The Guardian's alternate reality

From The Guardian:

The climate crisis is damaging the health of foetuses, babies and infants across the world, six new studies have found.

Scientists discovered increased heat was linked to fast weight gain in babies, which increases the risk of obesity in later life. Higher temperatures were also linked to premature birth, which can have lifelong health effects, and to increased hospital admissions of young children.

Right. The 'cimate crisis' leads simultaneously to more premature babies, which tend to be underweight, and also faster weight gain/obesity?

The burning of fossil fuels drives the climate crisis but also causes air pollution and a new study in Denmark assessed the impact of dirty air on 10,000 couples trying to conceive naturally. It found that increases in particle pollution of a few units during a menstrual cycle led to a decrease in conception of about 8%.

A recent study in China also found that air pollution significantly increased the risk of infertility, but the average pollution level was more than five times higher than in the Danish study. “Air pollution [in Denmark] was low and almost entirely at levels deemed safe by the European Union,” said Wesselink. “Current standards may be insufficient to protect against adverse reproductive health effects.”

Of course pollution is unhealthy, nobody is disputing that. But it doesn't seem to have that much effect - the birth rate in Denmark is only ever so marginally higher than in China.

Wellenius said an important aspect of the studies was that they showed that vulnerable people often suffered the worst effects, for example people of colour and those on low incomes who did not have air conditioning or lived in areas with higher air pollution. “This is absolutely a health equity and justice issue,” he said.

Right. The number of babies being born seems to be inversely proportional to how urbanised or economically developed a country is (it's a fascinating topic in its own right); the world's overall birthrate has plummetted quite precipitously over the last century. The only continent where they are still getting on with it and popping out lots of babies is also the poorest, and probably the hottest and most polluted one - Africa. But according to the Guardian, the opposite is happening.

"Blue is for a baby boy and spattered in blood is for a baby girl"

Woman, 56, is killed by flying debris after an explosion during a gender reveal party gone wrong in Iowa

"House prices go up... number of births goes down"

The Daily Mail publishes a summary of some research by the EBRD:

Young couples are putting off starting a family as a result of rising house prices, research shows.

They want a home of their own before they have a baby but face a longer wait before they can afford to buy. A European Bank for Reconstruction and Development study found that for every 10 per cent increase in house prices, the overall birth rate falls by 1.3 per cent.

All of which we knew anyway, it's nice to see somebody putting some numbers on it. This is exactly what the Boomers and Homeys want of course, they need today's adults to be slaving away paying off mortgages and rent, not wasting time bringing up children who will only be of benefit to society after the Boomers are all dead.

... an increase in house prices on that scale could reduce the birth rate by more than 7,000, the figures suggest.

The pattern is the opposite when looking only at those who own their home, with a 10 per cent house price rise causing a rise in the number of births among this group by 2.8 per cent.

Among renters, however, the same increase causes a birth rate decline of 4.9 per cent, bringing the overall national birth rate down.

And why does house price inflation make owner-occupiers have more kids..?

... rising house prices usually mean that those who already own a home have a larger proportion of equity in their home. This may make them feel wealthier and more inclined to have more children, he said.

Newsflash: Rising house prices do not pay off your mortgage for you. You might feel wealthier but you are not.

I accept that having children is a "choice" for the parents, but it is an absolute necessity for a healthy and cohesive society. The only other way to keep things going is to have continual mass immigration, which brings its own problems - more perceived than actual, but problems nonetheless.

Being the Daily Mail, they love the last bit:

The researchers call for the Government to scrap the maximum purchase cap of £250,000 – £450,000 in London – on its Help-to-Buy ISA as the amount may be too low to allow couples to buy a home big enough for a young family.

Aaargh! That is exactly the opposite of what they should be doing! Shifting taxes away from earnings and output to Land Value Tax will sort all this out - it will level the playing field, encourage Poor Widows to sell their Mansion to young couples, increase owner-occupation rates among people of prime child-bearing age (25 to 35), enable people to pay off their mortgages faster etc etc.

[Sadly, the report offers no conclusions as to the correlation between house prices have and the gruesomeness of domestic murders.]
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UPDATE: The actual study (pdf here: www.ebrd.com/documents/oce/shortterm-effects-of-house-prices-on-birth-rates.pdf) does not say who funded it, maybe it was just the EBRD acting instinctively on behalf of banks generally, despite all the evidence pointing the other way.

It kicks off with:

I would like to thank Dan Anderberg, Arnaud Chevalier, Christian Hilber, Melanie Lührmann, Berkay Ozcan and seminar participants at the University of London, Royal Holloway, Royal Economic Society PhD Meetings, 29th ESPE Conference (Izmir, 2015), 30th ESPE Conference (Berlin, 2016) for their helpful comments.

