A book chapter I have written about prescribed drugs and testamentary capacity, with two colleagues, has passed the final hurdle on its way to publication. It will appear later this year in May 2005 in Encyclopedia of Forensic and Legal Medicine. Our chapter is about this sort of situation
The BBC screened a simulated terrorist attack this week; some fools took it far too seriously.
Later in the week the BBC organised a terrorist shootout under the flight path to Heathrow airport, not unsurprisingly this was taken seriously by the police who sent an armed response team and grounded jets for 20 minutes.
On the film Troy:
“It look quite good, but I’ve heard it isn’t very accurate.”
“Which bit?”
“The Troy bloke, they have supposedly changed his character quite a lot.”
Blogging is suspended until further notice.
In the so-so film Extreme Measures a doctor, played by Hugh Grant (in a thriller?), uncovers a sinister plot by disabled people and their relatives. They use tramps and allsorted vagabonds from the streets for research in order to help them walk again. The evil disabled people are defeated, but one central moral question [...]
Bertie Bassett may be harmful to your health in large quantities. A lady in Yorkshire has overdosed on liquorice:
The woman from Yorkshire went into muscle failure, a potentially fatal condition, after eating too much Pontefract cake.
Writing in the Postgraduate Medical Journal, doctors said she had been eating the liquorice sweets to relieve chronic constipation. [...]
MMR vaccine is to be offered to students in universities, following a case of mumps at an international student sports event in Spain.
Meanwhile, in The Lancet, Wakefield has been accused of selectively interpreting and quoting another person’s work to bolster his argument. There’s a surprise.
Good news in South Africa, after the previous denial of the problem by Mbeki, where HIV treatment is rolling out and making a big difference to people’s lives:
a short distance away from the chaotic triage centre, is a quiet, tastefully decorated haven that dispenses antiretroviral drugs to a small but growing number of AIDS patients. [...]
The Lancet is not impressed…
In the absence of evidence of the overall mortality benefits of OTC simvastatin, it is difficult to avoid concluding that the motive behind the Government’s decision is saving money. Statins are currently prescribed to about 1·8 million people in the UK, costing the NHS £700 million a year. With the NHS [...]