Colin Norris has just been convicted of the murder of four women at hospitals in Leeds. His chosen weapon appears to have been insulin, a drug which is used to control levels of sugar in the bloodstream. In large overdoses it quickly causes coma, followed by death, unless sugar (glucose) is administered intravenously, and quickly. [Read more →]
You might have heard about the lottery winner who had to be within half an hour of a hospital at all times because of his medical condition - an aneurysm. An aneurysm is caused by a weakening in the internal wall of an artery, which allows the artery to bulge alarmingly under the pressure of blood inside. Eventually they can burst. If the aneurysm is on an artery inside your brain (as many as a third of us walk around with these potential widow-makers inside our heads I’m afraid) the result is a brain haemorrhage. If the aneurysm is situated on your abdominal aorta (the main artery that carries blood away from the heart and down towards the pelvis), then the result of rupture is usually immediately fatal. A thoracic aortic aneurysm is higher up, and more difficult to operate on. This story had me a bit confused.
Measles is back.
Either < Middle Dutch masels measles, formally the plural of masel blood-blister, pustule, spot on the skin (Dutch mazelen measles), or < Middle Low German maselen (plural) measles (the singular masel a red spot on the skin is extant but rarer; cf. Old Saxon masala blood-blister, German regional (Mecklenburg) Masseln (plural) measles); both cognate with Old High German masala (Middle High German masel) blood-blister (the Old High German and Old Saxon words both gloss post-classical Latin flemen, variant of phlegmon PHLEGMON n.), Swedish regional massel, masla (1538 as matzla), and further with the German and Dutch forms noted s.v. MASERS n.; ultimately from the same Germanic base as MAZER n.1 and MASE n., which is tentatively identified by some scholars as being related to the Indo-European base meaning ‘rub, smear’ which is reflected, in extended form, by SMITE v. Cf. also MEASLINGS n.
More cases of measles have been reported in the UK in 2007 than in any year in the last decade. All this stems, of course, from the research published in 1998 which showed (or didn’t show, depending on who you believe and which papers you read) a link between the combined measles, mumps and rubella vaccine, inflammatory bowel disease, and autism.
Uptake of the vaccine fell from 92% to 75%, and it appears that we are now paying the price. you can download details of the latest numbers here.
As a doctor I should of course now start banging on about herd immunity, and how important it is to always have your child vaccinated along government guidelines. But I’m also in the fortunate position of not having any kids of my own. I have to say that I would think twice and more about the MMR vaccine. Not for any scientific reasons; by now most agree that there is no link between the vaccine and autism. But the doubt would still be there. And you would have to consider the possible scenario of your child having the MMR vaccine, and then going on to develop symptoms of autistic behaviour. No matter how much you believed the science, would you really be able not to blame yourself - even though it is in all probability complete coincidence?
It’s a difficult one, and as usual, no easy answers.
The recent spate of apparently unrelated suicides among young people in the Bridgend area of south Wales has generated much criticism of the media; the ‘media’ in its various guises, from newspapers to the internet, appearing to be the only way these tragedies could possibly be in any way linked. In the middle of these alarming figures (seventeen deaths in just over a year) comes a report in the British Medical Journal (download it here) describing how the suicide rate in young men has in fact fallen over the last decade compared to earlier years. In England and Wales in 2005, the numbers of suicides among young men was the lowest it has been since the 1970s. The article’s authors question how this trend has come about – are people really happier than they were ten or twenty years ago, thanks to social factors or more effective psychiatric care? Or has the suicide rate dropped for other more mundane reasons, such as the fact that catalytic converters make it now almost impossible to kill yourself with car exhaust? There is little new in any of these arguments.
