Whut?

Mrs Sane has nagged me for a long time about my bad hearing so a few months ago I went to see my GP about it.  A nice student doctor asked me some questions, stuck a tuning fork behind my ear and referred me to an ENT consultant.

A week before Christmas I went to the hospital and had a hearing test which showed a bit of a dip in the mid range which is where human speech is and it drops right off at the high range which is things like running water, rustling paper, birds, etc.  The consultant shoved a camera up my nose to see whether there were any blockages up there that might be causing the problem (not a pleasant experience and there was nothing wrong up my nose) and then pronounced that I needed a hearing aid, an MRI and they would send for me shortly.

I was expecting a 6 month wait at least but was pleasantly surprised to get an appointment for a month later for an MRI and then to be measured for a hearing aid the following day.  I was even more surprised to actually walk out with a hearing aid on the day, expecting to have to wait months for one to be ordered or for someone to die so I could inherit theirs!

So that was a week ago today and what a difference it’s made.  I walked out of the hospital and the first thing that struck me was how loud the world is.  I could hear people talking, car doors slamming, birds singing – I really hadn’t realised how bad my hearing had got.  It does take some getting used to though.  Running water is particularly loud, especially the toilet flushing.  I’ve had to ask for a new keyboard at work because the clattering of the nice Dell keyboard I had was too loud and noisy places can be a bit overwhelming.

It’s well worth having though and if anyone is experiencing problems with their hearing I would definitely recommend going to get it checked out.  Saying it’s been life changing would be exaggerating a bit but it’s made a real, positive difference.  It’s a tiny thing and unless they’re looking for it, most people don’t even notice it’s there.  After a while I forget I’m wearing the hearing aid but when I take it out it sounds like I’ve got cotton wool stuffed in my ear.  Even after just a week, if I didn’t have it I’d really miss it.

Whut?

I went to the ENT clinic at the hospital yesterday to see if they could figure out why my hearing is so bad and came away being told I’ve got to have a hearing aid.  I’m 33 years old for god’s sake, hearing aids are for old people!

I must say, I wasn’t expecting to have a diagnosis (of sorts) and a cure (of sorts) on my first visit.  I’ve got to go for an MRI to make sure there’s nothing wrong with my head and I’ve got to get fitted for a hearing aid some time in the new year.  Which is nice.

My knees are buggered, my eyesight isn’t great, I get eczema and rosacea, I suffer with a bad back on and off, I’ve had asthma for years … I’m a wreck!

If I was an animal they’d put me down.

What an organ head

A Scottish doctor, Dr Sue Rabbitt Roff, has suggested that English university students should sell one of their kidneys to pay for their tuition fees!

Roff has written on the British Medical Journal website in favour of the right to sell your organs for profit and suggested that those wishing to sell a kidney should receive the national average salary of £28,000 which they might like to use to pay university fees.

Alternatively, we could stop Scottish MPs imposing racist tuition fees on English students by creating an English Parliament so they can’t vote n things that are non of their business.  Slightly less extreme than selling your kidney to subsidise free university education in Scotland.

Currently you can get up to 2 months’ worth of medication on one prescription but PCTs have been telling GPs to cut that to one month, doubling the cost of repeat prescriptions at a time when they have just gone up to £7.40 per item in England.

Prescription charges have been free in Wales and Northern Ireland for a while and became free in Scotland this year on April Fool’s Day – the same day the British Department of Health put the price up to £7.40 in England.  The British Department of Health says that it can’t afford the £450m cost of providing free prescriptions in England but the British government still manages to find £20bn per year of English money to subsidise free prescriptions and other benefits in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland and £4bn to bail out Portugal.

The Brits are taking the piss once again, where are the riots on the streets over this sickness tax?

On the 1st of April, the Scottish government is abolishing prescription charges.

The Welsh and Northern Irish already get free prescriptions so from April Fool’s Day, the English will be the only people in the UK who have to pay for prescriptions.  Not only will we pay for our own prescriptions, but we’re also paying for the free prescriptions the Scots, Welsh and Northern Irish get by way of the £20bn a year Barnett bribe.