I've never heard of the others, but "Professor" Hilber is the Home-Owner-Ist from Hell, so he might be the one who pushed the author towards the completely 100% wrong final recommendation.

Perhaps we ought to email the author and point out his mistake via aksoyc@ebrd.com

Nobody move or your first born get it!

Far beyond parody, from The Evening Standard:

Couples are delaying having children because of worries about the uncertainties of a Brexit, a senior London academic said today. Professor Michael Bruter of LSE discovered evidence that young voters in particular were “far less likely to make family plans” before the June 23 vote.

The extraordinary finding came as a think tank calculated that economic turmoil after leaving the EU could cost low-income families up to £5,500 in reduced benefits and tax credits to rebalance the public finances.

The operative word is "could", if you read the article for the list of assumptions and caveats, a fairer term would be "is highly unlikely to", but hey.

The next one is beyond logic:

Brexit would “drive a wedge” between London and the rest of the UK as more Europeans live, study and work here than in any other part of the country, a report said today.

The Centre for London think tank said the capital was “more closely linked” with continental Europe than ever before, with 850,000 EU nationals calling it home.

It warned that with over 600,000 employed in London, any visa regulation following a pull-out would deal a major blow to the capital’s economy.

In which case, London would become more like the rest of the UK (again), which is the opposite of "driving a wedge between", is it not?

Trying for a baby

In the context of nothing in particular, it struck me recently that 'trying for a baby' is actually quite weird when you are doing it.

At the risk of generalising, when you first start off, it is purely a pleasure/recreational thing and you both go to a lot of trouble to make sure that it doesn't result in a pregnancy. Males and females do this for a decade or so until they 'settle down and decide to start a family'.

Then for the first few years after you get married, the gloves are off, and all the habits and instincts that you have developed are overturned but initially it seems quite unnatural not to use contraception. You both know deep down that you are playing with powerful forces of nature - for good or bad - far beyond your control.

Then you have all the nerve wracking pregnancy stuff to go through*, two or three cute little babies** arrive until you both decide you've had enough of sleepless nights, dramatic loss of earnings etc, you struggle through the rushing around taking them to different child minders, nurseries - all at huge expense - and schools until it all settles down again.

Five or ten years into the marriage, that's enough kids thank you very much, and you go back to doing it purely for pleasure/recreational reasons, you start 'taking precautions' again, dreading the very thought of the thin blue line, the ingrained instincts kick in again and this seems perfectly natural and normal for the rest of your life.

* My heart goes out to couples who want to have babies but physically can't, that's not the issue here.

** For some reason, your own babies are much cuter than the average baby, everybody says that. Some sort of bias going on, I suspect.

Disclaimer: I've been married twice and my kids are aged between 12 and 26. I'm not doing that again and wouldn't want to. But I'm glad I did/glad to have it over with.

Whatever is the world coming to..?

From The Mirror, February 2013: Mum, 22, arrested on child trafficking charges after 'trying to sell her kids on Facebook for $5,000'

From The Mirror, January 2014: Pregnant teenager 'sells unborn baby on Facebook for just £68'

Facebook is a social networking site! If you want to sell stuff you use eBay or Gumtree.

"Romanian gypsies flood London to celebrate birth of Royal Baby"

From The Daily Mail:

Only three days after a dawn raid cleared one of Britain’s most prestigious streets, a new group of revellers arrived in Park Lane yesterday.

Dozens of Romanian gypsies arrived to turn the tree-lined central London road into a bunting-strewn shrine. Members of the Roma camp laughed and chatted as they were entertained by an accordion player playing the English national anthem with their possessions scattered around them.

On Friday police and council officials had moved on 60 rough sleepers who had turned the underground footways around Marble Arch into their home. Twenty-one took up an offer to fly home for free if they went straight to Heathrow. Yesterday it was clear that the desperate and expensive tactics had freed up space for well-wishers to flood London.

And the ‘cease and desist rejoicing’ notices, carefully translated into Romanian and handed out to dozens of people, were worthless. Some of the Romanian travellers insist they have come to Britain hoping to hear the 41 royal gun salute, but are now trapped because they cannot find the address.

Others simply state they are waiting for one set of grandparents to zoom past on their way to the maternity ward in a heavily guarded motorcade. Whatever the truth, council officials and police credit the visitors with a surge in sales of knock-off royal tat. Nearby businesses, which include Dorchester Souvenirs and a string of luxury memento dealerships, are delighted with the competition.

