When health scares have wider consequences

The MMR scare strikes again. From the Brighton Argus:

Nine children at two Hove schools have been diagnosed with the potentially fatal infectious disease in the past couple of weeks – more than the entire number of cases in the whole of Sussex last year.

…In some cases babies too young to be vaccinated have contracted the illness from contact with infected older children who have not been given the jabs.

Arguing with RJ Ellory

I don’t usually edit or remove posts, no matter how much of an arse they make me look, but I’m making an exception this time: I went off the deep end about a series of tweets by the novelist RJ Ellory, and in doing so I made an arse of myself.

The tweets were about aspartame, and I felt that Ellory was rehashing internet conspiracy theory nonsense and being dismissive of anyone who disagreed. I still think that, but my original post was over the top.

It’s turned into a fun discussion thread, though.

The downsides of stopping smoking

Robyn Wilder’s description of being an ex-smoker is perfect.

I am a retired cigarette enthusiast, which brings with it the following woes:

• Getting up from my desk at the end of the day and all my joints cracking at once because cigarette breaks are the only breaks I know
• Dreaming that I had a cigarette, and waking up all a-panic
• A sudden passion for biscuits
• Having to ransack the house for a lighter when I want to light a candle
• Unquenchable Haribo Tangfastic addiction
• The three seconds between me telling a smoker I don’t smoke anymore, and them inevitably telling me about all the times they’ve tried to give up
• Those awkward silences at the pub that you can’t break by just fucking off outside for a cigarette
• The fact that my risk of emphysema and various cancers is only slightly reduced. Slightly reduced? Are you kidding me? I have a pot belly now
• Social acceptance from smug, evangelical ex-smokers.

“This website, and any page on the website, is based loosely off a true story, but has been modified in multiple ways including, but not limited to: the story, the photos, and the comments.”

I hate pop-ups in general, but I particularly hate pop-ups that pretend to be real articles in order to flog quackery.

we here at The Consumer Reporter London Online News are a little skeptical and aren’t sure that we’ve seen any real proof that these pills work for weight loss. So we decided to put these products to the test. What better way to find out the truth than to conduct our own study?

You’ve got to love the disclaimer, though.

It is important to note that this site and the comments/answers depicted above is to be used as an illustrative example of what some individuals have achieved with this/these products. This website, and any page on the website, is based loosely off a true story, but has been modified in multiple ways including, but not limited to: the story, the photos, and the comments. Thus, this page, and any page on this website, are not to be taken literally or as a non-fiction story. This page, and the results mentioned on this page, although achievable for some, are not to be construed as the results that you may achieve on the same routine. I UNDERSTAND THIS WEBSITE IS ONLY ILLUSTRATIVE OF WHAT MIGHT BE ACHIEVABLE FROM USING THIS/THESE PRODUCTS, AND THAT THE STORY/COMMENTS DEPICTED ABOVE IS NOT TO BE TAKEN LITERALLY.

Two years without a cigarette

I stopped smoking two years ago today. I don’t miss the cigarettes, but I do miss being thin.

Now wash your hands

Probably not one for lunchtime, but here’s one for the men: why one man has decided that he’s going to start washing his hands after he urinates.

Fidopiastis says he’s heard all of my hand-washing protestations before, and to all of them he has the same response: “Perianal sweat.”

Fidopiastis’s message isn’t getting much attention, it seems: I’ve had entire nights out where as far as I can tell, I’m the only person who bothers washing after using the bathroom.

[Via The Browser]

A more sober analysis of the WHO/phones/cancer story

The tabloids are leading with headlines of the MOBILE PHONES WILL EAT YOUR FACE variety, but the WHO/phone/cancer story is something of a non-story. Here’s what Cancer Research has to say.

It is understandable that people are concerned about mobile phones, especially because they are so widely used. But so far, the published studies do not show that mobile phones could increase the risk of cancer.  This conclusion is backed up by the lack of a solid biological mechanism, and the fact that brain cancer rates are not going up significantly.

However, all of the studies so far have weaknesses, which make it impossible to entirely rule out a risk. Mobile phones are still a new technology and there is little evidence about effects of long-term use.

For this reason, the UK Government advises a precautionary stance. It suggests that if adults want to use a mobile phone, they can choose to minimise their exposure by keeping calls short. It also advises discouraging children under the age of 16 from making non-essential calls as well as also keeping their calls short.

And, as IARC’s working group said, there needs to be more research.

Mobile phones and brain cancer

There’s an excellent feature about the cellphones/cancer controversy in the New York Times magazine. Executive summary: there’s no persuasive link yet, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a link; conversely, there may be no connection at all.