According to the British Department of English Health, it would cost £450m to give free prescriptions to English people and after giving all our money away to the Scots, Welsh, Northern Irish and the EU we apparently can’t afford it.  Two and a half days of EU membership fees would cover the cost of free prescriptions in England.  I know what I’d rather the money was spent on and it isn’t Greek sewers, Albanian roads, French farmers and Spanish fishermen.

The main shocker of the night was that David Wright MP not only stayed after the photographers had left but what he said while he was in the meeting actually made sense.

In Shropshire we have two main hospitals – the Royal Shrewsbury Hospital (RSH) and the Princess Royal Hospital (PRH) in Telford.  In addition to the two general hospitals, there’s the specialist orthopædic hospital at Oswestry and a handful of cottage hospitals.  The RSH and PRH are where all the main hospital services are – A&E, vascular, pædiatrics, maternity, etc.

Shropshire is unusual in having two general hospitals, especially for the relatively small population of the county.  We gave up 10 of our cottage hospitals to get a general hospital built in Telford so it came at a price.  But now the hospitals are running out of money thanks to the British government’s cuts to the English NHS and services can’t be sustained at both hospitals.

A year ago there was a proposal to move services from the PRH to the RSH which were shelved because of the opposition.  It wasn’t the first time moving services from Telford to Shrewsbury was suggested either – whenever money is tight the hospitals trust has always chosen a starting position of keeping all services in Shrewsbury.  This time, however, the proposals are a little more balanced with some services moving from Shrewsbury to Telford and others moving from Telford to Shrewsbury.

If the proposals go ahead, consultant-led maternity services will be moved to Telford rather than Shrewsbury where they are currently provided.  Consultant-led pædiatrics will also move to Telford, reflecting the fact that there are far more children in Telford than Shrewsbury and more social deprivation which leads to poor health in children.  Acute surgery will move to Shrewsbury and both hospitals will retain A&E services.

The hospital at Telford is a much newer building than Shrewsbury and there is a lot more room for expansion at the Telford site.  The RSH was built in the 60′s and parts of the building are structurally unsound according to a report that the hospitals trust have just released.  The report dates from 2007 so cynical types might wonder why the report has only just been released when it backs up their proposals and why the imminent condemnation of parts of the RSH wasn’t a problem a year ago when they wanted to consolidate services in Shrewsbury.  But that doesn’t change the fact that the RSH is structurally unsound in places and there is no money to fix it up (especially not after Gordon Brown took £1bn out of the English NHS’ building fund as one of his final acts as Chancellor).

Telford has the largest population in Shropshire by a considerable margin and the fastest growing population too.  It makes sense to put services where they will be most used and that’s at Telford, especially in the case of maternity and pædiatrics.

The four consultations being held in Shropshire are finished now and the next three are being held in Mid-Wales.  The RSH – and to a lesser extent, the PRH – provide services to patients from Powys where there is no general hospital.  Some of the services the hospitals in Shropshire provide are only sustainable because Powys is in their catchment area and Powys health board pays for patients that are treated in Shropshire but I don’t agree that this entitles people in Powys to a say in how our hospitals are configured.

People in Shrewsbury seem to have latched onto the extra 18 miles Welsh people will have to travel for some services as an argument for keeping all services in Shrewsbury.  From what people who have been to the other public meetings have said, there seems to be an attitude in Shrewsbury that they have an entitlement to keep all services in the town and that any cuts should be made to the PRH which they see as a subordinate hospital to the RSH rather than one half of the same service.  In fact, one very brave man from Shrewsbury announced to the 200 or so people in the room that everything should be moved to Shrewsbury because it’s the county town.  He did make it out in one piece but that’s possibly more to do with the fact he made a sharp exit than the restraint of the people in the room!

