taint.org: Justin Mason’s Weblog

• Review of bicycle helmet effectiveness studies : quite a few case-control studies consistently demonstrating the protective effects of bicycle helmet use on shared roadways
  (tags: cycling helmets safety health statistics)

• Spammer-X’s numbers on spam profitability : he claimed that he made net $336k per year from spamming in 2004
  (tags: via:tzink spammer-x spam money pay profit motives)

Tags: cycling, health, helmets, money, motives, pay, profit, safety, spam, spammer-x, statistics, via:tzink

Caerphilly is a small commuter town in South Wales, notable mainly for Caerphilly cheese and a castle.

Well, you can add one more thing to that list; its inhabitants also provided some key data in a major health study, from which emerged one great finding — it turns out that if you’re male, sex twice a week reduces the risk of death from heart disease by about half:

Men who said they had sex twice a week had a risk of dying half that of the less passionate participants who said they had sex once a month, Dr. Davey-Smith’s team said.

No other risk factor showed a statistically significant link to the frequency of orgasm.

The authors said that they had tried to adjust the study’s design to account for a factor that might explain the findings — that healthier, fitter men with more healthy life styles engaged in more sex. Even so, they could not explain the differences in risk. Hormonal effects on the body resulting from frequent sex could be among other possible explanations for the findings, Dr. Davey-Smith said.

Here’s the science bit, via the BMJ — a paper entitled ‘Sex and death: are they related? Findings from the Caerphilly cohort study’:

Result: Mortality risk was 50% lower in the group with high orgasmic frequency than in the group with low orgasmic frequency, with evidence of a dose-response relation across the groups. Age adjusted odds ratio for all cause mortality was 2.0 for the group with low frequency of orgasm (95% confidence interval 1.1 to 3.5, test for trend P=0.02). With adjustment for risk factors this became 1.9 (1.0 to 3.4, test for trend P=0.04). Death from coronary heart disease and from other causes showed similar associations with frequency of orgasm, although the gradient was most marked for deaths from coronary heart disease. Analysed in terms of actual frequency of orgasm, the odds ratio for total mortality associated with an increase in 100 orgasms per year was 0.64 (0.44 to 0.95).

Conclusion: Sexual activity seems to have a protective effect on men’s health.

The perfect excuse ;) Thanks, Caerphilly!

Tags: caerphilly, health, medicine, orgasms, sex, wales

Last weekend, I picked up a super-cheap cycling computer in Aldi for 20 Euros. I cycle to work, and I thought it’d be fun to get some geeky number-crunching in on my daily commute.

Here are the figures for my trip into work:

• Ride time: 12:16
• Trip distance: 2.4 miles
• Avg speed: 12.7 MPH
• Max speed: 22.4 MPH
• Total KCal work performed: 136
• Max pulse rate: 146

Given that there are 46 kilocalories in a Jaffa Cake, 136 KCal means that every day, I can eat 3 Jaffa Cakes with impunity. Result! ;)

Also: some relevant commentary from Penny Arcade.

Tags: calories, cycling, exercise, food, health, jaffa-cakes

Just got a mail from an old friend, Caelen, who’s got a new start-up going with an interesting angle. Caelen and his (now-) wife, Barbara, spent a while travelling around Asia around the same time as we did. As I noted back in 2003, one thing he tried out, which I found particularly intriguing at the time, was to have some minor surgery in Bangkok:

This may seem foolish at first, but despite being in the heart of South East Asia, in what is generally thought to be a developing country, the Thai medical system is unbelievably good. Not only is it the medical hub for expatriates throughout the region, but tens of thousands fly here each year to have elective surgery, from laser eye treatments to boob jobs and face lifts. There are lots of reasons why they come to Bangkok but invariably quality of surgery and care comes top of the list. Simply put, medical care in Thailand is amongst the best in the word, available at a fraction of the cost.