If you’ve even a passing interest in things that may or may not cause cancer, the article’s well worth your time.

Google thinks you’re fat

Well, perhaps not. But it is steering you towards low-calorie options when you search for recipes. Nicholas Carr on recipes, bias and search engine optimisation:

When you’re looking for a good recipe today, you probably don’t reach for Joy of Cooking or Fannie Farmer or some other trusty, soup-stained volume on your cookbook shelf. You probably grab your laptop or tablet and enter the name of a dish or an ingredient or two into the search box. And that makes Google very important in the world of eating. Very, very important.

Quitting cigs is hard. Let’s not pretend otherwise

On Radio Scotland earlier there was a discussion about stopping smoking. Every single person I heard said how easy it was. Pick a date, get a wee bit hypnotised. No cravings. No irritation. No nothing.

Amateurs!

Proper smokers don’t quit like that. When proper smokers quit – and by proper smokers I mean two lighters a day smokers, smokers who were chucked out of nursery for huffing B&Hes behind the tricycle sheds, smokers who wonder where the smoking area is when they’re scuba diving – when those smokers quit, there’s carnage.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not unhappy that the radio people are ex-smokers. Binning the cigs is indisputably A Good Thing.

I just don’t like the way when stopping is discussed, it’s usually in the form of ”I listened to one CD, felt a bit sleepy and woke up an ex-smoker. Now I run marathons, tear up telephone directories with my bare hands and cough ostentatiously whenever I smell tobacco.”

I don’t know a single ex-smoker whose experience was like that.

In my experience, if you go into stop-smoking-land expecting it to be all rainbows and summer days and bounding about in flowery fields like a fucking diddy, you’ll be back on the smokes by the afternoon.

I think maybe the the happy-clappy crowd are very lucky, or maybe they just have short memories. Not feeling cravings now doesn’t mean you wouldn’t have sucked the nicotine off a tramp’s fingers then.

For many people, the first few days are hellish, the following weeks are no picnic and it takes a year or more before you start to feel like you’ll never go back.

I stopped smoking in September 2009 thanks to a combination of willpower, worrying that I was going to die, and Champix. It wasn’t particularly easy. A few months later, I stopped taking Champix. That wasn’t particularly easy either.

It was, I think, my 3,000th attempt at stopping smoking.

What made that attempt different, I suspect, was that I knew exactly how hard it was going to be. I was prepared for it. Previously I’d had a bit of the “this will be a miracle cure!” approach to binning the cigs, to the point where I’d try any old shite that promised to get me off the fags. In no particular order, I’ve tried:

* Laser acupuncture at £80 a pop. I was younger then, and much more gullible. I went to several sessions because, hey! Lasers!

* Hypnotherapy. £90 to sit in a room with an idiot wondering why I wasn’t feeling sleepy, feeling sleepy, feeling sleepy.

* Cold turkey.

* Hypnotherapy again. £100 to sit in a room with an idiot in the hope that it was a therapist problem, not a “Gary can’t be hypnotised” problem. She gave me a cassette tape to listen to. It was the wrong cassette. It was about cake, and I’ve barely eaten cake since. I continued to smoke for a good fifteen years, however.

* Nicotine gum, nicotine patches, nicotine lozenges, nicotine inhalers.

* Hypnotherapy again, because somebody I knew had a friend who’d been to this woman and said she was awesome. £140 to sit in a room with an idiot with hilarious EMPHASIS on every SECOND or THIRD word. She made me throw my Zippo in the bin too. I loved that Zippo.

* Heroin.

Okay, I’m lying about the heroin. But what all of those things had in common – other than their mainly being bullshit ideas that cost a fortune – is that they weren’t the magic bullets I wanted, because magic bullets don’t exist.

My first stop-smoking attempt was when I was sixteen, and I continued to try and stop smoking on and off for 22 years. If stopping smoking were easy, I’d have been a non-smoker at seventeen.

I spent some time at the Western Infirmary last year – carpal tunnel and all that. The Western has an oncology ward, and if you’re walking past it you’ll often see patients, in scrubs, still hooked to IVs, having a fag.

That’s testament to how bloody difficult some people find quitting smoking: God is giving them the biggest fucking hint imaginable, and they’re still nipping out for a smoke. To paraphrase the NRA, you can have their cigarettes when you prise them out of their cold, dead hands.

Let’s not bullshit people here. Let’s be honest. Stopping smoking is shit. You don’t do it because it’s a laugh. You do it because the possible alternatives are so much worse.