Fair play to ASH

The WHO has gone completely mental...

The World Health Organization says there should a ban on the use of e-cigarettes indoors and that sales to children should stop.

In a report the health body says there should be no claims that the devices can help people quit smoking - until there is evidence to support this.

WHO experts warn the products might pose a threat to adolescents and the foetuses of pregnant women.

Is it perturbing or reassuring that ASH, who have pumped out so much of this anti-nicotine garbage propaganda over the years, appear to be reining it in a bit..?

Hazel Cheeseman, at the charity Action on Smoking and Health, said there was no evidence of any harm to bystanders and warned regulation needed to be proportionate.

She added:

"Smoking kills 100,000 people in the UK alone. Smokers who switch to using electronic cigarettes in whole or in part are likely to substantially reduce their health risks.

"Although we cannot be sure that electronic cigarettes are completely safe, as the WHO acknowledges, they are considerably less harmful than smoking tobacco and research suggests that they are already helping smokers to quit."

Even the "100,000" figure is a step back from their previous exaggerations.
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UPDATE. "Unknown" left a link to NHS Smokefree: "Smoking is the biggest cause of preventable deaths in England, accounting for more than 80,000 deaths each year. One in two smokers will die from a smoking-related disease."

Well, call it half a million deaths a year, a fifth of people are smokers, so going by those figures about 50,000 people each year die somewhat earlier than they otherwise would have done as a result of having smoked. It's going a bit far to say that even 50,000 people are "killed" by smoking, let alone 100,000, but it's not as entirely plucked-out-of-the-air unreasonable as other claims which ASH have made.

Health Scare Story Du Jour: EPIC FAIL

From The Scotsman:

Diesel exhaust causes cancer, the World Health Organisation has said, in a ruling that makes the fumes as important a threat as...

OMG! Tell me doctor, how dangerous is it? Is it like being bitten by a rabid dog? Polio? Scarlet fever? AIDS? Being a guinea pig in an atom bomb test? How much longer have we got? Do we have time to even write a will?

... second-hand smoke.

Righty-ho.

A bit of good news at long last!

From the BBC:

The swine flu pandemic has been declared officially over by the World Health Organization.

The body said it was moving to the "post-pandemic phase" after many countries, including the UK, had scaled down their emergency measures. WHO director general Dr Margaret Chan said the virus had "largely run its course".

Millions of people were affected across the world by the infection after it emerged in April last year. But the pandemic - the first for 40 years - proved much less deadly than many had feared. In the UK, more than 450 people died, but that was well short of the 65,000 predicted as the worst-case scenario.

Jolly good. I can cross that off my "Things to worry about" list. Ah... I did that over a year ago. Oh well.

WHO makes these silly rules? (2)

By signing the imfamous Article 8 of the FCTC, the UK agreed to:

"... recognize that scientific evidence has unequivocally established that exposure to tobacco smoke causes death, disease and disability."

On this basis we agreed (emphasis mine):

"Each Party shall adopt and implement in areas of existing national jurisdiction as determined by national law and actively promote at other jurisdictional levels the adoption and implementation of effective legislative, executive, administrative and/or other measures, providing for protection from exposure to tobacco smoke in indoor workplaces, public transport, indoor public places and, as appropriate, other public places."

So different nation states implemented different smoking bans. Some, like the UK, went the whole hog other took a more relaxed approach, much to the annoyance of WHO. So the 2008 guidance on implementation of Article 8 sought to clarify what WHO really meant: (again, emphasis mine)

"[Article 8] creates an obligation to provide universal protection by ensuring that all indoor public places, all indoor workplaces, all public transport and possibly other (outdoor or quasi-outdoor) public places are free from exposure to second-hand tobacco smoke. No exemptions are justified on the basis of health or law arguments. If exemptions must be considered on the basis of other arguments, these should be minimal. In addition, if a Party is unable to achieve universal coverage immediately, Article 8 creates a continuing obligation to move as quickly as possible to remove any exemptions and make the protection universal."

Pesky thing this national law, isn't it? Luckily, Andrew Lansley hasn't been ordered to ban smoking in private homes and cars. The guidance states:

Public education campaigns should also target settings for which legislation may not be feasible or appropriate, such as private homes.

So Lansley's 'Tobacco Control Plan' proposes the following 'Big Society' solution:

"We will encourage local areas to create networks of local smokefree ambassadors at a community level to encourage people to make their homes and family cars smokefree."