The Thai government sees health care as the next logical step in its hospitality industry. As holiday makers in Thailand reach saturation point, growth has to come from other sectors and international healthcare has many of the same requirements as the tourism industry: good flight connections, plentiful accommodation and above all staff that are understanding and friendly. Gleaming hospitals, which could be mistaken for 5 star hotels, not only have rooms with all amenities but also have suites, restaurants, shops and cinemas. Menus from the finest restaurants in town are placed in the best rooms. Going to hospital doesn’t mean you have to stop having fun – this is Bangkok after all. This is a long way from the cold greasy egg served by the kitchen’s ‘Miserable Person of the Year’ award winner we get at home.

Back in 2002, this was pretty unprecedented — of course, nowadays, the concept is a lot more widely practiced, what with healthcare costs rising in the US and waiting lists rising in the UK.

I can vouch that the quality of care in Bangkok was fantastic, by all accounts; fastidiously clean and professional. (I never did it myself, but many people I knew at the time took advantage of the opportunity, rather than risk something flaring up in the less, er, reliable settings of Luang Prabang or Phnom Penh.)

Anyway, turns out Caelen has come up with a new site that is related to this – Reva Health Network. He says, ‘basically, we are a medical tourism search engine where consumers can find and compare hospitals and clinics from around the world. We cover everything although the bulk of our business is currently in dental.’

If you’re looking for some work done, it might be worth taking a look; it’s at revahealthnetwork.com.

Tags: bangkok, dentists, health, healthcare, india, medical-tourism, reva-health-network, surgery, thailand, tourism

Via Yoz comes this great article: Zoe Williams: Being pregnant and receiving unscientific advice go hand in hand. Here’s a sample:

Listeria has been my particular bugbear ever since a midwife – that is, a trained prenatal professional who, unless I develop complications, represents the highest medical authority I can expect to deal with throughout my pregnancy – told me that I could get listeriosis, thereby brain-damaging my foetus, without knowing about it. Now, listeriosis is an incredibly serious disease, with extremely serious symptoms, taken extremely seriously by epidemiologists nationwide. Get it without noticing it? If I got listeriosis, the national papers would know about it. It would be the third outbreak that has occurred in [the UK] in the past 20 years.

Here are some other things that are wantonly untrue: pasteurisation, in fact, has nothing to do with a cheese’s ability to harbour the listeria bacteria. The bacteria that characterise different cheeses are introduced after the pasteurisation process anyway. Listeria flourishes in moist environments, so parmesan is safe where camembert isn’t, but even rinded and soft cheeses are safe once they have been cooked. But food hygiene is a much more important factor than moisture – raw fish does not come out of the sea carrying listeria, but contracts the bacteria from contact with dirty hands. Of the past two outbreaks of listeria in Britain, one was from butter and the other from lettuce (there have been other instances of product recalls, but no human contamination).

In fact the three worst recorded cases of listeria since 1992 have all been in France, and were all from pork tongue in jelly, which nobody in their right mind would ever eat. Of the past 10 listeriosis outbreaks in America, only two were from cheese, and one of those was a Mexican homemade cheese. The notion that there are pregnant people out there whipping themselves into a frenzy of guilt because they have eaten some gorgonzola is just infuriating.

This patronising “pregnant women mustn’t do X” paranoia is C’s pet hate of the moment; being a (pregnant) scientist, she’s been checking them against Medline, looking into the extent of the real research these claims are based on, and generally writing them off one by one. I’ve been trying to persuade her to write a blog post about this for taint.org, so far with no luck though…

Tags: health, news, patronising, pregnancy, science, the-guardian

I’ve long held green views, and have always voted green — I believe climate change, damage to the environment and pollution are extremely serious problems, especially for Ireland. At the same time, I also believe that science and technology has a key place in a better, greener future — a Viridian, bright green / electric green viewpoint, in other words.

Given this, I was really shocked and appalled to hear (via the lovely C) of an interview on Today FM with Patricia McKenna, a Green Party candidate for my local constituency of Dublin Central — one I’ve voted for before, no less! — in which she revealed that she believes in the thoroughly discredited scaremongering regarding a link between the MMR vaccine and autism, and has taken the appallingly irresponsible position of not allowing her children to be vaccinated.

This blog post discusses the interview, which was broadcast on Today FM’s The Last Word show on Tuesday 13 March. Here’s an archived podcast of that interview so you can listen to it yourself, and here’s a local copy of that WMV file in case that first link expires any time soon.

