In six weeks, the spread of the coronoavirus will stop.

From the BBC:

20 January - 291 cases
30 January - 7,711 cases

That's a compound growth rate of 39% per day.

7,711 cases x (1.39 ^ 42) = over 7 billion, or pretty much the entire world population. 42 days = six weeks.

Death rates are currently at about 2% (assuming the Chinese government is telling the truth, lolz). These diseases tend to become less and less fatal as they spread. SARS was much more deadly at first, but then fizzled out and disappeared and/or just merged into flu generally, so the final death rates from coronavirus will be not much worse than the death rates from the colds and flu that go round every year anyway. And the rest of us will be immune.

BBC guidelines means that they have to squeeze it into every article...

From the BBC:

The world is entering "a new phase" where big outbreaks of deadly diseases like Ebola are a "new normal", the World Health Organization has warned.

Previous Ebola outbreaks affected relatively small numbers of people. But the Democratic Republic of Congo is dealing with the second largest outbreak ever, just three years after the world's largest one ended.

The topic of epidemics is fascinating and terrifying in equal measure, go on...

Dr Josie Golding, the epidemics lead at the Wellcome Trust, said the world needed to get better at preparing for such outbreaks.

"With Ebola in West Africa, that was the mobility of people and porous borders - that is now the world we live in, that won't stop," she said.

Yup, more movement of people = more spread of diseases, until one day hopefully we'll all be immune to everything.

And drumroll, please...

Climate change could lead to more outbreaks like cholera in Mozambique after Cyclone Idai, she said. But she hoped diseases resulting from humanitarian crises would not be a new normal.

"Preparedness needs to be better, we can see movement of populations and climate change, a lot of this we can see coming, and we need more resources to plan and prepare."

Like most 'natural disasters', the cyclone/cholera episode was actually a failure in town/infrastructure planning. Cholera outbreaks were common in England until we got our mains water and sewage systems sorted out; Developed countries are regularly hit with typhoons- hurricanes-cyclones and they don't have cholera outbreaks.

"Increased frequency of travel may act to decrease the chance of a global pandemic"

From BioRxiv.org:

The high frequency of modern travel has led to concerns about a devastating pandemic since a lethal pathogen strain could spread worldwide quickly.

Many historical pandemics have arisen following pathogen evolution to a more virulent form. However, some pathogen strains invoke immune responses that provide partial cross-immunity against infection with related strains.

Here, we consider a mathematical model of successive outbreaks of two strains: a low virulence strain outbreak followed by a high virulence strain outbreak. Under these circumstances, we investigate the impacts of varying travel rates and cross-immunity on the probability that a major epidemic of the high virulence strain occurs, and the size of that outbreak.

Frequent travel between subpopulations can lead to widespread immunity to the high virulence strain, driven by exposure to the low virulence strain. As a result, major epidemics of the high virulence strain are less likely, and can potentially be smaller, with more connected subpopulations. 

Cross-immunity may be a factor contributing to the absence of a global pandemic as severe as the 1918 influenza pandemic in the century since.

Seems plausible to me. Either we have just been incredibly lucky for the past century, or there is a self-correcting mechanism that reduces the risk of pandemics.

Women talking sense

Item 1, from the BBC:

People who believe the myths spread by anti-vaccine campaigners "are absolutely wrong", England's top doctor has said. Prof Dame Sally Davies said the MMR vaccine was safe and had been given to millions of children worldwide but uptake was currently "not good enough"...

"A number of people, stars, believe these myths - they are wrong," she said, "Over these 30 years, we have vaccinated millions of children. It is a safe vaccination - we know that - and we've saved millions of lives across the world. People who spread these myths, when children die they will not be there to pick up the pieces or the blame."

Uptake of the MMR vaccine had reached a good level in previous years but has now dropped back to 87%.

"That means a lot of protection but it doesn't give us herd immunity," Dame Sally said. "So when people from abroad have been coming in, travelling infected, it is spreading into our local communities."

I'll mark her down for the platitude 'local communities', apart from that, agreed.

