Kieran Lamb's List: The Times Health News 02/09

British doctors are predicting a damaging brain drain of scientists to the US after President Obama's move today to lift the Bush Administration's restrictions on federal funding for embryonic stem-cell research.

Mr Obama's decision to overturn the funding ban is aimed at increasing the chance of finding cures for Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's and other afflictions. Yet it also promises to provide a new stream of financial support that could prove tempting for British researchers who are struggling to raise the money they need for their experiments, scientists said.

Plans to force cigarette manufacturers to introduce plain packaging — assumed to have been dropped in Alistair Darling's Pre-Budget Report last year — have been quietly revived, The Times has learnt.

A group of cross-party backbench peers have made amendments to the Health Bill, which is making its way through Parliament, with a view to restoring the proposal.

A ten-year-old girl who had always been fed by tube has delighted her family by deciding to eat for the first time.

Doctors had been baffled by Tia-Mae McCarthy’s refusal to take food, and said that there was no medical reason, although she was born with a gap between her oesophagus and stomach. But she was recently offered yoghurt and accepted.

Given no other way to end their lives, patients are choosing an Euthanasia agonising death with the help of GPs

TO AVOID the legal ban on medically assisted dying, doctors are helping patients starve and dehydrate themselves to death.

Brandon Muir’s tragic death will not be the last of its kind

We can put a name to the grainy face of the toddler in the news last week because of the way he died. But in Scotland today there are tens of thousands of children like Brandon Muir living chaotic, violent and perilous lives because of their parents’ drug and alcohol addiction.

Reports of two deaths and dozens of near-misses involving cancer patients receiving the drug amphotericin prompted a rapid safety review by the National Patient Safety Agency.

The agency found that the formulation and dosages of the drug, used to treat severe fungal infections, were being easily confused. Patients were at risk of having more toxic variations at too high a dosage, with potentially lethal side-effects, or doses that were too weak for the therapy required.

A wealthy British couple who both had terminal cancer have committed suicide together at the Dignitas clinic in Switzerland.

Peter and Penny Duff, from Bath, are the first Britons to die at the controversial clinic since the Lord Chief Justice signalled that anyone helping a terminally ill person to organise an assisted suicide abroad would not be prosecuted.

For the Duffs’ family and friends it is a shock, a sudden sorrowful farewell. For onlookers, hard on the cases of Daniel James, Anne Turner and others, it brings an uneasy sense of floodgates opening. Dignitas is the first Swiss clinic to accept foreigners and its founder, Ludwig Minelli, has made it clear that he does not insist on natural death being imminent, or certain to involve untreatable pain. Indeed, he has even defended the possibility of admitting the healthy but depressed to his procedures.

The British couple who committed suicide in a Swiss voluntary euthanasia clinic last week had kept their plans secret from all but their close family.

Peter Duff, 80, and his wife Penelope, 70, were both suffering from terminal cancer in an advanced stage when they took the decision to end their lives at the Dignitas clinic.

Men who fear redundancy are far more likely than women to become depressed and suffer from anxiety, according to research on the credit crunch.

The study, by academics at the University of Cambridge, also found that job insecurity, rather than redundancy itself, took a far greater toll of the mental health of both men and women.

Doctors who act contrary to the wishes of dying or comatose patients could be judged to be causing harm and struck off under new rules from the medical regulator.

The General Medical Council (GMC) will publish draft guidance this month advising doctors how they should approach decisions surrounding the “end of life”, including whether to withhold treatment from terminally ill patients, turn off life support or attempt resuscitation.

Patients have an absolute right to refuse treatment – they even have the right to make an unwise decision – and as doctors we have to respect that.

The key in any walk of medicine is if you accept a refusal of consent to treatment, you have to be quite certain that it is valid. Does the patient have the mental capacity to make that decision? Is it a voluntary decision without any external pressure being put on them? Do they really understand the implications of what they are asking for? If the answers are “yes”, then the doctor – and the guidelines that structure care – have to accept it.

A trailblazing campaigner who won the right to be treated with Herceptin on the National Health Service has died of cancer.

Ann Marie Rogers won a landmark legal victory in 2006 that paved the way for a more widespread use of the of the expensive but effective treatment that can prolong the lives of some cancer patients.

One in 20 of all salads and sauces on sale at kebab takeaways contained food poisoning bugs according to an investigation by the Health Protection Agency and council enforcement officers.

Cucumber was the most contaminated salad product but bacteria that can be harmful to human health such as e.coli and salmonella were also found in lettuce, cabbage, onions and tomatoes.

Tens of thousands of children are at risk of abuse and neglect, with a quarter of councils providing inadequate or minimal services for young people, the Audit Commission reveals today.

Even wealthy authorities are not immune to the widespread deterioration in children’s services. The rating of Surrey, one of the country’s most affluent councils, fell to the bottom of the local government watchdog’s league table after failing its children.

For years it was the invisible public service, known only to the poor and dispossessed and accountable to no one for its actions. Today not only is child protection front-page news, but it is fast becoming a benchmark against which to measure the performance of entire local authorities.

On-the-spot checks for childcare and assessments for a much wider range of services are to be introduced next month in an attempt to make public sector inspections more rigorous.

The Audit Commission, which first compiled town hall annual performance league tables in 2002, now admits that the collection of data needs to be updated and improved.

Football boots sit in a pile by the back door, holiday snaps crowd the mantelpiece and sunlight spills in through the stained-glass window in the hall.

This could be any large family home in a forested corner of affluent Surrey. Only the industrial-size washing machines hint that it is a children’s home.

CHILDREN under 12 should not be given over-the-counter cough and cold medicines because they are ineffective and can be harmful, Britain’s medicines regulator will warn.

A simple homemade preparation of honey and lemon is likely to be just as effective as popular remedies such as Lemsip, Day Nurse and Sudafed, the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) will say this week.

SINGLE women undergoing fertility treatment will be able to name almost any other adult as their child’s second parent on the birth certificate, under laws coming into force next month.

A man being named as the “father” or even a woman as the second parent will not need to be biologically related to the baby and will not even need to be the mother’s boyfriend or girlfriend.