Large areas of grass are strewn with yesterday's newspapers bearing Kate Middleton's beaming face and half-drunk Pimms. Their possessions, including piles of cardboard placards with slogans such as "Wills I Love You" and pushchairs loaded with red, white and blue balloons, were scattered around them.

Nickie Aiken, of Westminster City Council, said the "squares, gardens and subways of London" are reserved for "groups of people who intend to contribute to the spontaneous outbreak of joy in the city."

She said: "Residents and businesses are delighted that people are coming from as far abroad as Romania to pay homage."

Life copies satire

From the 8 March 1980 episode of Roscoe Moscow: Who killed rock'n'roll?:

Daily Mail out by a factor of about four hundred, as per usual

From The Daily Mail:

Now that's double trouble! Woman, 25, beats odds of 170,000 to one by giving birth to twins for the second time

According to Wiki, about one birth in thirty* results in twins. We also know that some people are more likely to have twins than others, it's genetic as well as being related to age of mother, fertility treatment and diet. So if a mother has already had twins, let's assume that the chances of her having twins again is twice as high, maybe one-in-fifteen?

So the chances of any woman having two sets of twins is very approximately 1/30 x 1/15 = 1-in-450. Not 1-in-170,000, FFS.

But congrats to Mrs Power anyway, and I wish them all the best.

* Seems about right. There was a pair of fraternal twins in my class at primary school, and there was also a pair of fraternal twins in my class at secondary school. Was there a pair twins in your class at school?

HMS Ocean Open Day in Greenwich

Today's outing was the HMS Ocean Open Day.

Queuing took about two-and-a-half hours, but actually standing on the deck of an aircraft carrier (OK, it's not a proper aircraft carrier, it's a 'helicopter carrier') made it all worthwhile. It is as long and flat as you imagine, and a lot higher above water level.

The hangar deck was laid out as a recruitment exercise for the Royal Navy, which is fine if you enjoy that sort of thing. You weren't allowed to see the other parts of the ship, but they handed out loads of leaflets explaining how well armed and well appointed it is. Who would have thought that Senior Ratings on HMC Ocean have their very own maternity ward? (see third paragraph)

"It was the worst moment of my life"

From The Daily Mail:

She's the apple of Una Healy’s eye but The Saturdays star has spoken of the ‘worst moment’ of her life when her new baby's name was entered incorrectly on her birth certificate.

The singer, who gave birth to Annabelle Foden on March 13, with England rugby player Ben Foden, said the arrival has transformed her life. But she told Hello! magazine:

"I was screaming. It was the worst moment of my life. There’s this precious little person who you would die for and you just can’t bear to think of anything bad happening to her, like being constantly bullied at school or having every single official document issued incorrectly."

Her rugby fiancé said the couple panicked when they saw the birth certificate - issued in the name of 'Aoife Belle Foden' - and are hopeful that the local registrar of births, deaths and marriages will rectify the mistake.

Mum Of The Week

From OK! Magazine:

It was only a matter of time until there were repercussions. Stacey Solomon* has been ditched by Celeb Mum of the Year shortlist organisers Foxy Bingo, after she was spotted smoking while 7 months pregnant...

I know it's not much of a consolation for her, but she can be this blog's Mum Of The Week** instead. Here's a picture of Stacey in "Jewish Princess" mode:*Quite why she is famous is a mystery to me, that's all part of her appeal.

** Seconded by Patsy Nurse.

Detecting autism in six-month old babies

As widely reported last week, for example in NHS News:

... a study... assessed the brain activity of 104 infants aged 6-10 months as they watched an image of an adult’s face whose eyes moved from looking away from them, to directly at the infant, then away again. Researchers called these eye movements ‘dynamic eye-gaze shifts’.

They then assessed whether differences in brain activity in response to the eye-gaze shifts were related to autism developing in the same children at three years. Children who did not develop autism showed large spikes in brain activity when they saw the ‘gaze shifts’. Much smaller spikes in brain activity were detected in the infants who went on to develop autism, raising the prospect that autism could be identified earlier than is currently clinically possible.

However, this test was not 100% accurate...

Well of course it's not 100% accurate, as autism is not a yes/no condition, there is an infinitum spectrum between 'completely shut off and irresponsive to other humans' and 'completely with it most of the time', but none of this surprises me.

As I have pointed out before*, for some reason intelligent creatures, most noticeably small babies, like staring you straight in the eyes and appreciate it when you reciprocate. Therefore, by reverse logic, there must be something a bit wrong with small babies who don't do this, or more to the point, who don't find it unusual if you don't look them straight in the eyes.

