. Digging deep into the earth, you strike something hard and, with a metallic thud, a geyser of water fountains up into your face. One of our neighbours recently experienced such a shovelling disaster while erecting a new fence when an old lead pipe supplying her mains water was punctured by a misplaced spade.
An emergency repair job soon restored her drinking water supply and her unwanted new water feature suddenly vanished. But her watery debacle unearthed the reality that many of our homes are supplied by ageing lead pipes. Old pipes can sometimes leech into tap water and, if at sufficiently high concentrations, can cause harm to health. Time for a lead level check-up methinks… Read more
Astronaut Tim Peake interview: boldly going where no body has gone before
For Tim Peake it’s T minus 600 hours until launch. Come 15th December, the 43 year old father of two will be strapped atop 150 tonnes of rocket fuel looking skyward. He will be spending six months aboard the International Space Station, during which time he will be floating around, admiring the view, and playing with test tubes. The life of the astronaut – boldly going where no one has gone before. It’s every schoolboy’s (and girl’s?) dream job. Except that it isn’t. If they knew what being an astronaut was really like, that is.
Earlier this year I interviewed Tim while he was undergoing final preparations in Houston, Texas. I asked him about what life would be like in space and, with my doctor’s hat on, wanted to know what medical research he would be doing when in space. I learnt that going into space isn’t like in the movies. Within moments of Tim entering orbit, his body’s internal workings will be tipped upside down. As soon as he enters zero gravity, blood will rush to his head, causing his heart and kidneys to go haywire. When not nursing a killer headache, he would be emptying his bladder in the space khazi as his body fluid levels rapidly adjust. In the days and weeks that follow, his bones will rapidly leech out their calcium, his muscles will shrink and his heart get weaker. He will grow a couple of inches taller which, while not a problem in space, will give him terrible back ache when gets back onto terra firma. Read more
Jamie Oliver is right about sugar tax – but he’s still a hypocrite
Jamie Oliver has been stirring the pot again and getting all het up. In the run-up to a recent Channel 4 documentary Jamie’s Sugar Rush, the outspoken TV chef launched a campaign against sugary drinks and the ‘hidden’ sugars in our food. He said that a ban on sugary food ads before 9pm, rules to prevent the sale of overly-sweetened processed foods, and a 20p per litre ‘sugar tax’ on soft drinks would make us all healthier and happier.
Those of you who listened to Mr Oliver’s rantings will know that sugar is making us fatter, is putting us at increased risk of diabetes, and is costing the NHS £30 million a year in pulling out kid’s sugar-rotten teeth. His claims leave a bitter taste in the mouth but he is mostly right (with the exception of the slightly exaggerated dental health claim). Science has repeatedly shown us that eating too much sugar will ultimately cause a raft of health problems. Most of us are eat far too much of the stuff and kids are the ones most at risk. Read more
Ringing in your ears? Get some sound advice for tinnitus
The last time I heard Motörhead play my ears were ringing for two days. Known for their 1980 hit ‘Ace Of Spades’, the three-piece metal band say they are ‘The World’s Loudest Band’ and their concerts have been recorded at 130 decibels – louder than a military jet at 100 feet. I was lucky that the ringing in my ears gradually faded, but for tinnitus sufferers the ringing never stops.
Described as hearing a sound when there is no sound, tinnitus affects people of all ages and walks of life. Statistics say that one in seven people experience tinnitus, and it can be experienced as high-pitched ringing, buzzing, hissing, whistling or even a humming sound. Most of us will experience tinnitus from time to time after a loud bang but it becomes a problem when it doesn’t stop. If you hear tinnitus after listening to music or being near noisy machinery, it’s the body’s way of telling you that your ears can’t cope and are being damaged. When tinnitus persists it is notorious for keeping people awake at night and can interfere with work and cause depression. Read more
The time I saw demons: let’s remove the stigma of mental health
‘The witch’ first started speaking evil thoughts into my mind when I was working in a hospital in Gambia, West Africa. To everyone else she was a concerned-looking 50-something woman crouching over a feverish relative. My supernatural sensitivities told me otherwise. Utterly oblivious, I was suffering the horrifying symptoms of schizophrenia and was utterly convinced these hallucinations were real.
It was several weeks later, after returning to the UK, that reality slowly returned and I stopped hearing voices*. It took me years to gain the courage to tell anyone about my experiences – and even longer to write about it. For this is the nature of mental health illnesses: few people want to talk about them, it is shameful to suffer them and – even in 2015 – those affected are often branded ‘mad’ or ‘weak’.
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