Here’s a transcript of the part of the interview once the issue of vaccination is brought up. Matt Cooper is the host of the show. Keith Redmond is an opposing candidate, for the PDs. The timestamps are in minutes and seconds from the start of the audio file.

• 8:30: Patricia McKenna: Parents have the right to choose what they opt to do, and in relation to some vaccinations, there are serious question marks hanging over them but that’s not what we’re talking about here…

• 8:44: Matt Cooper (clearly annoyed): No its not, but now that it’s up there, couldn’t it be irresponsible for parents not to vaccinate children against serious issues (sic), if they don’t have reputable scientific facts to back up the decision not to vaccinate?

• 8:54: Patricia McKenna: Many parents in this country have chosen not to vaccinate their children in relation to the MMR because of the links to autism.

• 9:00: Matt Cooper: Utterly untrue, totally unproven, absolutely bogus and false.

• 9:02: Patricia McKenna: Hold on a second…

• 9:03: Matt Cooper: Andrew Wakefield has been utterly and totally discredited in relation to that. Anyone who doesn’t give the MMR vaccine to their children because of a fear of autism is almost in danger of endangering their child themselves. We’re going to have a rise of measles again in this country because of people not actually giving the vaccine.

• 9:17: Patricia McKenna: First of all, we’re moving away from the issue…

• 9:22: Matt Cooper: Yeah we are, but it’s come up now, let’s deal with it…

• 9:23: Patricia McKenna: It’s come up, right. Eh, have you had the measles? I’ve had the measles, and I’ve got over them well, I have a strong immune system, my 10 year old son has had the measles…

• 9:30: Matt Cooper: And you are aware that unhandled the measles can have very serious side effects?

• 9:33: Patricia McKenna: Look — the side effects that are linked to the measles are in relation to… there are other things linked to it in relation to the child’s well being initially. Now you just look at the number of people when you were young, all of your peers I would say have had the measles as with mine, and I think we have a tendency to over-indulge in vaccinating our children and vaccinating ourselves, because what we need — our immune systems are getting weaker and weaker by the day, it’s a — I think we need to be very careful about how we actually approach this so that when medicines are necessary, we will not be immune to them…

• 10:08: Matt Cooper (interrupting): Do you know that children have died of the measles in this country in the last 5 years?

• Keith Redmond: because of views like that.

• Patricia McKenna: Well I’m saying is that, as far as I’m concerned…

• 10:18: Matt Cooper (repeats): Do you know that children have died of the measles in this country in the last 5 years?

• 10:30: Patricia McKenna: The children that have died of the measles because of other complications (sic), not the measles themselves.

• Keith Redmond: that have not been vaccinated.

• Patricia McKenna: Not the measles themselves, but other complications, right? Now if you’re saying that parents should — it’s a bit like –

• Keith Redmond: Matt, can I just come back to…

• 10:32: Matt Cooper: Sorry, one second Keith. Would you also concede Patricia, that there is absolutely no link between the MMR and autism, that that link was a bogus link put up by Andrew Wakefield who has been completely and utterly discredited and it has done an awful lot of damage, the misrepresentation of his views in relation to the MMR and autism.

• 10:50: Patricia McKenna: Well in relation to the MMR, I am not satisfied that it’s safe, and I am not satisfied with the idea of lumping a whole lot of vaccines — different vaccinations together en masse, inducing them (sic) to our children — but having said that, parents should have the right to choose and decide what is best for their children…

• 11:06: Matt Cooper: But would you concede that Andrew Wakefield, who is the man that pushed that whole agenda, was exposed as a fraud?

• 11:11: Patricia McKenna: But the jury is still out in relation to…

• 11:15: Matt Cooper: No, it’s not.

• 11:16: Patricia McKenna: Yeah well I’m sorry but the jury is still out in relation to how safe the MMR is. And I think it’s unfair to label all parents who decide for their own children’s safety, that they may not want to go down the route of vaccination, that they’re being irresponsible, because I wouldn’t consider myself irresponsible, I would consider I want what’s best for my child.

• 11:37: Keith Redmond: [again says something]

• Matt Cooper: Give Keith a chance to come in.

