Today a Brighton man, Kevin Hazelwood, was sentenced for raping a 9 year old girl while on probation for paedophile offences. What to do with people like this? Clearly the system is not working. As a psychiatrist, I am happy to offer an answer: give them an effective pharmaceutical treatment. No reason why not. It is not perfect, but is better than nothing - and that is what the probation service offers, more or less.
Medroxyprogesterone is a drug routinely given to girls for contraception. The Home Office offers a completely spurious case against hormonal treatment. But then government (and by this I mean the civil servants who increasingly can be seen to be driving policy) will never have anything that is not hammered out on its own anvil.
Thursday, April 20, 2006
David Cameron of the Arctic Circle Exploitation plc
As a long-standing Green Party activist I welcome the fact that David Cameron, the leader of the UK Conservatives, is to take a trip to the Arctic Circle to see for himself the effects of climate change. The fact remains however that he leads a party of economic dinosaurs who cherish the belief that it is possible to take forever from finite resources, and to expand forever into a finite space. They also cling to the irrational notion that this material throughput must increase year on year forever. David Cameron will talk the greenish talk, but like Tony Blair, his corporate paymasters will see to it that he continues to walk the walk of free market fundamentalism. To slow and reverse the process of global warming requires a change in economic thinking and performance far more serious than that which is contemplated by any party of the present political establishment.
Tuesday, April 18, 2006
H5N1 spread: Poultry , not wild birds
From the The Lancet Infectious Diseases
Since mid-2005, the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and WHO have given wide prominence to the theory that migratory birds are carrying the H5N1 virus and infecting poultry flocks in areas that lie along their migratory route. Indeed, this is probably how the virus reached Europe. Unusually cold weather in the wetlands near the Black Sea, where the disease is now entrenched, drove migrating birds, notably swans, much further west than usual. But despite extensive testing of wild birds for the disease, scientists have only rarely identified live birds carrying bird flu in a highly pathogenic form, suggesting these birds are not efficient vectors of the virus. Furthermore, the geographic spread of the disease does not correlate with migratory routes and seasons. The pattern of outbreaks follows major road and rail routes, not flyways.
Far more likely to be perpetuating the spread of the virus is the movement of poultry, poultry products, or infected material from poultry farms—eg, animal feed and manure. But this mode of transmission has been down-played by international agencies, who admit that migratory birds are an easy target since nobody is to blame. However, GRAIN, an international, non-governmental organisation that promotes the sustainable management and use of agricultural biodiversity, recently launched a critical report titled Fowl play: the poultry industry's central role in the bird flu crisis.
Since mid-2005, the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and WHO have given wide prominence to the theory that migratory birds are carrying the H5N1 virus and infecting poultry flocks in areas that lie along their migratory route. Indeed, this is probably how the virus reached Europe. Unusually cold weather in the wetlands near the Black Sea, where the disease is now entrenched, drove migrating birds, notably swans, much further west than usual. But despite extensive testing of wild birds for the disease, scientists have only rarely identified live birds carrying bird flu in a highly pathogenic form, suggesting these birds are not efficient vectors of the virus. Furthermore, the geographic spread of the disease does not correlate with migratory routes and seasons. The pattern of outbreaks follows major road and rail routes, not flyways.
Far more likely to be perpetuating the spread of the virus is the movement of poultry, poultry products, or infected material from poultry farms—eg, animal feed and manure. But this mode of transmission has been down-played by international agencies, who admit that migratory birds are an easy target since nobody is to blame. However, GRAIN, an international, non-governmental organisation that promotes the sustainable management and use of agricultural biodiversity, recently launched a critical report titled Fowl play: the poultry industry's central role in the bird flu crisis.
Monday, April 17, 2006
Tristan, Isolde - and Ogrin the Hermit
Acknowledgements to eubank-web for the picture of Roche rock, aboveI eagerly await the Tristan and Isolde (what's wrong with Yseult then?) film - not just because it is the greatest and most tragic love story the world has ever known, but because my epic poem, Ogrin and the Boy, is an account of the rehabilitation of Tristan and his Irish princess from the viewpoint of Ogrin, the hermit of Roche. There is a case to be made that the legend of Tristan was worked out around Fowey, in Cornwall. Of course, serious scholars pooh-pooh the identification of the place where Tristan fought the Irish Morholt, and Mark's castle, and Roche, and the forest. But then they thought Troy was legend until they dug it up. There is a stone in Fowey with Tristan's name on it. I am sorry if this offends the Welsh and the Picts, who also claim Tristan, but you cannot make an omelette without hurting a chicken somewhere along the line. Anyway who cares? It's a great story, and Ogrin had a nice place to live, if Roche is where he lived, and it is worth while seeing what he had to say for himself by taking a look here.
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