From the New York Times: Blood tests have confirmed that a mysterious series of cases of mass sickness at girls’ schools across the country over the last two years were caused by a powerful poison gas, an Afghan official said Tuesday. … The spokesman, Dr. Kargar Norughli, said his ministry and the World Health Organization […]
Continue reading about Afghan gas attacks weren’t hysteria after all
Last week there was a news story about a man who faced the prospect of having a spinal cord injury inflicted on him surgically in Saudi Arabia as an Islamically-prescribed retaliatory penalty. The usual penalty for bodily injuries in Islam, if the victim insists on it, is retaliation in kind whether the injury consists of […]
Continue reading about Replicating spinal cord injuries in Saudi Arabia
This actually happened a couple of months ago, but I thought I’d comment on it now since it appeared again in Invest in ME’s August newsletter (top article): a doctor named Martin Scurr who has written a medical column in the UK Daily Mail for years has finally, after attending IiME’s conference in May, admitted […]
Continue reading about Daily Mail doctor notices sky is blue
This past week, two major British M.E. organisations, the Young ME Sufferers Trust and the ME Association, issued a joint statement ([1], [2]) condemning as “unethical” a study, scheduled to start in September, of the so-called Lightning Process on children with “CFS and ME”. The research team, awarded £164,000 from the Linbury Trust and the […]
Continue reading about M.E. and the ethics of testing on sick kids
Yesterday, the BBC station Radio 4 ran a feature on the so-called Court of Protection, the body set up to manage the financial affairs of those who are incapable of doing it themselves, such as those with dementia, brain injuries or lifelong learning disabilities. They covered three cases, one of a man with Down’s Syndrome […]
ButYouDontLookSick.com is a website by a woman with lupus (she wrote the Spoon Theory I referred to in a previous post). In her biography, she says that, despite suffering a wide range of symptoms over the years, she had been told by “well-wishers and doctors alike”, “but you don’t look sick”. The story I saw […]
Lost Voices is published by Invest in ME, a British charity which concentrates on promoting research into the causes of, and a possible cure for, the debilitating neurological disease, myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME); they have organised conferences in London addressed by the major scientists involved in such research, mostly from the USA. I ordered the book […]
Just over a week ago, the team behind the blog FWD/Forward decided to hold a “blogswarm” dedicated to busting myths about Helen Keller and demonstrating that there was more to her than the “water over the hand” clichés commonly taught in schools (you can find some contributions in the comments to that post). When the […]
Continue reading about Juneteenth and Helen Keller: fabricating a controversy
Last week a number of newspapers reported that scientists were “on track to establish the genetic triggers for autism, paving the way for earlier diagnosis of children who could be at risk of developing the condition and opening up the possibility of inventing new drugs and treatments for the condition”. Personally, “on track” sounds like […]
Continue reading about Why wouldn’t you want to be autistic?
Earlier today, Dr Andrew Wakefield, who published a study in the Lancet, a major British medical journal suggesting that the triple vaccine against measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) might be a cause of autism, was struck off the British medical register by the General Medical Council, which found him guilty of serious professional misconduct. The […]
First of all, this past week has been ME Awareness Week as I mentioned several times in my last article. This fact has got lost in all the election talk as might have been expected, although I’m sure many in the ME community found that disappointing, but nonetheless some media outlets found space to cover […]
Continue reading about Guardian on ME and retroviruses, and other press coverage
This week is ME Awareness Week ([1], [2]), and a number of media appearances and articles have been scheduled, including two appearances from Kay Gilderdale (on Radio 2 today and, allegedly, on GMTV tomorrow morning) as well as from Criona Wilson, the mother of Sophia Mirza who died from complications of ME in 2005, in […]
Continue reading about Jeremy Vine meets Kay Gilderdale again
Earlier today I read that a woman from mid-Wales who is bed-ridden with fibromyalgia and also suffers from Crohn’s disease, epilepsy and depression has been refused an appeal in the High Court against extradition to the USA on charges of having abducted her six-year-old daughter twelve years ago. The abduction followed the withdrawal of her […]
Yesterday (Saturday) morning, I got to speak on the Late Show with Joanne Good on BBC London (94.9FM). She was doing a feature on bad comedy, specifically an incident in which Frankie Boyle, a former panellist on the BBC TV show Mock the Week, challenged a woman in the front row of his audience after […]
Recently I read an article by Jodi Bassett, a campaigner on ME issues who suffers from the severe form of that illness, on the Planet Thrive website (it’s also posted on her own site) entitled Myalgic Encephalomyelitis: The shocking disease. It lays out a few facts about the illness, its similarities to MS and polio […]
Continue reading about Why don’t people abandon support groups with bad policies?
Last Wednesday in Manchester, a 64-year-old man with learning disabilities, David Askew, collapsed and died after two youths broke down his garden gate and tampered with his mother’s scooter. He had not been physically assaulted, but had been the subject of a campaign of intimidation by a gang of local yobs. Neighbours described the harassment […]
Continue reading about Harassment “commonplace” for those with learning disabilities
Yesterday I had a brief exchange of tweets with Organica, who told me of her enthusiasm for the British comedian, Ricky Gervais, best known for writing and starring in The Office, his stand-up shows, and most recently the critically very unacclaimed film titled The Invention of Lying. She was enjoying learning British English from him, […]
Continue reading about Ricky Gervais on ME, and other bad comedy
The other day I had a debate with Clair Lewis, a British disability activist and blogger, about the public reaction to the Kay Gilderdale case. Lewis was appalled by the show of public sympathy towards Kay and the way she was let off the hook after what she regarded as a 30-hour assault on her […]
Continue reading about Gilderdale, Schiavo and models of disability
At the end of December there was an article by Hadley Freeman in the Guardian, characterising the past decade as a decade of fakery: fake science, fake politics and fake friendships connected only by Facebook. At the time, I criticised the article, but things I’ve learned over the past couple of weeks have put the […]
Continue reading about The real value of online friendships (Hadley Freeman revisited)
Does anyone remember what Robert Kilroy-Silk was like before he wrote that column in the Daily Express — AKA Daily Spew — saying that the West owes Muslims nothing, being as we are all limb-choppers and women-repressers etc., and then tried to make a name for himself by getting involved with UKIP? A YouTuber who […]
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