Ban the banger and the bacon butty!

 

Did you start the day with a full English breakfast. If so, hold the rasher. Forswear the banger. Bacon and sausages can be fatal, according to the ‘experts’.

 

This latest health scare was the headline item on BBC News. Of course, there is not one jot or tittle of scientific evidence to prop up this piece of nonsense, but we get these health scares several times each week.

 

This was followed by another; that salt can cause RA, MS, and diabetes. Perhaps it does if you consume it in industrial quantities. Water also has a fatal outcome if you hoover down a gallon or three.

 

And another that insomnia can cause heart disease.

 

Then there’s the asbestos phobia, notwithstanding that asbestosis can only be contracted by inhaling free-to-air short fibre asbestos over a period of years, as in mining the stuff.

 

Then there was the ban on DDT because it made birds sterile and killed the bugs that they feed on. It is also the only really effective and cheap spray against the malarial mosquito, but what do malaria deaths matter against the protection of our feathered friends? When spraying was banned in Sri Lanka, malaria cases rose from 17 to 2.5 million in five years.

 

And do you remember Three Mile Island nuclear power station? Because of a minor fault with the plumbing all children and pregnant women within a five mile radius were evacuated, and nuclear power was dealt a great injury. How many died? None. How many suffered from radiation sickness? None. What was the radiation level after the incident? Nothing abnormal.

 

Then there was the cyclamates scare. This all started when this artificial sweetener was found to cause cancer in rats. So it was promptly banned. The truth was that you would have to drink 350 cans of diet Pepsi each day to be in danger.

 

Today, we have Dame Sally Davies, the Government Chief Medical Officer, warning that resistance to antibiotics can lead to untreatable strains of bacteria, and will be a bigger danger than terrorism.

 

Well, we’ve known that for donkey’s years. What do you expect us to do about it?

 

More to the point, what are you going to do about it?

 

You are the CMO. You could start by banning doctors from handing out antibiotics for virus-related diseases, such as colds. They have no effect. You could discourage the medical profession from using them in cases where the complaint is non-fatal. You could limit their use in veterinary and fish farming.

 

To be fair, she was actually shellacking Big Pharma for not developing new antibiotics, life-style drugs like Viagra being much better for the bottom line, but radio news didn’t mention that,  concerned only with sensationalist bit.

 

But what they should take into account is that the more scare-mongering they peddle, the less we believe them.

 

They must remember the sad tale of Matilda, who was a terrible liar, when the house caught fire:

 

‘For every time she shouted Fire!’,

They only answered ‘Liar, liar’.

And therefore when her aunt returned,

 

Matilda and the house were burned’.