Rewritin' history: it depends where you start

From the BBC:

The number of MRSA infections in hospitals in England has fallen by 40% compared with the same period last year, figures show. Between April and June this year 509 cases were reported, compared with 839 in the same quarter in 2008, the Health Protection Agency said.

The latest figure is a quarter of the peak of nearly 2,000 in 2004. Rates of Clostridium difficile infection are also continuing to fall with a 37% drop from last year. The government met its target to halve 2004 MRSA rates in summer 2008, and at the time ministers called for the NHS needs to focus on sustaining the reduction.

What's the significance of 2004? What is the relevance? Ah ... I see:
Chart from National Statistics Online. OK, that's deaths not cases, but I'd assume that the two move roughly in line. It's not clear to me why they chose 2004 rather than 2005 as their 'year zero'.

Alan Johnson's speech at the Labour Party Conference

Just caught the umpteenth rerun of this, yadda yadda, blah blah blah, but this stuck in the craw:

In the mid 1990s infection rates rocketed in understaffed and dilapidated hospitals. Last week I announced that NHS staff had succeeded in cutting MRSA infections, not by half as envisaged but by 57% in three years.

Woah! Fact check!

Deaths from MRSA increased from 51 in 1993 to 800 in 2002 (BBC)

Deaths from MRSA increased from 955 in 2003 to 1,168 in 2004 (The Torygraph)

Deaths from MRSA fell slightly from 1,652 in 2006 to 1,593 in 2007 "the first time the number of MRSA-related deaths has fallen since the ONS began keeping records in 1993" (BBC).

So we are still way above the numbers back in 1997, eh lads?

Meanwhile, the number of death certificates mentioning Clostridium difficile increased from under 2,000 in 2003 to over 8,000 in 2007 (BBC).

If you're going to tell Big Fat Lies, don't lie about things that can be disproven by scratting around for twenty minutes on the internet, FFS! Ah well, at least Tractor Production is up, I suppose ...