Item 2, also from the BBC:

Chief Constable Sara Thornton said forces were too stretched to deal with "deserving" issues, such as logging gender-based hate incidents... She called for a "refocus on core policing".

Ms Thornton told police chiefs and police and crime commissioners: "We are asked to provide more and more bespoke services that are all desirable - but the simple fact is there are too many desirable and deserving issues."

She added: "Neither investigating gender-based hate crime or investigating allegations against those who have died are necessarily bad things - I just argue that they cannot be priorities for a service that is over-stretched."

... Since 2010 police chiefs say funding in England and Wales has decreased, in real terms, by nearly a fifth, and there are 20,000 fewer officers.

Spot on. It's not hard to understand, is it?

It's third time unlucky though:

Shadow Home Secretary Diane Abbott said forces could not do "more with less". Police should not have to "pick and choose" between crimes, and if misogyny was made a hate crime the government must provide the funding to tackle it, she added.
-----------------------------
UPDATE. Jonathan Bagley in the comments:

I know that there are many ways of recording crime and new crimes are being invented, but according to the crime survey, crime has fallen from a peak of 19 million offences in 1995 to 6 million offences in 2016. Doesn't that alone suggest we need fewer police? I've heard no mention of this.

I live in a small town in the North of England. In the early 90s there were more break-ins, more car crime and huge amount more drunken vandalism and criminal damage. Crime now, apart from some drug dealing, seems virtually non-existent and this is not a wealthy middle-class place.

Agreed, crime has been on a downward trend in developed countries for centuries. Steven Pinker has made a career out of reporting this. This has been particularly noticeable over the last few decades, when those born before they stopped putting lead in petrol had passed prime crime-committing age (allegedly, but it's the best explanation we have).

But:

a) However much - or little - crime there is, there is always too much, from the point of view of victims.

b) The economic optimum level of crime/policing is where £1 extra spent on police reduces the total cost of crime by £1, spend any more and it's money wasted. But it's difficult to measure or value distress, worry, trauma etc (the bulk of the true cost of crime), so best go on the safe side.

c) We have got softer as we have become more civilised. A few centuries ago, if somebody was murdered, it was just bad luck and few people cared too much, widow or widower remarried and moved on. Nowadays, it's a heck of a blow to a large number of relatives, friends and colleagues. So the "cost" of crime might be going up even if the absolute number of crimes is going down.

d) The Tories have been reducing police budgets and numbers too far, too fast, and/or encouraging them to focus on non-crimes as listed by Ms Thornton. There does appear to have been an increase in crime rates over the past few years - especially in London which has had a particularly right-on Mayor - bucking the long term trend.

"Stalins benefits underestimated, review says"

From the BBC:

The benefits of mass murdering megalomaniac dictators are underestimated and the harms exaggerated, a major review suggests.

Published in the Lancet and backed by a number of major health organisations, it says Stalins lower heart attack and stroke risk. The review also suggests side effects such as surveillance and punishment without trial do occur, although in relatively few people.

But critics say healthy people are unnecessarily being subjected to forced labour camps and widespread hunger.

Why You Should Vote

From the Telegraph

Pensioners over the age of 75 will be guaranteed same-day access to a family doctor under Conservative plans for a “total revolution” of GP services in Britain.

In an interview with The Daily Telegraph, Jeremy Hunt, the Health Secretary, said that the Tories will deliver better care for the elderly population by committing to a minimum of £8billion of extra funding for the NHS every year by 2020.

The money will pay for at least 5,000 new GPs to ensure that pensioners who require care will be able to see a doctor within hours.

Leaving aside that I think GPs are something that should be scrapped and everyone should just go to specialists for most things, the idea that over 75 year olds should specifically get a guarantee on seeing a GP is frankly nuts.

The people who should get immediate access to a GP are working people and school children. 75 year olds have had their working life, have plenty of spare time and aren't the people who are earning the money that keeps the NHS going. We want kids to be getting back to school or being able to go out and play and working people to be getting back to work or look after their children.

