Talking heads and Ahmed himself seem to think that this is an issue of social mobility, i.e. that Imperial College want to defend the privileges of the affluent middle class.

But is the story really this simple? Were admissions officers simply being cautious in refusing a student with a criminal record in order to protect “confidence in the integrity and probity of its doctors”? Should applicants with a criminal record be considered for places at medical school or is the trust, and potentially the safety, of patients to precious to risk?

The companies weren’t named but 23andMe and Navigenics – the two most well-known – have confirmed that they have recieved cease and desist letters. Both companies offer the same kind of service: spit in a test tube, pay a thousand bucks and get genotyped. A website then helps you match up your genetic variations with known risk factors for disease.

California seems to have two issues with the genetic testing companies: firstly that the labs they outsource to aren’t always licenced and secondly that they’re breaking a Californian law that requires all genetic tests to be ordered by a physician.

Some genetic testing labs are literally garage start-ups and it makes sense that they should be held to some minimum standard. Some tests can be a bit silly but others could have a major impact on your life – if somebody in your family has an inherited disease and you’re trying to decide if you should have children or not, for example. In the latter case you’d probably want some assurance that the test was properly carried out.

But should you need a doctor’s permission to obtain information about your DNA that, as Tom Goetz at Wired suggests, belongs to you in the first place?

Alcohol can cut risk of arthritis?

Hmm, far-fetched sounding stories on medical research pop up in the news all the time.

However, the other day I stumbled across the fantastic NHS website Behind the headlines.

The site aims to:
“explain the facts behind the headlines and give a better understanding of the science that makes the news”
i.e. spot a hysterical story about medical research in the news and boil down the respective journal paper to cut through the hype and provide a take home message on what the findings mean for personal health.

As someone who reads clinical papers all the time, I’m pretty aware of how findings are inflated in the media. Ergo, I think this website is a great idea and does a brilliant job of explaining the science behind the stories in a matter-of-fact way.

But do the general public appreciate how much medical findings tend to get trumped up in the media? And if they do, are they really likely to look at a website like Behind the Headlines, regardless of how engaging it is?

I placed a link to this on another Forum and received the following comments from individuals in Canada and the US respectively as below.

Please consider watching the presentation, reading the associated text and commenting here.

Great idea Graham but in order to succeed I think that it also requires that the drug companies themselves be under public ownership.

Modern medicine has been extraordinarily successful in only two main areas—control of infectious disease, and trauma care. Both were government-funded initiatives. Control of infectious disease was regarded as warranting government intervention because epidemics cause problems for governments. Trauma care was revolutionized during the Vietnam war because the body count was becoming a political liability for the US government. (In earlier US wars, it was crippled soldiers and not dead ones who represented the greatest political liability.)

Neurodegenerative and cardiovascular disease and cancer do not yet threaten the US government—in fact, the huge amounts of money spent on not solving those problems provides a profit stream so fat that it fuels political parties. In other words, politicians are very happy with the medical establishment just the way it is. Until something happens to make them unhappy with the way things are, to the point where they fear losing their jobs, the government will not do any major reform of the system. ........The impending collapse of Social Security may eventually provide that fear, we’ll see. .......If public but nongovernmental healthcare reforms were to take enough money out of “the system” to where it no longer owns government through right of purchase, that eventuality would cut politicians some flexibility as well.

Nigel Hawkes from the Times has just written an article published today about yesterday’s Court of Appeal decision.

Cutting a long story short, ”The ruling is the first case that NICE, the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence, has lost in court. It means that in future it will have to be completely transparent in the way it reaches its decisions, revealing the inner workings of the computer models it uses to measure value for money.”

It will be interesting to see from happens from here.

As a result of this research and other papers, the UK Department of Health recommended that all girls aged between 12 and 13 years receive a vaccination against HPV, starting from September 2008.

However, a paper published last week in the British Medical Journal investigating uptake of the HPV vaccine in a cohort of girls in Manchester found that 20% of parents refused to have their daughters vaccinated. The research paper reported that the primary reason parents turned down the vaccine was because of insufficient information its long term safety. The media, on the other hand, jumped on the suggestion that parents thought a jab against an STD would encourage sexual promiscuity

The ongoing MMR/autism saga has highlighted the detrimental effect on public health of parents responding to media hype and refusing to vaccinate their children.

What do you think? Should parents and children have a choice which routine vaccinations they want to receive? Or should doctors insist on immunizations for the greater good of society? More controvertially, should some vaccinations be made compulsory?