So no big government snoopers, just 'Big Society' busybodies.

Tractor Beer Statistics

From The Telegraph:

"Normalising the beer production market and classifying it as alcohol is totally the right thing to do and will boost the health of our population," Yevgeny Bryun, the ministry of health's chief specialist on alcohol and drug abuse, said. "We have been talking about and have wanted such a measure for ages. I take my hat off to the parliament."

The new law would restrict beer sales at night, ban its sale in or close to many public places such as schools, and limit cans and bottles to a maximum size of 0.33 litres...

Regularly rated among the heaviest five drinkers in the world, the Kremlin estimates that Russians consume 32 pints of pure alcohol per capita per year (1), more than double the World Health Organisation's recommended maximum. This appears to have seriously dented population growth.

Russia's population fell by 6.4 million between 1991 and 2009 and the federal statistics agency has predicted that it could fall to less than 127 million from just under 142 million now by 2031 in a worst-case scenario.

Meanwhile, Russian officials estimate that 500,000 people die for alcohol-related reasons every year (2), a state of affairs that has prompted President Dmitry Medvedev to declare the country's drinking problem "a national disaster".

1) OK, beer is approx. 5% alcohol, so 32 pints of pure alcohol = 640 pints of beer, divided by 365.25 days a year = one-and-three-quarter pints of beer a day. Vodka is (say) 40% alcohol, so that also equates to one-sixth of a bottle of vodka a day (assuming they use 0.7 litre bottles?)*. And that is naff all if you are used to it.

2) Eat you heart out Ian Gilmore! If you're going to make up statistics, then GO LARGE! With a population of 142 million and a life expectancy of 63 years, we'd expect around 2.25 million deaths a year, so what they are saying is that nearly one-in-four Russians die for 'alcohol-related reasons'. The feeble tossers who invent fake statistics in the UK are currently only claiming that one-in-forty deaths is alcohol related.

* At least I hope that's right. 32 pints x 0.568 = 18.18 litres; 18.18 litres pure alcohol ÷ 0.4 = 45.4 litres vodka; 45.4 ÷ 0.7 litres/bottle = 65 bottles; 65 ÷ 365 days/year = 0.178 bottles a day (or one-and-a quarter bottles a week, if you find that easier to envisage).

Honduras shows us how to do it!

From The Times of India:

Lighting up a cigarette at home could bring a visit from Honduran police if a family member or even a visitor complains about secondhand smoke.

A new law that took effect on Monday banning smoking in most public and private spaces doesn't actually outlaw cigarettes inside homes, but it does have a provision allowing people to file complaints about secondhand smoke in homes.

Violations would bring a verbal warning on the first offense . After that could come arrest and a $311 fine — the equivalent of the monthly minimum wage in the country.

Even some anti-smoking advocates suspect that part of the law may not work. Armando Peruga, a program manager at the World Health Organization's Tobacco-Free Initiative, said the clause allowing family members to call police on their smoker relatives is confusing.

The clause "does not make much sense since the law clearly does not prohibit smoking at homes" , Peruga said. Some also say that the law will be almost impossible to enforce in a country of 8 million people with a rampant crime problem and only 12,000 police officers.

Note that the bansturbator-in-chief does not say that the law is completely insane and repressive; he merely says that it's "confusing", which is short hand for "an outright ban would be nice and simple".

That police-to-public ratio of 1:667 is impressive, that's about half European levels.

"WHO swine flu experts 'linked' with drug companies"

There's not much to add to this article from the BBC apart from the traditional 'We suspected as much.'

Ageing rockers in the headlines

A lot of people have picked up on the proposal by The Nice for minimum alcohol pricing, but let's not forget that The Who have been pushing this agenda for years.

The proposal is complete nonsense of course, but the real problem is that these people will never admit that they are wrong/were lying*. It'll be like The War On Drugs all over again: a minimum price of 50p per unit won't achieve what they claim, and instead of doing the obvious thing and scrapping it again, they'll just up the ante and go for 70p or £1 or £2 or whatever.

* Delete according to degree of cynicism.

How did we miss this one?