And the only reason this is happening is because 75 year olds vote in such huge numbers and like most people, vote for themselves. Most of them seem to even lack an enlightened perspective that their children and grandchildren are paying for the splurging of government money on them.

So, if you're young and wondering why you can't get a home of your own, it's because you don't vote, and that's all the parties care about. They disregard those who think that they're making a point. If you have a YPP candidate in your area, vote for them, if not, find the least worst option. But for god's sake, vote.

Leader's Debate

I didn't watch it. Apparantly Nicola Sturgeon did well, though, no doubt promising the Scots a pony for all based on some inflated numbers on oil prices, but something that stuck out was what Farage said.:-

Nigel Farage was rounded on by other party leaders on ITV’s Thursday night debate after he complained about foreigners with HIV costing the health service up to £25,000 per year per patient.

The Ukip leader steered the debate on to the topic of health tourism when he was given the opportunity to talk about the NHS.

Plaid Cymru leader Leanne Wood tackled him on the subject during the seven-way discussion, saying it was scaremongering and that he should be ashamed of himself.

...

SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon responded saying: “One of the things we’ve learned is there’s nothing Farage wouldn’t blame on foreigners.”

...

Having not intervened during the debate, Labour leader Ed Miliband tweeted afterwards that Farage’s comments were “disgusting”, adding: “He should be ashamed. The fact he isn’t says so much.”

...

Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg also took to Twitter to condemn the remarks, saying: “Farage’s comments about foreign people with HIV were simply vile and desperate. Politics of the lowest form.”

...

David Cameron remained silent, but when asked to comment, chancellor George Osborne said he would not dignify them with a response. Later, on the BBC’s Newsnight, he refused once again to rule out the idea of a post-electoral pact with Ukip.

I think this sums up a problem we have in this country, that our political class have contempt towards the public.

I wouldn't mind if Cameron, Clegg or Miliband had challenged Farage to show his numbers (which it turns out are about right).

But what they're really saying is that it's beyond the pale to even discuss something that the government spends money on. Now, I know the game that Farage is playing, but that doesn't mean that it doesn't dignify a response. This is public money being spent. Maybe not as much as Guido reports, but based on House of Lords numbers, it's around £500m/year for England. Personally, I'm not at all happy if some Africans are coming over here just to get treatment for a disease (if we're saying it's OK, should we therefore be treating all Africans)?

And I'm not against people arguing that this is morally OK. I'm not against a politician saying that it's morally wrong to screen people coming to the UK, or that it's not worth it, but to just say that something costing half a billion of public money is off-limits for discussion is contemptible and shows the political class at its worst.

Cut Music to One Hour a Day - WHO

From the BBC

WHO figures show 43 million people of my generation aged 12-35 have hearing loss and the prevalence is increasing.

In that age group, the WHO said, half of people in rich and middle-income countries were exposed to unsafe sound levels from personal audio devices and pinball wizards.

Meanwhile 40% were exposed to damaging levels of sound from clubs and bars that could be seen for miles and miles and miles.

The proportion of US teenagers with hearing loss went from 3.5% in 1994 to 5.3% in 2006.

Dr Keith Moon, the WHO's director for injury prevention, told the BBC: "What we're trying to do is raise awareness of an issue that is not talked about enough, but has the potential to do a lot of damage that can be easily prevented, and there is no substitute."

"That's a rough recommendation, it is not by the minute, to give those kids who are alright an idea to those spending 10 hours a day listening to an mp3-player.

"But you better you bet, even an hour can be too much if the volume is too loud."

Not a surprise at all, but a pleasant one nonetheless.

From the BBC:

HIV is evolving to become less deadly and less infectious, according to a major scientific study. The team at the University of Oxford shows the virus is being "watered down" as it adapts to our immune systems.

It said it was taking longer for HIV infection to cause Aids and that the changes in the virus may help efforts to contain the pandemic. Some virologists suggest the virus may eventually become "almost harmless" as it continues to evolve.