• 11:41: Keith Redmond: This totally exemplifies the Greens’ approach to any kind of science. We have a woman there who knows, in her heart of hearts, that her argument is wrong but refuses to admit it because it relies on science. Now, we have exactly the same issue with flouridation — we know the science, we know the facts, and we still have this scaremongering every now and again. And the Green Party are totally irresponsible and you’re right, they are frightening parents across the country right now and it’s absolutely reprehensible.

My god, this insanity has me agreeing with a feckin’ PD!

This is luddism, pure and simple. Matt Cooper is spot on the money – children are dying in Dublin because of this “my child, my rules” selfishness and simple inability to understand the science surrounding vaccination as a public health policy.

This is appalling. To put it bluntly, there is no fucking way I’ll be voting Green if this kind of cargo-cult, anti-science superstition is the kind of shite they’re espousing these days. …and if you think I’m feeling strongly about this, you should hear my (zoologist) wife.

But it goes on — here’s a letter to the Irish Independent on this issue from Feb 9 2007, which raises another worrying factor:

… until two days ago, there was a statement on the Green Party website informing voters that there were “serious question marks about the benefit of mass vaccination programs”.

Furthermore, the party promised that there would be a “major review” of vaccination if they were returned to office.

Now that these statements have apparently been removed from the Green party website are we to take it that they are no longer Green policy?

This blog posting at Winds and Breezes also notes this. So — is this official Green policy or not?

Update: In the comments, it was noted that McKenna is pretty much acting alone in this; it, apparently, is not Green Party policy at all. I’ve updated the title to reflect that it’s only one constituency’s candidate that needs to be shunned.

Also, Conor O’Neill has a great idea over here:

I was thinking further on this yesterday and I realised what the Greens need to do in order to be taken seriously… They need to become the “Party of Science”. Proper environmentalism is based on rigorous science and strategic thinking. Every policy they define should be backed up with rock-solid science and a detailed long-term financial analysis proving why it is in our best interests to adopt them.

Man, I would love to see that!

Tags: autism, badscience, dublin, elections, green-party, greens, health, herd-immunity, ireland, luddites, measles, mmr, patricia-mckenna, politics, vaccination

The European Health Insurance Card is dead handy, providing access to healthcare for EU residents while travelling in Europe – it’s definitely worth having one.

There were a few reports in the Irish newspapers last week of an announcement by the Health Service Executive, warning of “a bogus website” which charges a fee of EUR22 to process applications for this:

The HSE also warned that the site is asking applicants to submit detailed financial information. “It has come to the attention of the Health Service Executive that Irish residents are being targeted by a website which is unnecessarily charging people to apply for EHIC cards. The bogus site concerned — http://www.ehic-card.eu/ — is not connected to the HSE,” said the HSE in a statement.

I’d link to the HSE’s press release on the topic, but it’s down, apparently — and that’s pretty indicative of the problem. You see, I’ve been trying to apply for one of these recently.

The HSE has been announcing that there’s no need to use this “bogus site”, since we can just use the “real” site at http://www.ehic.ie/ to apply for one. Here’s what they neglect to mention:

• (a) that unless you’re a pensioner you can’t apply for one online — you have to print out a form, fill it in, and post it to your local health office.
• (b) there’s no indication on the site as to what exactly your “Local Health Office” may be, just a long list of mysterious locations.
• (c) in order to apply, the form demands that you supply all that ‘detailed financial information’ — namely your name, address, date of birth, proof of residency, and PPS number — anyway.
• (d) the “bogus site” isn’t really all that bogus after all.

If they had a simple and usable online application process, perhaps they wouldn’t be plagued by other sites attempting to offer that service for what is really a quite reasonable EUR22 fee?

This is a pretty frequent phenomenon on Irish governmental websites; a half-assed attempt to bring governmental services online, resulting in shiny informational sites, full of clip-art of smiling people talking on the phone, which all come down to a bottom line of “print this out and post it in” or “call this number” – business as usual. Having said that, at least I can generally still get a human on the phone, which still beats dealing with US government agencies, I guess!