I asked a question around the contribution to the running costs of the hospitals from Powys health board.  Whilst the health board pays for treatment of one of their patients, the hospitals cost money whether they’re used or not – how much is Powys health board contributing to the running costs of the hospitals and the reconfiguration of services?  The answer I got from the CEO is that they’re not contributing to the reconfiguration of services but they provide approximately 10% of patients and about 10% of the hospital trust’s income.  What he didn’t mention, though, was that the patients that come to Shrewsbury do so because their treatment is something that can’t be done in a cottage hospital or GP’s surgery – in other words, they are the expensive treatments.  The current CEO’s predecessor told the Shropshire Star that treating Welsh patients costs the hospitals £2m per year because Powys health board doesn’t pay the going rate for treatment so unless something has changed since 2008, he misled the meeting last night.

The question that got the loudest applause was when one lady – a former nurse – stood up and asked why we are taking Mid-Wales into account when they get a lot more money than we do in England.

Outside the meeting a group of communists were handing out “no more cuts” trades union propaganda.  I handed mine back and reminded them we don’t have any money.  The man walking past me at the time was slightly less polite to them.

In an ideal world we would retain a full range of services at both hospitals but there isn’t enough money to pay for them so until the Brits stop using our money to subsidise the celts, we have to accept that there will be cutbacks to our services in England and this proposal – despite being far from ideal – is the best solution for the whole county.

This letter was informing me that unless I opt out by the 31st of May, the NHS will create a “summary care record” in their spangly new multi-billion pound database.  The pitch informs me that in the first instance only details of any allergies, bad reactions to medicines and any medication I’m currently on will be included but “other important information such as serious illnesses, long term conditions and/or test results” will be added to the record.

Now I don’t have a problem with the whole NHS knowing that I have an allergy to penicillin, nor do I have a problem with them knowing that I have an inhaler for asthma.  In fact, not only don’t I have a problem with it, I positively welcome that information being available to anyone in the NHS that needs it because if I was taken into hospital for some reason and was unable to speak for myself, it’s important that the medical staff know that I have asthma and that I have an allergy to penicillin.

It makes sense that a serious illness should be on the record but if I’m knocked unconscious and taken to hospital, do they need to know that I have arthritis?  If I’d been to the doctors and had a routine blood test, would they need to know?  I don’t think they do and I’m not prepared to give the NHS or any other agency that plugs into the database in the future (and there is very little doubt in my mind that this database will be added to, shared and linked into other databases in the future) permission to record any medical details they see fit about me in a database that’s available to tens of thousands of people in the NHS and beyond.

There is no way to control the amount of information that they record in the “summary care record” – you either agree to nothing or you agree to whatever they decide to put on there and whilst you can view your own record any time you want, you can’t remove anything from it.  If it was possible to choose what type of information was recorded on the “summary care record” I would happily agree to it but as I’m not allowed any control over what goes on it and where it goes I’m going to opt out.

Back then I said:

Mrs Sane showed me an article in Reveal magazine today about a woman whose daughter was weighed and measured and then a letter was sent to her to tell her that her daughter was obese.  She isn’t obese, she’s normal and one of four children, none of which have problems with their weight.  But because she was 1lb over the “normal” weight for an “average” child with an “average” build her mother got a letter telling her her daughter was obese and therefore at increased risk of high blood pressure, heart disease, type two diabetes and cancer.

Luckily for the young girl in question – who, from the photos, looks perfectly healthy – her mother didn’t believe a word of it and has kicked off instead.  But like I said a year and a half ago, what about the parents that get the letter and inappropriately start to fatten up their child or put them on a diet?

It’s time to do away the BMI scale and start using some common sense before we end up with a generation of children pushed into an obsession with weight and body image by British government propaganda.

As expected, swine flu has proven to be less of a problem than seasonal flu and the third wave predicted by the “experts” and the pharmaceutical companies has failed to materialised.

There are now less than 5,000 in England with swine flu and only 360 deaths caused by swine flu were recorded in the UK.  Seasonal flu kills about 4,000 a year.