This is something else covered in "Guns, Germs and Steel". We have observed similar things happening with many other infectious diseases for example syphilis.

Basically, germs want to maximise their own number. So the ideal outcome is for their hosts to remain alive but infectious.

There is no mileage in killing off your host; germs like it when their hosts produce and discharge more germs to infect others (coughing, sneezing, vomiting and other things too disgusting to mention on a family blog). The unfortunate side-effect of this, from the germs' point of view, is that they overdo it and the symptoms kill their hosts (who can no longer infect others) and thereby some of their own number.

The side effect of becoming less lethal is that they become less infectious as well; there's simply not the hurry. If you are a disease that kills within a couple of days, each host has to infect at least one other host in the next couple of days. If you are a slow-killer or non-killer disease, you can take your time, if your host only infects one new host every few years, then that is enough.

Diseases which kill nearly everybody they infect soon disappear because they run out of victims; either they are dead or immune (by luck or acquired). We see the same thing happening with Ebola, there's a nasty outbreak every decade or two, then it all quietens down again.

See also: why animals on isolated islands tend towards vegetarianism.

NHS Hospital Health Fascism

From the Telegraph

The NHS has been accused of fuelling the obesity epidemic after an investigation disclosed that dozens of fast food restaurants, coffee bars and shops are selling discounted chocolate at hospitals. Medical experts urged the health service to “get its house in order” and clear its hospitals of junk food companies such as Burger King and Subway and coffee shops selling muffins and high-sugar drinks.

Simon Stevens, the head of NHS England, said the health service had to take “hard-nosed action” to end the sale of junk food in hospitals, to help tackle the obesity crisis. Health campaigners said they were particularly disturbed by the march of Costa Coffee, which has recently come under fire for selling fruit drinks with four times the recommended daily sugar limits.

You can also buy a black americano with no sugar in them too, which as long as you don't overdo the caffeine is rather healthy. Or a mineral water.

And since when is Subway a "junk food" company? It's about the healthiest takeaway around.

But what do they expect people to eat?

My eldest was recently in hospital and the food was abysmal. A fine example of Friedman's 4th way of spending money - someone spending someone else's money on someone else, which means they don't really care how good it is. Every day, my wife brought food in for her (a mix of some healthy and unhealthy stuff). But for someone who is maybe on their own, what's their option?

And even Burger King have healthy options. And unhealthy ones if that's what people want. Because they're adults and have the brains to choose for themselves, thank you very much.

"One in three adults in England 'on cusp' of diabetes"

Not far from the BBC:

Almost more than a third of adults are on the cusp of developing type-2 diabetes, figures for England as good as show.

Sugar

A report, which nearly made it into the British Medical Journal, well-nigh highlighted a "virtually rapid" rise in pre-diabetes since 2003, all but a dozen years ago. The authors predict a surge in people who might or might not develop type-2 diabetes in the coming years, which will not quite have consequences for life expectancy and disability.

Spice

The charity Diabetes UK practically said the NHS was already spending no-tenths of its budget on the non-condition.

All things

People with pre-diabetes have no symptoms of ill health, but their blood sugar levels are at the very high end of the normal range - on the cusp of diabetes. Between 90% and 95% people with pre-diabetes do not develop type-2 diabetes each year, the researchers might as well have said.

Nice

Their study more or less looked at Health Survey for England data between as far back as maybe 2003 and as late as something like 2011. In 2003, not quite 11.7% of adults surveyed exhibited no symptoms of diabetes, but the figures trebled to close to 35.4% exhibiting no symptoms by 2011.

Tee hee

There was an article in today's Metro saying that "drunk casualty patients have less chance of suffering complications than those who are sober, research has suggested...", which I can't track down online, but it appears to be old news anyway.

From Red Orbit, November 2012:

Alcohol can make a person act in an uncharacteristic manner, persuading them to do things they would never do with a sober mind.

In fact, some people (depending on their poison) are even taken to feeling indestructible with the right amount of spirits in them. This is all very well known behavior, of course.