BTW, I notice the HSE claim that it only takes 10 working days for an EHIC to arrive using their system. I applied for mine 3 weeks ago, and there’s been no word yet…

Tags: ehic, eu, government, health, hse, internet, ireland

I gave up smoking last year on May 26 — that anniversary isn’t too far away. Here’s how much money I’ve saved, courtesy of QuitMeter.com:

QuitMeter Counter courtesy of www.quitmeter.com.

Wow — I could buy myself another iPod! ;)

Tags: addiction, health, life, quitting, smoking

Health: Meridian Bioscience Inc. of Cincinnati, Ohio mails lethal pandemic strain of ‘flu to nearly 5000 labs in 18 countries:

The firm was told to pick an influenza A sample and chose from its stockpile the deadly 1957 H2N2 strain.

Check out how it was spotted:

On March 26, National Microbial Laboratory Canada detected the 1957 pandemic strain in a sample not connected with the test kit. After informing WHO and the CDC of the strange finding, the lab investigated. It informed the U.N. health agency on Friday that it had traced the virus to the test kit.

My emphasis. omgwtfbbq!

(WHO’s influenza chief) Klaus Stohr said the test kits are not the only supplies of the 1957 pandemic strain sitting in laboratories around the world. ‘The world really has to think what routine labs should be doing with these samples they have kept in the back of their fridges,’ Stohr said.

True: the lovely C has a story from her TCD days of a vial of smallpox
found buried deep in the ice in the back of a long-forgotten freezer, apparently rediscovered by someone during a routine spring cleaning. This was in the early ’90s, when smallpox was supposedly down to samples in just two high-security labs, in Russia and America.

Tags: back, bioscience, health, influenza, kit, meridian, sample, smallpox, strain, test, world

Health: On a lighter note, I’ve been getting through my last two weeks mail and RSS data, and came across this beauty.

It’s a truly venerable internet urban legend — the Nepalese Nose Leech story. Even given that I assumed it was more than likely a UL, I still took care not to drink from streams when I visited leech-infested areas, especially in Nepal!

Well, it appears it may not be a UL after all –

Doctors have removed a leech from the nose of a 55-year-old Hong Kong woman after she swam and washed her face in a stream, a medical journal reported.

The woman went to her doctor complaining of nose bleeds and an occasional sensation that something was blocking her left nostril, the Hong Kong Medical Journal said in its April issue. Her family doctor noticed a brownish mass in her nostril but couldn’t remove it because of heavy bleeding, the journal said.

The patient was taken to the emergency room, where doctors identified the problem as a bloodsucking leech. They had trouble pulling it out because the 2 inch invertebrate retracted into the nostril and disappeared, the journal said.

Part of the slimy leech was in a passage of her nasal cavity and a larger segment was in her sinus cavity, the article said.

Doctors used a nasal spray to anesthetize the dark brown leech that had a sucker on the front part of its body. After two minutes, the leech moved slowly out of the antrum (sinus) and was retrieved with forceps, the journal said.

The woman said that one month before her symptoms developed, she swam and washed her face in a stream while hiking. Doctors checked other members of her hiking group and found another leech in the nose of a man who washed his face in the stream, the journal said.

Link via jwz, AP wire story, abstract at Hong Kong Medical Journal site, MEDLINE abstract, including a line noting ‘this form of leech infestation has not been previously reported’ — except on teh internets!

Tags: doctor, face, health, journal, leech, nose, nostril, story, stream, swam, woman

Health: A few hours after ( ;) I link-blogged this New Scientist article about a case of the H5N1 avian flu transmitting itself between humans, Boing Boing put up this entry titled ‘Bird Flu risk extremely low’, which concludes that the risk is effectively not worth worrying about.

It’s fundamentally wrong, and is well worth pointing out as a result. As Quinn at ambiguous.org says, it’s not the danger now that’s important here — it’s the potential.