All of the deaths could have been avoided if the British government had closed our borders before swine flu had hit these shores but No Mandate Brown saw it as an opportunity to look like a capable leader, the prime minister that saved us from certain death from a modern day plague.

When El Gordo sold off our gold reserves he announced the sale well in advance and depressed the market so badly that the price of gold halved by the time he sold it, losing the taxpayer billions.  Let’s hope the same doesn’t happen with the swine flu vaccines.

One of the features was about an announcement of a new scheme for elderly carers.  More money and support is to be given to elderly carers who need their partners to have respite care.  This annoyed me.

My father-in-law has a rare degenerative disease called superficial siderosis.  As of 2006, there were only 270 reported cases of superficial siderosis and nobody knows what the long term prognosis is other than it won’t get any better.

So how does it feel to be a carer for someone who is disabled, has to be pushed around outside in a wheelchair, is deaf, has no short-term memory and doesn’t feel pain?  My mother-in-law is my father-in-law’s full time carer and it’s pretty damn stressful, not to mention tiring.

My father-in-law used to get respite care in Telford but the care home decided – understandably – that they would rather rent out the only room they had for middle aged disabled people to the council for OAPs for £600 a week rather than leave it empty for 3 weeks a month.  But as this was the only room of its kind in the borough (population 160,000) this means that my father-in-law now has to go to Oswestry, on the Welsh border, for respite.

Telford & Wrekin Council isn’t entirely to blame but they certainly aren’t blameless.  They haven’t invested in respite care for middle aged people but it wouldn’t be such a problem if it wasn’t for bloody stupid British government regulations that insist on care homes in England segregating their buildings based on age groups.

My father-in-law was, until recently, taken to the gym for an hour and a half every week by the council’s Social Inclusion Team.  But a few weeks ago they decided that they wanted paying £38 every time they took him.  They can’t afford it so the council offered to do it for £17 a time.  They still can’t afford it (their household income consists of disability living allowance, carers allowance and a wage for a few hours of work that my mother-in-law does) so they won’t take him.

He goes to a day care centre for a few hours a couple of days a week where they do group activities – it’s the only chance he gets to socialise with people outside of the familiy.  It costs £9.50 each time he goes but it’s been capped by the British government for years.  The cap is being lifted next year so the price will be going up to an unknown amount.  People who pay privately to go to the day care centre pay £26 a time – if it goes up to £26 he won’t be able to go there either.

If you are young or past pensionable age there are plenty of services available.  I don’t imagine there are enough services to satisfy everybody’s needs but the services available to middle aged people are so sparse that they might as well not exist.

Me and the mother-in-law were interview by BBC Radio Shropshire about it yesterday and it was on the radio this morning.  Click here to get the Eric Smith show on the iPlayer.  Skip forward to 06:40 to hear the mother-in-law talking to the reporter and 59:44 for my comments in the news.

Since the kids have gone back to school the number of cases has started going back up – as it was predicted to do – but there still haven’t been many deaths.

Swine flu isn’t a nice thing to have and ultimately, of course, it can kill.  But so does normal flu and normal flu will kill more people this winter than swine flu has all year so why is there such an emphasis on preventing swine flu when getting a flu jab in the last few years has been quite a challenge for a lot of people who are in the at-risk bracket?

This swine flu vaccine will be rolled out to medical staff, children and ill people from next week but it hasn’t been tested sufficiently to prove there are no side effects.  In the 1997 swine flu outbreak in America, an untested vaccination was rushed out which ended up killing more people than swine flu did.

With four young children – one with a heart condition – we will shortly have to make the decision as to whether we should get them vaccinated.  What is it they say about food?  If in doubt, throw it out.  I’m inclined to say no and take a chance.

Tonight they printed a reply from another reader …

Agree with every word right up until the second half of the last sentence.

Erm no.  NHS Direct has nothing but a list of pharmacies with normal opening hours and the two local NHS websites that had an out-of-hours pharmacy rota only had rotas up to Easter this year.  With all these admin staff the English NHS employs, you’d think one of them would be able to keep an out-of-hours pharmacy list up-to-date.