One new study, however, is suggesting that people who become injured and require hospitalization are more likely to live if they have alcohol in their system.

At last! Two bits of sensible health advice from the BBC.

Have a nice lie-in every day

Sleep loss may be more serious than previously thought, causing a permanent loss of brain cells, research suggests.

In mice, prolonged lack of sleep led to 25% of certain brain cells dying, according to a study in The Journal of Neuroscience.

Don't play football

The Football Association has apologised to the widow of a former England striker who died after suffering brain damage from heading heavy leather footballs.

Mithridatism

From the BBC

Doctors say a potential treatment for peanut allergy has transformed the lives of children taking part in a large clinical trial.

The 85 children had to eat peanut protein every day - initially in small doses, but ramped up during the study.

The findings, published in the Lancet, suggest 84% of allergic children could eat the equivalent of five peanuts a day after six months.

Excellent news. If you know someone with a peanut allergy it's potentially fatal and you've got to be careful, go out carrying an epi pen, etc. It still doesn't mean they can eat a bag of peanut brittle, but any contamination of nuts will not cause a problem. Well done to the people at Addenbrooke's for making the world a slightly better place.

There's a word for this, and it's known as mithridatism. Named after King Mithridates VI who was so scared of getting poisoned that he took small amounts of poison to build up a resistance. Ironically, he was later facing capture by Rome and tried to commit suicide by poison but couldn't because of this and had to get his bodyguard to stab him instead.

It's been a feature of some fiction, featuring both arsenic and iocaine, but in the real world people it's used by people who have to handle cobras as they can then build up a resistance to the venom.

NHS employment figures in perspective

We are well aware, see e.g. here, that the NHS employs about 1.4 million people, including "146,075 doctors, 369,868 qualified nursing staff and 37,314 managers".

It has a budget of "£105.254bn in 2012/13".

Just for fun, we can multiply up the doctors by £100,000 a year each (£15 billion), the nurses and managers by £40,000 a year each (£16 billion) and the other 850,000 by £20,000 a year each (£17 billion) and tot that up to £48 billion, half the NHS budget.

We are also well aware, from personal experience as patients, that you get treated a lot better/quicker in European countries. This is partly because of the best-of-both worlds taxpayer-funded (with small personal additional charges), patient-driven, competing-providers model.

But it's the money as well.

UPDATE: Kj in the comments links to this and this showing that the UK spends 9.3% of GDP and Germany (I'll take Germany because I used to live there) spends 11.1%. The taxpayer/government-funded portion is UK 7.7% of GDP and Germany 8.4%.

So what do they get extra for their money? There are some stat's on the numbers employed in healthcare in Germany here.

See if you can guess the total before you follow the link!

If your German's a bit rusty, click and highlight below to reveal the official total:

Four (4) million! Jeez!!

NB, I've adjusted that figure down to exclude people working in health-related sectors, i.e. pharmaceuticals and dispensing chemists, who would not show up in NHS figures either. If we scale that down for Germany's larger population, this gives us three (3) million, which means that Germans spend 20% more than we do but get 100% more out of it.

Shuffling the Deck Chairs

From the BBC

David Cameron says he wants to offer more patients the chance to visit a GP in the evening or at weekends.

Under a scheme to be piloted in nine areas of England, surgeries will be able to bid for funding to open from 8am to 8pm seven days a week. The prime minister said the £50m project would mean doctors "fit in with work and family life"...

He told the BBC: "Many hard working people find it difficult to take time off to get that GP appointment, so having these pilot schemes... is, I think, a very positive step forward.

"It also links to the problems we have seen in our accident and emergency departments because the number of people going to A&E departments is up by four million since the changes to the GP contract that Labour put in in 2004.

"What we need to do is enable the right people with the right ailments, as it were, to either go to a GP or to accident and emergency."

So, here's the multi-million dollar question: what's the problem with people going to A&E outside of hours instead of a GP?

