Making rubella history

Rubella has been eliminated in the USA - a good demonstration of the power of scientific medicine and determination.

Rubella is usually a relatively mild disease in children, but in pregnant women can cause birth defects and miscarriage. After a vaccine was introduced in the 1960s in America, the numbers of rubella cases have declined steadily. There were just nine cases in 2004, and all seem to have been infected outside the USA. The next goal is to eliminate rubella in the entire Western hemisphere by 2010. Fortunately, the USA has not been affected in the same way as the UK by the panic about the MMR vaccination and autism. Dr Julie Gerberding of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) told a press conference: 'The MMR vaccine is a wonderful vaccine. It saves lives, but also protects children now and will protect them as they become adults....' The success of the vaccination campaign is based on faith in modern medicine and a resolution to rid the world of disease. But in recent years, the benefits of medicine have been called into question, with increasing reliance on untested alternative treatments and growing distrust of medical authority. The ready audience for panics about MMR in the UK and thiomersal vaccines in the USA illustrates this all too clearly. As we celebrate the conquering of rubella, we should remember how such feats are achieved, and question why we aren't showing similar resolve to tackle major killers such as malaria.

CDC Announces Rubella, Once a Major Cause of Birth Defects, Is No Longer a Health Threat in the U.S., CDC, 21 March 2005

spiked-issue: MMR

Jamie Oliver: this hero worship is just bizarre

Jamie Oliver is campaigning to improve school meals. They're crap, and it's about time they were sorted out. But the reaction to this has been to anoint him as some kind of mockney messiah. Take this from the Telegraph today:

"It is about one decent man's heroic battle against an uncaring, bureaucratic system; about the exploitation of dinner ladies and everybody else who has to struggle away on the front line in a country which no longer values leadership, principles and standards; about the corruption of childhood; and the loss of virtue."

Telegraph | Opinion | Outside the Westminster village, heroes struggle to make Britain better

Good grief! If only George Trefgarne were alone in his opinion. Here's Janice Turner in the Times:

"As celebrities start to invade the political process, either politicians will have to use the strategies of reality TV both to show their humanity and to drive their agenda. Or celebrities are going to start standing for political office: suddenly President Reagan and Arnie “The Governator” Schwarzenegger don’t seem so risible. Because while Tony Blair and Michael Howard grub around for women’s votes, Jamie Oliver already has our hearts."

If you want to change your life, vote for Jamie not Tony, 19 March 2005

This only reflects the low esteem in which our leaders are held. As Trefgarne notes, these little to choose between Tories and Labour, so all we get is personal, negative wrangling. But, unlike Jamie Oliver, when Tony Blair makes statements which overegg his case, he is accountable for them. Hardly anyone has pulled Jamie Oliver up for his egregious errors.

Hard to swallow, spiked, 18 March 2005

Hard to swallow

My new article on spiked

It's undoubtedly a good thing to feed children the best food we can. But TV chef Jamie Oliver's campaign for better school meals is being used as a weapon in a cultural war about what we eat.

Food is discussed in black-and-white terms. On the one hand, we have mass-produced convenience meals produced by large companies, designed to be dished up easily at your local takeaway, or bought by the car load from the supermarket down the road. On the other, we have local food bought daily from local shops, preferably organic and always freshly prepared. In this simplified and moralised version of reality, the industrialised food is 'bad'; the small-scale food is 'good'.

Jamie's School Dinners made a number of assertions about the effects of processed food on children. According to the programme, children eating freshly prepared food are less likely to be obese, more likely to behave better, and have fewer asthma attacks.

Most luridly, it claimed that some children were now so constipated that they were vomiting their own faeces, and that this new generation were the first expected to die before their parents.

These claims deserve to be challenged because they create unnecessary fears about what we eat and, by implication, reflect badly on those who allow children to eat certain kinds of food.

Read on...

Robbin' and the Hoods

Is Nottinghamshire's police force drowning under a wave of violent crime?

Chief constable Steve Green certainly seems to think so. 'We are reeling with murders', he told the Sunday Telegraph. 'We are in a longstanding crisis situation with major crime and it won't go away overnight.' The rate of 'category A' murders - those which involved a premeditated attack with no obvious suspect - has certainly increased, from one incident every year or so, to 21 cases in the past four years. However, the risk of being a victim of such a crime is still tiny.

While this may be an issue for police resourcing, it certainly has little impact on wider society. Moreover, these murders are largely committed in the parallel universe of drug gangs. They only intrude on the lives of the rest of us on those very rare occasions when, as in the case of schoolgirl Danielle Beccan, someone gets caught in the crossfire.

It may be the case that Nottinghamshire police can't do their job because they are underfunded - or it could be a case of the rent-a-quote Green attempting to stir up political controversy, and a crime panic, to deflect criticism from his own poor management. What is clear is that this won't be the last example of a public official engaging in a bit of special pleading in the run-up to the election.

Police chief: we cannot cope with violent crime, Sunday Telegraph, 13 March 2005

The flying green 'swear box'

It's official: air travel is a bad thing. Now UK government ministers will be paying penance when they fly.

Under the new policy, when ministers or civil servants make official trips by air, the government will pay into a special fund to encourage 'clean' energy in the developing world. Even government critics think the idea will take off, though some claim it doesn't go far enough. 'This is an excellent and innovative idea', said former Tory environment secretary John Gummer. 'But it should not mask the appalling rise in emissions that will emanate from this government's disastrous aviation policy.'

If 'clean' energy was so important, surely the government should just pay for it. This new initiative is the environmentally friendly equivalent of a swear box, giving money to the poor every time you do something naughty. The clear implication is that air travel is morally wrong, a concession to those who argue that, in the words of one leading environmentalist, 'flying across the Atlantic is as unacceptable, in terms of its impact on human well-being, as child abuse'.

It is far from clear whether human beings are having any dramatic effect on climate. Even if such an effect is occurring, it does not follow that cutting back on travel is a sensible response. The ability to travel around the world in a matter of hours has helped to liberate us from the dead weight of parochialism, and has increased communication and trade - and vastly improved our holidays. Those who think that's a bad thing are clearly living on another plane.

MPs' flights 'pay for clean air', BBC News, 5 March 2005

Cool heads required, by Rob Lyons

spiked-central | Bites | spiked bite

Telling kids not to smoke doesn't work

A survey of eight school smoking programmes found that seven didn't work at all. This should not be a surprise, given that children use smoking and other 'deviant' behaviours as a way of expressing their autonomy.

My mother, god rest her soul, found out I was smoking when I was 13. She told me, 'I can't stop from doing it, but your an intelligent boy, you make your own mind up.' I stopped because it was no longer possible to use it as a means of expressing my independence - she had already granted that.

That, however, did not stop the later rows about not going to church, vegetarianism, communism...

ABC News: School Anti-Smoking Programs Don't Work