But while I was going through the list of pharmacies on the Shropshire NHS website the real reason why there are no pharmacies open on a Sunday evening dawned on me and for once it’s not about NHS funding.  It’s Alistair Darling’s fault.  “How is the Chancellor of the Exchequer to blame for pharmacies not opening on a Sunday evening?” I hear you cry.  Well, it’s quite simple …

A couple of years back Alistair Darling was the Minister for Trade & Industry (an English department of course, he is an MP for a Scottish constituency after all) and was approached by the major supermarkets asking for a repeal of Sunday trading laws in England.  He declined despite there being no Sunday trading laws in Scotland where he was elected.  So what has that got to do with pharmacies?  Take a look at a list of pharmacies in your local area and see how many different names there are on the list.  I doubt there will be more than 9 or 10 in a medium sized town.  Boots, Lloyds, Superdrug, Tesco, Asda … all big chains and all banned from opening for more than 6 hours on a Sunday.  Because they have the buying power they are pricing independent pharmacies out of business and because they are cash rich they can buy up the independent pharmacies they are putting out of business.

If NHS services are going to be farmed off to the private sector then Sunday trading laws need to be repealed because people need access to medical services 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Technorati Tags: NHS, Pharmacies

What a prize prick.

He rubbishes claims the Tories are the party of the NHS as Camoron claims because Dan Hannan has criticised the NHS.  Apparently “every single MP, MEP and member of the Labour Party endorses the NHS” which is a bold claim to make bearing in mind the fact that he cannot possibly have canvassed the opinions of all MPs, MEPs and Liebour Party members.

He asks if Camoron will ban members of Atlantic Bridge – a transatlantic group of conservatives – from attending the Tory conference because they have criticised the NHS.

He calls on Camoron to demand Tory shadow ministers resign from the Cornerstone Group – a traditionalist, eurosceptic, anti-devolution group in the Conswervative Party – because they described the NHS as stalinist and called for it to be replaced.

I have a few points to make about Burnham’s letter.

Firstly, there is no “the NHS”.  There are four National Health Services in the UK and only the English NHS is under the control of the British.

Secondly, it is perfectly possible for a party to be in favour of something whilst some, or even most, of its members have a different view.  The Tories are a eurofederalist party, for instance, whilst the majority of its MPs and members are eurosceptics.

Thirdly, withdrawing the whip or otherwise punishing an MP or MEP for voicing an opinion that doesn’t concur with the official view of the party is a ridiculous suggestion.  What sort of fascist, anti-democratic autoritarian political party would spouse those sorts of views?  That’s a rhetorical question, by the way.

Fourthly, the suggestion that members of Atlantic Bridge should be banned from the Tory conference for criticising the NHS is pathetic and has nothing to do with their views on the NHS and everything to do with the fact that Atlantic Bridge is a conservative organisation.  If they were socialists, like the Liebour Party used to be, Burnham wouldn’t have mentioned them.

Fifthly, setting aside the fact that it would be morally wrong to insist shadow ministers resign from the anti-socialist Cornerstone Group because they think the NHS is stalinist and needs replacing, wanting to replace the National Health Services doesn’t mean they oppose them, it means they want to replace them.  The clue is in the word “replace”, which doesn’t mean “abolish”.

Sixthly – and finally – if you’re going to criticise the Tories then at least do it for genuine reasons, of which there are plenty.  Criticise them for being anti-English or eurofederalists.  Criticise them for being socialists in blue ties or for being vague and evasive on policy.  It will mean being hypocritical but that shouldn’t be a problem for a Liebour minister.

Technorati Tags: Andy Burnham, NHS, Tories

Interestingly and perhaps a little unsurprisingly, he said they were being inundated with calls about swine flu and the majority of the calls were from people anxious about swine flu or convinced they had it when they didn’t.  This is presumably why I got an engaged tone for 15 minutes this morning trying to get an appointment.  Does it help that the British government has told the general public that up to 65k people could die from swine flu?  In his opinion it wasn’t the best move, let’s just leave it at that.

