I wasn’t going to comment on yesterday’s royal wedding, but then I found this delightfully irreverent description of the BBC and ITV coverage of the event in the Scottish Sunday Herald. Here’s a taste: … the wedding itself must be counted a modest success. The bride didn’t scrub up too badly considering she’d spent . . . → Read More: The Royal Wedding
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Professor Hugh Pennington, the president of the Society for General Microbiology and professor emeritus of bacteriology at Aberdeen University warned today that British government estimates of 50 000 deaths from avian flu are based on enormously optimistic assumptions (that the death rate is no higher than for normal flu and that there is only one wave of flu) and that the government is making a mistake similar to the one made 10 years ago regarding BSE. He believes a more realistic figure is around 2 million deaths, many from pneumonia, for which there is still no effective treatment. In the last week, 2 nurses in Vietnam have caught avian flu. Infection of health workers is a first indication, according to health experts, that the virus has become capable of jumping directly from one person to another. The British government has ordered over 14 million doses of an anti-viral drug for delivery in two years time, which can be used to treat avian flu (at the moment there is no vaccine available, although tests are being made on experimental vaccines which are expected to offer some protection against the flu). A marginally better situation than in Germany, where risk of avian flu has been played down, with the government focussing more on the danger to German poultry, than on the risk to the human population. (I don’t recall seeing any reports in the German press about measures being taken to protect the local population against avian flu, despite the World Health Organisation’s latest warning that “The world is now in the gravest possible danger of a pandemic.”). The current status of influenza infections in Europe is available here, by the way. The Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (RoSPA) has some advice for office parties. Tips include: Resist the temptation to photocopy parts of your anatomy – if the copier breaks, you’ll have Christmas with glass in painful places. and Office furniture isn’t designed to be as sturdy as the furniture in . . . → Read More: Advice for office Christmas parties A BBC poll released on Thursday, shows that 60% of those under 35 have never heard of Auschwitz. This is really surprising, given that the image of the Germans and Germany in the UK is still, 60-odd years later, frozen in the past, thanks, apparently, to the history curriculum at school and the . . . → Read More: Auschwitz – what was that? The Independent makes me realise how lucky I am to not have been born in 1887 – if I had been, I would have had to sit an entrance exam to get into grammar school. Their article includes part of an examination paper recently found by someone whose father passed the test. Education experts . . . → Read More: Tough exam Following on from my posting about the IMF warning about overheated house prices in the UK, I see that the Scottish Widows Bank commisioned a survey by YouGov and found that 63% of recent university graduates can not afford to buy a home. The situation isn’t much better for those who have been working . . . → Read More: 63% of Scottish grads can’t afford to buy a home The International Monetary Fund yesterday added its voice to that of The Economist and The Bank of England, pointing out that British house prices appear much higher than can be explained by developments in fundamentals (wages and rents), and warning: The central risk remains an abrupt adjustment in the housing market… …With interest rates . . . → Read More: IMF says UK house prices too high The British Liberal Democrat party is proposing to send teenage joyriders to go and race cars or learn car maintenance, as well as fining them Ł40. The proposal is called “tough liberalism” by the party spokesman. Um – is that supposed to be a deterrent or an incentive to break the law? A couple of months ago I mentioned the real time traffic monitoring / forecasting site for Nordrhein-Westphalen, which has good forecasts of delays and jams for up to an hour ahead of time. There are quite a lot of real time traffic services on the web. Did you know, that you can also get . . . → Read More: Traffic jams – on the tube The German education authorities are struggling to move from morning-only schools – primary and secondary schools don’t provide midday meals or tuition in the afternoon – to ones which are open for something approaching a normal working day, so long as enough parents request it at a specific school. In many cases where schools . . . → Read More: Britsh primary schools to open 10 hrs daily |
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