OK, I know the answer to that is that A&E gets crowded and waiting times go up. But then, you can deal with that by simply putting more resources into A&E. After all, this plan is going to mean more GP resources, and fundamentally, you're dealing with the same skillset.

It's not like if you have 12 hours of A&E that you're going to get to see your GP. They can't work 12 hours - it's going to mean some sort of split-shift, so there's a reasonable chance you're going to see another GP, so any personal connection value of a GP isn't being added.

The other downside of 12 hour GP surgeries is that you're going to end up with a lot of GP time spent sitting around doing nothing, because even now, many GP surgeries are quiet at certain times of day. And you can't go moving GPs from a busy surgery to a non-busy surgery just for odd lulls. That means losing GP resources.

Look at it this way: if lots of small offices worked so well, why did we ditch town centre insurance brokers for vast call centres that you could fit an Star Destroyer in? Answer: because it's more efficient. Because you can make it that no-one is sat around waiting for customers. Because you can improve the use of specialists. You get some scale, like 1000 people working in a call centre and it's worthwhile employing a team of a dozen geeks just to work out how to improve the efficiency.

So, you build models to work out how many people to put on there at certain times, you computerise all the crap (like sending letters) to free up people, you stick a load of stuff on the net so people can do it themselves. All of this reduces the cost of the call centre, and as a result, the cost to customers. But you can only do all of that with scale, and having 2 GPs isn't going to do it.

That's not to say that there isn't a place for GPs - sometimes people need that personal connection. A woman suffering from post-natal depression probably needs that connection. But she's not going to want to see an anonymous GP any more than seeing someone at A&E. And I'm pretty sure that she'd find time in the day for something like that.

Female GPs

From Sky News:

Sarah Wollaston, a Tory MP and GP, called it a "a load of (mcIn)'tosh!".

"Women doctors add great value in medicine and job sharers often contribute more than Whole Time Equivalent," she said.

Well, it isn't tosh. The facts are the facts here. It might be inconvenient that it's been raised, or it might offend your feminist perspective or make you feel personally wounded, but neither of the opponents are disagreeing with the figures quoted that women GPs work part time for a quarter of their careers.

And what's the effect of that? 70% of all GPs training are women, 50% of the work, 25% of the time? That's what, 8% of GP capacity lost? Anyone want to say that people shouldn't be worrying about that level of loss of capacity in the system

Health Scare Story Du Jour

From LBC:

Britons are more likely to die early than people in most wealthy nations, research suggests - and experts are warning the gap is widening.(1)

A study has found the UK is now 14th out of 19 Western countries for life expectancy.(2) In 1990, Britain ranked tenth in a league table - with Alzheimer's disease, cirrhosis of the liver and drug use disorders being blamed for our falling position.(3)

The research was published as Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt prepares to address a "shocking underperformance" that is costing 30,000 lives every year.(4) The report compares death rates, disease and health risks in 1990 and in 2010. In these 20 years, life expectancy has increased in the UK - by an average of 4.2 years to 79.9 years - but it has failed to keep pace with other nations.(5)

While we are living longer, we are experiencing longer periods of ill health and disability.(6) The UK is now below average compared with 18 other countries on many important indicators.(7)

1) Gasp! We're all going to die!

2) And out of about two hundred countries in the world, we rank..?

3) Longer life expectancy = more Alzheimer's; they can "blame" cirrhosis of the liver all they like, that doesn't mean it's on the increase (nowadays they just fall over themselves to diagnose something as such where they wouldn't have done twenty years ago); drug use is stable or on the decline and most health problems are because drugs are illegal and hence contaminated.

4) None of this "costs" lives, it is merely the flip side of postponing everybody's inevitable death. If you dive into a frozen pond and pull somebody out before they drown, clearly you have saved somebody's life and deserve a medal. But if you put terminally ill people on brilliant but expensive life support machines which will prevent them from ever dying, no matter how vegetative their state, you have not saved a life at all, you have merely postponed their death. And the money you've spent might have been more usefully spent on preventive medicine.

5) Aha, here's the crux, we are doing better than we were, but other countries have improved more.