I read New Scientist religiously, so I’ve been following it, and this search on H5N1 gives the perfect illustration of why this is well worth worrying about:

• supplies of human flu vaccine in Thailand are very low, due to rich countries in the North taking up the excess; one route that flu strains pick up human-to-human transmission is through ‘co-infection’, where multiple flu strains infect the same person and swap genes.
• H5N1 has developed the ability to infect mammals already, namely cats, and therefore has another vector.
• the Chinese scientists studying H5N1 warn that ‘it is still evolving’, and the current ‘Z genotype has so far had difficulty infecting humans, but is lethal when it does. If it becomes more adept at this, it could cause a severe human pandemic.’
• the virus may have evolved human-to-human transmission. This is the biggie; a flu that transmits bird-to-human is inherently much more controllable, but once it gains the ability to jump directly to other humans, the pandemic danger becomes much higher. If it gets better at this, we could be in big trouble.

(Now, while it’s worth worrying about, it’s not us end-users who should be doing the worrying. It’s the politicians who need to ensure CDC and the WHO are funded well, the terrible state of vaccine development and production be sorted out, the lack of outbreak monitoring infrastructure be addressed, and research into these strains is funded and given a priority, in case things do go all pear-shaped influenza-wise.)

Tags: ability, boing, case, danger, flu, health, infect, new, risk, scientist, transmission

Health: USDA orders silence on mad cow in Texas: ‘The U.S. Department of Agriculture has issued an order instructing its inspectors in Texas, where federal mad cow disease testing policies recently were violated, not to talk about the cattle disorder with outside parties … The order … was issued in the wake of the April 27 case at Lone Star Beef in San Angelo, in which a cow displaying signs of a brain disorder was not tested for mad cow disease despite a federal policy to screen all such animals.’

Great idea — if you want to avoid finding mad cow cases, just don’t bother looking for them! The beef rendering plant in question supplies beef to MacDonalds, reportedly.

Press: LWN: A look at SpamAssassin 3.0 (article is subscriber-only until next week).

OSes: Kernelthread.com: Making an Operating System Faster. Great article on some OS-level optimisations Apple used in MacOS X — including a nifty boot-time read-ahead system which reportedly more than doubles the speed of OS X reboots. nice!

Wildlife: here’s another critter we encountered last weekend — a baby Western Diamondback rattlesnake, hiding in a crevice.

Tags: agriculture, article, beef, cow, disease, disorder, health, order, silence, system, usda

Bizarre: OK, OK, Google, I’m planning to! Geesh, all I wanted was a search engine, not health advice. They’re not even my ads!

Tags: advice, bizarre, engine, geesh, google, health, planning, search

Health: Revealed: how drug firms ‘hoodwink’ medical journals (Observer) — an
amazing attempt to mislead scientific progress for short-term commercial gain. (via forteana):

Hundreds of articles in medical journals claiming to be written by academics or doctors have been penned by ghostwriters in the pay of drug companies, an Observer inquiry reveals. The journals, bibles of the profession, have huge influence on which drugs doctors prescribe and the treatment hospitals provide. …

Estimates suggest that almost half of all articles published in journals are by ghostwriters. While doctors who have put their names to the papers can be paid handsomely for ‘lending’ their reputations, the ghostwriters remain hidden. They, and the involvement of the pharmaceutical firms, are rarely revealed. …

(One) email, seen by The Observer, said: ‘In order to reduce your workload to a minimum, we have had our ghostwriter produce a first draft based on your published work. I attach it here.’ The article was a 12-page review paper ready to be presented at an forthcoming conference. Healy’s name appeared as the sole author, even though he had never seen a single word of it before. But he was unhappy with the glowing review of the drug in question, so he suggested some changes. The company replied, saying he had missed some ‘commercially important’ points. In the end, the ghostwritten paper appeared at the conference and in a psychiatric journal in its original form – under another doctor’s name.

Tags: attempt, conference, drug, health, hoodwink, mislead, name, observer, paper, revealed, review

Net: ouch. That’s 5,093.54 New Zealand dollars — I guess $2,500 or so.

Tags: administration, canadian, drug, food, fud, health, inquirer, pharmacy, philadelphia, prescription, year

This is quite simply insane:

The sugar industry in the US is threatening to bring the World Health Organisation to its knees by demanding that Congress end its funding unless the WHO scraps guidelines on healthy eating, due to be published on Wednesday.

The threat is being described by WHO insiders as tantamount to blackmail and worse than any pressure exerted by the tobacco lobby.