The thing is, for the amount of people who have contracted swine flu, the number of deaths has been low.  Lower than you would expect with seasonal flu.  Yes, swine flu is spreading round the population faster than seasonal flu but that’s because we don’t have an immunity to it.  Having said that, Europeans seem to have a better natural defence to swine flu than Americans which would suggest that it may be something we’ve had here before.  Tens of thousands of people already have immunity to swine flu by virtue of having contracted it in the last couple of months.  By the end of the year, if all goes to plan, the whole population will be offered a vaccine.

So why the panic?  Why are the NHS (or, more properly, the British government) putting out information that’s causing panic?  We’re in an era of unprecedented access to information, it’s possible to lay your hands on more information about virtually anything from your living room than ever before.  This is the first major domestic public health problem we’ve had since most of the population got access to Google so perhaps the British government is thinking that the best way to satisfy peoples’ thirst for information is to give it to them, warts and all.  Or perhaps not …

There is a theory (you might call it a conspiracy theory) which quite a few people have arrived at that the Prime Mentalist is behind this.  Not that he has unleashed a swine flu virus created in a secret laboratory in a disused tube station (although I bet you could find someone who thinks that) but that he has presided over mismanagement of the epidemic to give him a crisis that he can use to increase his popularity and stop talk of an election.  How could we have an election in the middle of a swine flu pandemic?  Think of the public health risks.  Think of the disruption when we’re in the middle of a potentially disasterous flu epidemic.  How could you call an election under such circumstances and claim to have the interests of the country at heart?

And, of course, there is the vaccine.  The UK is the only country in the world to order enough vaccine for the whole population.  If and when the vaccine materialises – and assuming it doesn’t kill more people than swine flu does like the vaccine the Americans used in 1976 – then El Gordo will have been the Prime Minister that saved us all from the killer flu that would have killed up to 65k people but for his intervention.

The theory that he has allowed swine flu to take hold and spread scare stories in the media just so he can avoid an election and look good when it fails to wipe out half the population hinges on whether El Gordo’s insanity is so pronounced that he would sacrifice the lives of hundreds of people for personal gain.  I’m quite prepared to believe that he would do it, the only question for me is whether he will get caught out.

Technorati Tags: Swine Flu, Gordon Brown

They replied a week and a half later …

Right, so they appreciate that he’s been misleading the entire population but they’re going to do chuff all about it?

I got another reply shortly afterwards …

Right, so they appreciate my concerns, don’t answer my questions and then refuse to comment further.  That’s not on …

And their predictable response …

Tossers.  I’ve just found Andy Burnham’s parliament email address so I’ll forward the email trail on to him and see if he thinks his department dealt with my email in an appropriate manner.

Technorati Tags: Andy Burnham, NHS

He says that doctors have tried to convince parents but it’s not working so it has to be made compulsary, which begs the question: if the entire medical establishment can’t convince parents that the MMR jab is safe then someone, somewhere is doing something wrong.

We decided to have our children immunised even though there were doubts being cast in the media about the safety of the combined-MMR vaccination. We took a calculated risk, as we all do with any medication no matter how long it’s been around or how safe it’s been considered to be in the past. I used to have painkillers on repeat prescription when I was a teenager that were taken off the shelves a few years ago because they do nasty things to your insides. We also took a calculated risk in allowing one of our children to have his tonsils taken out even though there was a suggestion at the time there might be a risk of contracting CJD from metal surgical implements. And long time readers of this blog may recall that we took a calculated risk in allowing another one of our children to have open heart surgery even though he would be the youngest child in the UK to have had the Ross Procedure performed on him. This is what parents do – they weigh up the risks and benefits of many things every day where their children are concerned and come up with the answer they are most comfortable with. That’s what being a parent is about – caring for your children, deciding what is right and wrong for them and making the decisions for them that they can’t make.

