Health Scare Stories Du Jour

1. From The Daily Mail:

Mothers who are struggling to get their babies to sleep should consider how much caffeine they are consuming, according to a breast feeding expert. Drinking coffee, tea and soft drinks and even eating chocolate increases the level of the stimulant in the blood. Babies can become restless, awake and irritable, when it is passed on through a mother's milk.

Dr Ruth Lawrence, editor of the journal Breastfeeding Medicine, said that babies have difficulties in breaking down and removing the drug from their bodies especially in their first two weeks of life. This can lead it to accumulate causing adverse symptoms...

The "first two weeks of life"? They'll get over it.

2. While tracking that one down, I stumbled across another coffee/breast related shocker from 2008:

Drinking more than three cups of coffee a day can apparently reduce the size of women's breasts. But it also reduces the risk of cancer, researchers say.

Swedish oncologist Dr Helena Jernstroem said a gene - which half of women have - could react and cause them to a drop a bra size. But she added: "Coffee-drinking women do not have to worry their breasts will shrink to nothing overnight. They will get smaller but the breasts aren't just going to disappear."

Hmm, small boobs or cancer? Not a tough choice, is it?

3. Finally, our GPs are so incompetent, they can't tell whether a patient is alive or dead:

Doctors were receiving money for more than 95,000 people who should have been removed from practice lists in England and Wales, investigators found. Some payments were made for patients who died more 40 years ago.

But many more ghosts may yet be uncovered; there are 52.5 million people in England but 55 million names registered with GPs. With doctors being paid £65 for each patient on their lists, it could mean as much as £162million a year is lost to the NHS...

However, the British Medical Association warned there were reports of ‘over-zealous list cleaners’ removing valid – often vulnerable – patients.

They calculated the £162 million as 2.5 million duplicate/non-existent patients x £65 a year. That's probably woefully understated, as there must be some people who aren't registered with a GP at all.

Interesting use of the word 'vulnerable'. If they come in for regular treatment, then clearly they are valid patients and are not being neglected; if they don't, then why don't the GPs try and track them down to find out why not?

Male Chauvinist Pig Of The Week

From last week's Daily Mail:

Support groups have expressed concern after an ugly woman was ordered to 'face the wall' by a library worker in north London. A male member of staff told Ayala Ochert that he was concerned she would 'offend others'...

"Scrap 'breast is best' slogan, say campaigners"

From the BBC:

Campaigners are calling on the government to drop the "breast is best" slogan because it is not convincing new mums to breast feed, they say. The Breastfeeding Network wants breastfeeding to be seen as the norm - not something special - as the slogan suggests...

The campaigners appear to think that the time honoured 'breast is best' slogan is a bit outdated. Probably true, so how about we replace it with something a bit punchier? I dreamed up a few on the way in to work:

"Tits are it"

"Knockers - don't knock 'em!"

"Nippers love nipples"

"Your jugs - full of milk"

"Babies love boobies"

"Give your baby a bap!"

Another one for JuliaM

From The Bristol Post:

The woman who claimed she was thrown off a bus for breastfeeding her six-week-old baby made the story up.

Amy Wootten said she had been ordered off a First bus travelling from the city centre to her Stockwood home after a fellow passenger complained about her feeding daughter Emily. First initially apologised to Miss Wootten for the "distress" caused to her in the alleged incident and issued a statement to the Evening Post.

But during an investigation launched by the company CCTV from the bus was subsequently examined and found to show that Miss Wootten was not forced off the vehicle in Wells Road by the driver as she claimed. The footage, seen by the Post, shows that driver, Rob Stone, did not even speak to her during the journey along the 54 route on Tuesday and it shows the time she got off the bus and the location..

I suppose it's possible that the bus company found CCTV of the same woman on a completely different day, but that seems unlikely.

"Breastfeeding broke 'no food' rule"

This is brilliant, from The Metro:

A mother was told to stop breastfeeding her baby boy by a swimming pool as it breached a leisure centre's strict poolside ban on food and drink. Laura Whotton was left fuming when a member of staff said she could not feed 11-week-old Joshua by the pool at John Carroll Leisure Centre, in Nottingham...

Ah well. At least this guy wasn't secretly filming it.