In a letter to Gro Harlem Brundtland, the WHO’s director general, the Sugar Association says it will ‘exercise every avenue available to expose the dubious nature’ of the WHO’s report on diet and nutrition, including challenging its $406m (£260m) funding from the US.

The industry is furious at the guidelines, which say that sugar should account for no more than 10% of a healthy diet. It claims that the review by international experts which decided on the 10% limit is scientifically flawed, insisting that other evidence indicates that a quarter of our food and drink intake can safely consist of sugar.

Does anyone in their right mind think that a food intake consisting of 25% sugar makes any sense whatsoever?

Food over here, BTW, has been really good compared to Ireland. We have a branch of Trader Joe’s just down the road, which has supplied us with stacks of fantastic organic and/or healthy eats, for far cheaper than what the local supermarket charges for the usual pasteurised, added-sugar, added-salt crap.

This is just as well, because that supermarket has some really nasty stuff; even the bread is sweet due to added sugar! yuck. (In passing, pet food peeve: pasteurised orange juice. Pasteurisation of fruit juice kills the flavour and texture, and is thoroughly pointless; with that much acid and sugar, there’s no way any nasty bacteria can survive, assuming the juice is citrus and is fresh enough. But maybe that’s the point; saleable while less fresh == longer shelflife == profit.)

Tags: diet, food, funding, health, industry, intake, juice, sugar, supermarket, world

Gerry reckons the Irish Times are taking the piss.

Date: Tue, 01 May 2001 14:42:46 +0100
From: “Gerry Carr” (spam-protected)
To: (spam-protected)
Subject: IT are taking the piss out of me

Mere days after I send them this letter

Dear Sir,

Having read Mr Cruishank’s invaluable insight into the Health Shambles, can I offer the majority of your contributors a handy Irish Times letter generator;

Dear Sir/A Chara

How can one convince this Government that we need; a decent health system; help for the homeless; housing for travellers; free care for drug addicts; help for the 3rd World; free computers for every school; more social welfare money; more money for teachers/nurses/doctors/public servants/dustbinmen/soldiers wives

much more urgently than:

2 stadiums; a spike in O Connell Street; politicians’ beanos on St Patrick’s Day; a Eurovision song contest; sponsoring a race car; bailing out RTE; fireworks on the Liffey; a government jet/building/pay rise/reception/refurbishment/chauffer/travel expenses/secretary/ etc.

Is the government lacking morals/priorities/reason/sense of proportion/focus/ethics/

yours etc/Is mise [ADD NAME HERE]

Just delete as appropriate and you’ve got yourself 6 months worth of material.

Yours etc.

They print these 4 in a row;

POLICY ON SPORTS STADIUMS

Sir, – Let’s see if I understand the £60 million offer of our money to the GAA. It appears to have been offered the money to ensure that foreign games would not be played at Croke Park (thereby strengthening case for Stadium Ireland), and on the understanding that some key GAA matches would be played at the folly. In effect, does this mean that the payment is designed to ensure that Croke Park will be under-utilised? Just how far are our politicians willing to go to support an ego trip which could cost a billion or so by the time it is build? How will its annual financial costs of, say, £60 million be met? That amount equates to a Croke Park “donation” for every year to infinity! Surely, this money could be better used – to reduce the national debt, improve the infrastructure, assist the underprivileged and so on. Yours, etc.,

BRIAN FLANAGAN, Blackrock, Co Dublin. Sir, – The money being proposed for financing a national stadium in Abbotstown would be equally well spent on a submerged clock counting down the 998-plus years, second by second, to the next millennium. – Yours, etc.,

JERRY TWOMEY, Woodlawn Court, Santry, Dublin 9. Sir, – I would like our Taoiseach to complete the following sentence. I believe that £1 billion should be spent on a national stadium and not on our ailing health service because . . . – Is mise,

CIARAN MacAONGHUSA Baile an tSratha, Tír Chonaill. Sir, – Haemophiliacs are offered £4 million, the GAA is to receive £60 million. What a great little country we live in. – Yours, etc.,

EAMONN TIERNEY, Beverly Avenue, Knocklyon, Dublin 16.

Tags: date, gaa, government, health, irish, letter, money, sir, times, tue