The Atrium

Do you have Swine flu or do you not to have Swine Flu, that is the question. There is a funny thing in the UK at the moment. If you have anything resembling flu-like symptoms, your doctor will refuse to see you and simply assume you have swine flu, and prescribe the antiviral drug "Tamiflu". Studies show that Tamiflu shortens a bout of flu by, on average, 1 day. Wow. Moreover it is believed that about 95% of people who are diagnosed with swine flu don't even have it! Ailments which have been misdiagnosed over the phone or via Internet help lines as "swine flu" include ear infections (which if not treated could in some cases potentially lead to deafness) and Meningitis (which can kill).

Bearing in mind that on the one hand, you most likely don't have swine flu even if a helpline says you do, and on the other hand, the World Health Organisation says that even if you do have swine flu you probably don't need Tamiflu (it can have adverse side effects), why is it UK Govt policy to prescribe it? Could it be that the stockpiles of Tamiflu they purchased during the Bird Flu scare are reaching their sell-by date and need using up?

According to BBC Radio 4’s Statistics programme, More or Less, a random sample of people prescribed Tamiflu over the phone are sent a DIY swab kit to see if they really do have swine flu, so that some idea of the true figures of infections can be estimated. Only half of the swabs are returned, and of these 8.5% test positive for swine flu. So we might surmise that 91.5% of people diagnosed with swine flu don't have it. But bear in mind this is to some extent a self-selecting sample, in that half the people choose not to return the swabs. More or Less speculated that this might be because they are already feeling better, in other words the true number of cases might be as low as 4-5% of those who have been told they have it. In other words, only 1 in 20 people who thought they had it really did have it, which ties in with previous statistics on mis-diagnosis of the disease.

All in all I wonder if this pandemic is creating unnecessary pandemonium which is leading to people's real ailments being left untreated.

If you're quick, you can download the swine flu edition of More or Less as a podcast.

I don't know if this is true of other countries but the media in the UK seems awash with science coverage for once, with the launch of CERN's Large Hadron Collider. On Radio 4 in particular, every other programme today seems to be about the device, they're even running a short series on notable subatomic particles. I guess it helps that some people were making wild claims that it would destroy the earth (oh, if only it could....) Somehow I can't help feeling that this is all a flash in the pan though, and science will sink back into media obscurity in a day or two's time.

I think Armando Iannuchi summed up the media position perfectly last week when he said

"Next week the Large Hadron Collider will be turned on, which will either
(a) suck the world inside out, or
(b) be boring."

If the world doesn't end, people will lose interest. If it does end, they won't be around to care. So we're damned either way.

Genetically modified food
Genetically modified (GM) foods are foods made from genetically modified organisms (GMO) that have had their DNA altered through genetic engineering. GM foods were first put on the market in the early 1990s. The most common modified foods are derived from plants: soybean, corn, canola, and cotton seed oil.

Controversies surrounding GM foods and crops commonly focus on human and environmental safety, labeling and consumer choice, intellectual property rights, ethics, food security, poverty reduction, and environmental conservation.
Development
The first commercially grown genetically modified whole food crop was the tomato, which was made more resistant to rotting by Californian company Calgene. Calgene was allowed to release the tomatoes into the market in 1994 without any special labeling. It was welcomed by consumers that purchased the fruit at two to five times the price of regular tomatoes. However, production problems and competition from a conventionally bred, longer shelf-life variety prevented the product from becoming profitable. A variant of the Flavr Savr was used by Zeneca to produce tomato paste which was sold in Europe during the summer of 1996. The labeling and pricing were designed as a marketing experiment, which proved, at the time, that European consumers would accept genetically engineered foods.

The attitude towards GM foods would be drastically changed after outbreaks of Mad Cow Disease weakened consumer trust in government regulators, and protesters rallied against the introduction of Monsanto's "Roundup-Ready" soybeans.[citation needed] The next GM crops included insect-resistant cotton and herbicide-tolerant soybeans[8] both of which were commercially released in 1996. GM crops have been widely adopted in the United States. They have also been extensively planted in several other countries (Argentina, Brazil, South Africa, India, and China) where the agriculture is a major part of the total economy. Other GM crops include insect-resistant maize and herbicide-tolerant maize, cotton, and rapeseed varieties.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetically_modified_food