Plenty of people had assumed that the whole 'Mexican swine 'flu pandemic' was just a massive scare story engineered by Big Pharma to try and shift some fairly useless vaccines. The story is trundling on, and was trailed briefly on Radio 4 this morning (some time between 7.15 and 7.30), the best summary I can find online is in The Grauniad:

The World Health Organisation and other public health bodies have "gambled away" public confidence by overstating the dangers of the flu pandemic, according to a draft report to the Council of Europe. The report, by the Labour MP Paul Flynn, vice chair of the council's health committee, says that a loss of credibility could endanger lives...

In Britain, says Flynn, the discrepancy between the estimate of the numbers of people who would die from flu and the reality was dramatic. "In the United Kingdom, the Department of Health initially announced that around 65,000 deaths were to be expected. In the meantime, by the start of 2010, this estimate was downgraded to only 1,000 fatalities. By January 2010, fewer than 5,000 persons had been registered as having caught the disease and about 360 deaths had been noted," says his report...

Flynn's draft accuses the WHO of a lack of transparency. Some members of its advisory groups are flu experts who have also received funding, especially for research projects, from pharmaceutical companies making drugs and vaccines against flu...

The second evidence session will be held in Paris tomorrow. The witnesses will include the Polish health minister, Ewa Kopacz, who will explain why her government decided not to order any H1N1 vaccines...

Scared To Death

Today I have been mainly lazing around and reading Scared to Death: From BSE to Global Warming: Why Scares are Costing Us the Earth.

It is a most awesome book, incredibly well researched etc. Warmly recommended.

Fun Online Polls: privately collected taxes & Tiger Woods

I am pleased to see that on a low-ish turnout (86 votes), 80% of people who took part in last week's Fun Online Poll agreed with the statement "All money that changes hands purely because of existing laws (as distinct from free exchange) counts as 'tax'."

I gave examples of such privately collected taxes last week, the basic idea being that all 'rent-seekers' (such as Messrs Osterhaus and Pachauri, who are on the swine-flu and climate-change bandwagons respectively) are trying to funnel money into their own pockets. Whether that goes via the state (i.e. our taxes pay for the NHS, which then pays for immunisations and Tamiflu) or direct from one private business to another (selling carbon permits which your business obtained for free) is neither here nor there.

The problem is that while right-wingers lambast this type of rent-seeking, they have a bit of a blind spot when it comes to the rent-seeking that they indulge in themselves, primarily via the land market. A majority of commenters on this post thought it was an outrage to expect those land-owners who stand to benefit enormously from the construction of Crossrail to make some sort of modest financial contribution to its construction costs, even if the decision to do so were taken democratically.

With that in mind, it puzzles me that so many people voted as they did. Ah well.
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In a more light-hearted vein, and inspired by Rantin' Rab, this week's Fun Online Poll asks "Have you had an affair with Tiger Woods?"

Vote here or use the widget in the sidebar.

United Nations fun

I get the impression that both of these stories are a little exaggerated, but where there's smoke there's fire...

First story emailed by Bayard:

The man with the nickname “Dr Flu”, Professor Albert Osterhaus, of the Erasmus University in Rotterdam Holland has been named by Dutch media researchers as the person at the center of the worldwide Swine Flu H1N1 Influenza A 2009 pandemic hysteria.

Not only is Osterhaus the connecting person in an international network that has been described as the Pharma Mafia, he is THE key advisor to WHO on influenza and is intimately positioned to personally profit from the billions of euros in vaccines allegedly aimed at H1N1...

Second story via UKIP:

A story emerging out of Britain suggests "follow the money" may explain the enthusiasm of the United Nations to pursue caps on carbon emissions, despite doubts surfacing in the scientific community about the validity of the underlying global warming hypothesis.

A Mumbai-based Indian multinational conglomerate with business ties to Rajendra K. Pachauri, the chairman since 2002 of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, stands to make several hundred million dollars in European Union carbon credits simply by closing a steel production facility in Britain with the loss of 1,700 jobs...

[Dilemma] Whom do you trust less ...

... the UK Government/NHS or the World Health Organisation?

Dr Margaret Chan

WHO calls for collective punishment!!

This is wrong on so many levels, I don't know where to start:

'Punish all drinkers for the crimes of drunks'

To kick things off, they reckon that as 40% of all domestic violence is alcohol-fuelled (probably true), that taxes on alcohol should go up. Hmm. I am sure a lot of domestic violence is Islam-fuelled, so why not punish all Muslims for the crimes of the small minority of wife-beaters? Hmm?