6) Inevitably, the longer people live, the more likely they are to "experience longer periods of ill health and disability", that's the period between natural life expectancy and actually dying. As erstwhile German health minister Norbert Blüm once said, a century ago, people were pretty pleased if they made it past forty, nowadays they're whining because they only live until they're seventy.

7) Yes, and we are right at the bottom of the table of the top 14 countries. So what?

We've had our chips/I'll drink to that

From The Daily Mail:

Men who eat fried foods more than once a week may increase their risk of prostate cancer by a third. New research suggests that junk food staples such as chips, fried chicken, battered fish and doughnuts may play a significant role in the formation of aggressive and life-threatening forms of the disease.

Although previous studies have suggested poor diet can affect a man's chances of getting prostate cancer, this is the first to indicate that deep-fried convenience foods in particular pose such a big danger...

Nearly 40,000 cases of prostate cancer are diagnosed every year in the UK and 10,000 men die from it - the equivalent of more than one an hour. The risks increase with age, with men over 50 more likely to develop a tumour, and there is a strong genetic element to it.

So about one male death in twenty-five is caused by prostate cancer (a surprisingly large figure), i.e. your risk of dying from it is 4%, let's call it 3.5% for non-chip eaters and 4.5% for chip-eaters, and in absolute terms, your additional risk of dying from it (rather than from anything else) is about one-in-a-hundred if you tuck into the tastiest food known to mankind. Seems like a small price to pay.

From News Track India:

As coffee drinking increased, the risk of death decreased. This is what a large study of nearly half a million older adults followed for about 12 years has found.

Study author Neal Freedman, PhD, MPH, National Cancer Institute, discusses the significance of these findings and the potential links between coffee drinking, caffeine consumption, and various specific causes of disease in an interview in Journal of Caffeine Research, a peer-reviewed journal from Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers.

Yeah!

Has anybody gone to the bother of doing a meta-study of all these bits of research, half of which say coffee is slightly bad for you and half of which say coffee is good for you, which averages out to a nice round "it has no effect whatsoever".

Health Scare Story Du Jour

From The Daily Mail:

They are touted as a safe alternative to smoking, but electronic cigarettes could damage the lungs, latest research has found.

The devices were found to cause an immediate rise in airway resistance in the lungs - meaning less oxygen is absorbed by the blood. On average the effect lasted for ten minutes, a report presented at the European Respiratory Society's Annual Congress in Vienna found.

Around 650,000 smokers are thought to be using the inhalers - which look like cigarettes or pens - to help them kick the habit. But at present the devices - which are all imported from China - do not have to undergo any safety checks before being put on sale in high street chemists...

Professor Christina Gratziou, Chair of the ERS Tobacco Control Committee, said:

"We do not yet know whether unapproved nicotine delivery products, such as e-cigarettes, are safer than normal cigarettes, despite marketing claims that they are less harmful. This research helps us to understand how these products could be potentially harmful. We found an immediate rise in airway resistance in our group of participants, which suggests e-cigarettes can cause immediate harm after smoking the device.

"More research is needed to understand whether this harm also has lasting effects in the long-term. The ERS recommends following effective smoking cessation treatment guidelines based on clinical evidence which do not advocate the use of such products."

Ministers are concerned that some brands of E-cigarettes may contain very high levels of nicotine - the addictive substance in cigarettes has also been linked to cancer.

The conditional words and subliminal messages in order: touted, could, thought to be, imported from China, do not have to undergo safety checks, Tobacco Control, we do not know if they are safer, could be potentially harmful, lasting effects, may contain high levels of nicotine.

UPDATE: Bayard points out that there's a sneaky "linked to" right at the end, two words traditionally followed by either "cancer" or "Al Qaeda".

Apart from that, who knows what 'airway resistance' is? AFAIAA, people don't use inhalers because they want to 'kick the habit' but because you can use them where smoking is prohibited. And wouldn't you expect somebody from the EU-funded ERS Tobacco Control Committee to be just a little biased in these matters?