Category: Health

  • Russell Brand, Jonathan Ross and MMR

    I will shut up about MMR in a minute, but I wanted to link to this post by Scots Law Student: Saying that children’s vaccines cause cancer is a sure fire way to terrify parents and this should have been as well received as Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand’s Radio 2 phonecall. It’s a fair…

  • Mummy duck said “Quack! Quack! Quack! Quack!” and all the MMR crap came back

    The other day, LBC broadcast a breathtaking programme where presenter Jeni Barnett used her expertise as a parent to pooh-pooh the entire medical and scientific community. MMR is dangerous. There’s no evidence for it, but it’s a scientific fact. You know the kind of thing. That first link is to the audio; there’s a transcript…

  • BadScience.net in MMR quack attack

    When Bad Science’s Ben Goldacre had the temerity to criticise an LBC radio broadcast by Jeni Barnett, lawyers sent him a nastygram. Bad Science is currently offline. As Goldacre writes: It is my view that in this extended broadcast Jeni exemplifies every single canard ever uttered by the antivaccination movement. “It’s a conspiracy by the…

  • Art? My 15-month-old could do that.

    Baby Bigmouth drew with crayons for the first time today, scrawling all over the paper, cackling, and trying to eat the ones with the most interesting colours. Would it make me a bad person if I pinned it to the fridge, ordered visitors to look at it and – with a straight face – drew…

  • Who’s behind the ban on cigarette displays?

    An interesting – and typically angry – post on Devil’s Kitchen by the Filthy Smoker takes a hard look at the new ban on cigarette displays. The extraordinary support for the Department of Health (DOH)’s recommendations can only be explained by looking at the “stakeholders” who got involved. Of the 96,000 responses, only a handful…

  • From the archives: The Phantom Menace – are wireless networks really killing us?

    [Originally published in PC Plus. Shortly after publication I had a perfectly pleasant chat with the Powerwatch people. We agreed to disagree on this one – Gary] Fast facts: Powerwatch claims that up to 35% of the population suffers ill-effects from electromagnetic fields, and that 5% of people are severely affected. A possible link between…

  • Wi-fi, mobiles still don’t eat brains

    Sense About Science has published Making Sense of Radiation for the tinfoil hat brigade and newspaper journalists to ignore. In summary it says: Speculative stories about health risks and RF radiation often go uncorrected, leaving a trail of confusion that prevents public discussion and policy from moving forward. To counter this they wanted to share…

  • State-sponsored punching

    Hurrah for Ealing Primary Care Trust, which has decided to liven up people’s cigarette breaks by providing people you can punch. At least, I think that’s the idea. ‘Smoking police’ will target people at betting shops, bus stops and shopping centres to shock them into giving up cigarettes… A team of 11 young people have…

  • Cure colic with cranial osteopathy for babies

    Colic, it’s safe to say, sucks. But I found a cure. Mrs Bigmouth and I painted our heads blue, ate nothing but paint and cardboard for three weeks, danced an irish jig under the silvery moon at precisely 3.02am every morning and shouted “cakes!” every time we saw a magpie. And you know what? The…

  • The Supersmoker: Cigs 2.0?

    A few weeks ago I promised to blog about the Supersmoker, an electronic cigarette. Sorry it took so long but hey! Better late than never! First, though, let’s remind ourselves of the sheer awesomeness of the Supersmoker promo video, which I thought was a parody until I discovered there was a real product. The Supersmoker…