On a related topic, I'm sure that I read a science fiction book as a kid where the aliens/clones control people's minds by looking them in the eye, and the children make their alien/clone teacher's head explode by focussing on a spot six inches to the left of the teacher's face.** My fellow conspirators and I have tried this technique in Pointless Team Meetings and it does genuinely make the speaker very flustered. The technique is certainly up their there with Bullshit Bingo.***

* As it turns out, my observation that small children don't blink is an accepted fact, explanation here.

** Was that The Midwich Cuckoos? In which case swap round children/teacher.

*** If nobody wants to play, my other fall back is counting all the squares in the carpet, all the tiles in the ceiling or all the panes in the windows - not counting the rows and columns and multiplying, but counting them one by one and starting again if I lose count. When it's finally over, I am usually pleased to establish that I genuinely can't remember a word anybody said and don't have a clue what the meeting was about.

Meaningless statistic of the day

From The Daily Mail:

In a list of places where people do drugs, it's probably one of the last you would expect to find a class A substance. However, incredibly, traces of cocaine have been found in more than nine out of 10 baby-changing units in the north west, research has found. An examination of more than 100 units - including facilities in public toilets, shopping centres, police stations, courts and churches - found that 92 per cent of them carried traces of the class A drug...

You'd need nerves of steel to take cocaine in a police station or court, and I didn't know that churches had toilets, but apart from that, so what?

It is, for example, quite possibly the case that cocaine residue is very difficult to clean away and/or that baby changing units are not cleaned very often or very thoroughly. So if a baby-changing unit has only been used for sniffing cocaine a single time in the past few days, which might mean a single visitor out of dozens or hundreds, it still shows up as positive.

Or possibly nine-out-ten UK babies are addicted to cocaine, but that does seem unlikely. How would they fund their habits, for a start?

I'm pleasantly surprised he said that.

From The Daily Mail:

Tory backbencher Julian Brazier, author of a paper on rising population, said: ‘Late motherhood is one more example of how property prices in Britain are making family life increasingly unattainable.’

Mr Brazier, MP for Canterbury, said: ‘Despite the downturn, we have the highest property prices in the world in relation to incomes.
There is also the effect of immigration, which is responsible for two fifths of housing demand. It is important that the Government succeeds in getting immigration down.’

Well done for pointing out that high house prices are bad for 'family life', something which the Tories claim to support (but don't).
-------------------------------------------
He's a bit off piste with the immigration sideswipe though. It's true that recent immigrants have a slight advantage when it comes to social housing - the IPPR published some research which purported to show they don't, but they were too honest for the own good and the figures they included said otherwise.

What he probably means is that the net number of immigrants per year (presumably divided by two to give number of households) is equivalent to two fifths of the number new houses built per year*. So yes, getting immigration down is one possibility, the other is just allowing more houses to be built.

* Net immigration from 'New Commonwealth and EU8' was about 160,000 a year, divide by 2 = 80,000, for a long time, new construction every year was about 200,000, 80,000/200,000 is two-fifths. Of course, now that the Tories have got in, they have restricted new construction to 100,000, so next year they'll be able to say that immigrants take up four-fifths of housing.

Disproving your own argument

From The Evening Standard:

Mothers, stay at home for a safer, cheaper birth

There's a secret ritual a couple of weeks after having a baby: you sit down with your NCT group and compare notes on the birth.

My session last year was in a Crouch End coffee shop where six shell-shocked new mothers relived various birthing battles. Most of the salient details were hair-raisingly similar: chaotic, rude midwifery, lots of drugs and medical intervention, shoddy aftercare. Three of us ended up having emergency C-sections.

But one tale stood out - the home birth. Sure there were hairy [sic] moments, but these were comedic rather than life-threatening... Other friends who delivered their offspring at home have similar tales: very few stitches, barely any drugs and midwives treating them with respect.

Unless all those emergency Caesarians were entirely unnecessary, I'd say hats off to the NHS for identifying the potentially riskier births, wouldn't you? If those three mothers who ended up having a Caesarian had insisted on a home-birth, heck knows what would have happened.

Smoking horror statistics - missing figures round

From the BBC:

Women who smoke while pregnant should be aware that they are increasing the chance their baby will be born malformed, say experts. The risk for having a baby with missing or deformed limbs or a cleft lip is over 25% higher for smokers, data show.

Along with higher risks of miscarriage and low birth weight, it is another good reason to encourage women to quit, say University College London doctors. In England and Wales 17% of women smoke during pregnancy. And among under 20s the figure is 45%.