Vaccinations are something a parent should decide on, not the state. One parent’s decision affects one child, the state’s decision will affect millions and if they get it wrong the ramifications are far greater. And, of course, the British government could only make vaccinations compulsary in England and I’m sure it won’t surprise you to learn that Sir Sandy Macara is Scottish.

Technorati Tags: Vaccinations, Nanny State, Sandy Macara

The Chief Medical Officer for England says that they won’t be routinely screening people returning from Mexico, even though that’s where the virus is coming from.  This is really quite unacceptable – we’re an island, we can close our borders and isolate ourselves rather than risk letting a virus that we don’t understand take root in the population.  Stopping British Airways from continuing its flights to Mexico City would be a good start.

There are now 8 confirmed cases of swine flu in the UK, 2 of which are no longer infected.  Most people have little or nothing to fear from swine flu, it’s really just the elderly and infirm and the very young that are at risk and there is plenty of medication available to treat it as long as any epidemic remains manageable.  But there is no excuse for sitting back and letting the virus spread whether we’re geared up to cope with it or not.

Technorati Tags: Swine Flu

Check your spam folder for online pharmacy emails and order in as much Tamiflu as you can lay your hands on.  Get down to your local hardware store and buy all their stocks of face masks.

As if Jonah talking about swine flu wasn’t dangerous enough, this is almost exactly the same thing he said as the recession kicked in and now we’re being told that we’re probably going to be hit the hardest.

We’re doooooooooooooomed.

Being serious for a moment, there are very few cases of swine flu and no deaths outside of Mexico and the British government reckons it has enough flu medication to treat 30m people.  Four UK airlines have stopped flying to Mexico, two are flying holidaymakers out of Mexico but British Airways is still flying to Mexico City 4 times a week.  Banning travel to and from Mexico for a bit might help prevent the spread of swine flu, as would banning anyone who’s recently been to Mexico from coming into the country.  The technology is there at all ports, it is possible to enforce such a ban if one was ordered.

On a number of occassions recently I have speculated that El Gordo would cancel the election next year “in the interests of national security”.  He’s certainly got the ambition to do it, Liebour have passed legislation to allow it, all he needs is an excuse.  The recession and a few carefully engineered riots about rampant unemployment would give him the excuse to declare a state of emergency.  There’s an EU election in June which Liebour may finish as badly as fourth in.  An outbreak of swine flu with an exaggerated statement on the risk of congregating in public places or unnecessary travel from some sock-puppet health quango would give him an excuse to postpone the EU elections in June.

I’m naturally cynical, especially where the one-eyed Scottish idiot is concerned, but is his obsessive lust for power so great that he would allow a highly infectious disease to spread around the country through inaction and criminally stupid policies just to stay in Downing Street?  Is he that insane?  I wouldn’t put it past him.

Technorati Tags: Swine Flu, Jonah

Allan Farley has punctate inner choroidopathy and two consultants have told him that Lucentis will help to save the sight in his right eye. He is already blind in his left.

But the NHS Trust, acting on guidelines issued by the increasingly inaccurately named National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE), have refused to fund a course of Lucentis. Honestly, someone really should complain to Trading Standards – they are neither “national” nor “nice”.

Two years worth of Lucentis will cost about £18k, pocket money compared to the cost of paying benefits and providing services to a blind man and his family for the next 50 or 60 years. If you’ll excuse the pun, the decision is more than a little short sighted.

Mr Farley says he’s being refused Lucentis because of the cost. Yes, it’s an expensive drug and the NHS Trust probably doesn’t have £18k stuffed down the back of the Chief Exec’s sofa to pay for it but finding the money for the drug is a secondary issue and the NHS Trust does have the money if it wants to spend it.

The real reason why Mr Farley is being refused Lucentis is because he lives in England. If he lived in Scotland he would have been treated by now and the sight of his left eye might have been saved. The Scottish Medical Consortium – the equivalent body to NICE north of the border – allows Lucentis to be provided on the NHS in Scotland, along with a host of other drugs such as cancer and alzheimers treatments that are unavailable to English people.