Although most will go on to have a healthy baby, smoking can cause considerable damage to the unborn child. Researchers now estimate that each year in England and Wales several hundred babies are born with a physical defect directly caused by their mother's smoking. Every year in England and Wales around 3,700 babies in total are born with such a condition.

OK, 3,700 babies are born with defects out of 750,000 babies a year. We can minus off a third of those caused by Pakistanis marrying their first cousins, which gets it down to a third of a per cent with defects, call it 2,500 a year.

Question 1: If 17% of women smoke; the overall average risk of a baby born to normal couple having a defect is 0.33%; and the risk of your baby having a defect is 25% higher if you smoke (they cherry picked diseases where the risk is measurably higher, and didn't mention all the defects where the risk is the same whether you smoke or not, but hey), then what are the chances of having a baby with a defect if you:
a) Don't smoke during pregnancy.
b) Smoke during pregnancy.

Click and highlight to reveal answers: a) 0.32%, b) 0.4% (you can guess this answer, one is 0.33% minus a tiny bit and the other is 0.33% plus five tiny bits).

Question 2: How many babies born to mothers who smoke will have birth defects?

Click and highlight to reveal answer: 750,000 babies x 17% smokers x 0.4% with defects = 510 babies.

Question 3: If those mothers hadn't smoked, how many of their babies would have birth defects anyway?

Click and highlight to reveal answer: 750,000 babies x 17% x 0.32% = 408.

Question 4: Deduct your answer from 3 from your answer from 2 to calculate the additional number of babies born with defects as a result of the mother smoking?

Click and highlight to reveal answer: 510 - 408 = 102. It's not "several hundred", is it? There's a wide margin of error here, but I'd politely refer to that as "one hundred", i.e. a tenth as many as babies born with defects due to inbreeding.

Defiant Smoker Of The Week

From The Metro:

Young mum Charlie Wilcox has claimed the 3,500 roll-up cigarettes she smoked while expecting her first child were good for the baby.

The 20-year-old said cutting the amount of oxygen reaching unborn Lilly would cause her heart to work harder, making her stronger. She also said smoking was a ‘mother’s right’ and claimed a friend miscarried because she quit the habit.

She said: ‘Where’s the proof that it’s so bad to smoke? I don’t believe it was hurting Lilly. On a typical day when I was pregnant, I would smoke a fag every 45 minutes.’ Giving up suddenly during the pregnancy would put the baby under more stress, she added.

Miss Wilcox, of Rainham, Kent, made the claims on the BBC3 documentary Misbehaving Mums To Be, ignoring midwives who told her smoking could cause premature birth, low birth weight or other health problems. Specialist Lisa Fendall warned her: ‘Your baby is struggling for oxygen, and is saying “help me”.’

Lilly, now 14 weeks old, was born weighing 2.7kg (6lb 2oz) – beneath the British average of 3.3kg (7lb 4oz) for a newborn girl, and ten days early.

Unemployed Miss Wilcox’s levels of carbon monoxide were six times higher than the level considered safe for the baby while she was pregnant. Lilly’s father Shane Baker, 20, said: ‘Unless you’re in the situation yourself then you shouldn’t jump to conclusions.’

Charlie and Shane, we salute you, and congrat's for little baby girl.

Absolute and relative risk

From the BBC:

Fathers-to-be should stop smoking to protect their unborn child from the risk of stillbirth or birth defects, scientists say.

University of Nottingham researchers found that pregnant women exposed to smoke at work or home increased their risk of stillbirth by 23% and of having a baby with defects by 13%. They looked at 19 previous studies from around the world. A UK expert said it was "vital" women knew the risks of second-hand smoke.

Ho hum.

The figures are probably complete rubbish, but let's take them at face value for now. According to Tommy's there are around 4,000 still births a year in the UK against around 800,000 live births, and let's assume that a quarter of mothers smoke or are exposed to 'second-hand smoke'.

While I accept that a still birth is heart breaking and distressing for the parents involved, let's do our bit to inform women of the absolute risks of second-hand smoke:

Not exposed - 600,000 pregnancies x 0.473% = 2,837 still births
Exposed - 200,000 pregnancies x [0.47% x 1.23=0.58%] = 1,163 still births
Total = 4,000 still births.

So in absolute terms, 'second-hand smoke' increases the risk by 0.11% (from 0.47% to 0.58%). What's even more heart breaking is of course that 81% of still births where 'second-hand smoke' was in play would have happened anyway, so this will cause additional guilt and suffering on the part of the parents.

Finally, let me do a bit of Victimhood Poker for once and point out that a far greater risk factor is how many grandparents the parents of the child have in common.

"Baby Laughing Hysterically at Ripping Paper"

Via The Metro: