Politics, tech and media issues from a Muslim perspective
Earlier this week the Panorama documentary featuring Kay Gilderdale, titled “I Helped My Daughter Die”, won the Medical Journalists’ Association’s “best broadcast TV” award at their Winter Awards 2011 (the MJA don’t actually announce...
Yesterday afternoon there was a debate on ME at Westminster Hall, an annex to the House of Commons, whose main participants were Ian Swales (Lib Dem, Redcar) and the Tory health minister Paul Burstow....
Last week, the Countess of Mar, a long-standing advocate for the ME cause in the UK’s House of Lords, asked a question regarding why public records on ME dating back to the 1980s and...
This is, as far as I remember, the first time I’ve ever posted a review of a year to my blog, and that’s probably been because no old year has been as different from...
Last weekend I witnessed an ugly incident on Facebook, which led to a relationship breaking up and the two erstwhile partners both retiring from the site (and Twitter) over accusations that seemed flimsy at...
I got a reply from someone at the BBC Complaints department, which (much like the response to my earlier complaint about male rape jokes) wasn’t so much an apology as a self-justification. It included...
After the Gilderdale story made headlines this past January (and the other coverage of assisted suicide and mercy killing that happened around the same time), I was expecting both stories to be featured in...
Earlier today I got an update from the family of Emily Collingridge, a lady from south London who wrote a book on living with Severe ME, based partly on her experiences (she has been...
Parents tell how every day is a battle to care for teenager struck down with chronic fatigue syndrome – The Daily Record "Chronic fatigue syndrome", in this context, is M.E. (the symptoms described are...
New Report: Assisted Suicide – how the chattering classes have got it wrong The Centre for Policy Studies (which is, as I understand it, a traditionally Tory-aligned think tank) has published a report by...
Earlier today I took part in a Facebook discussion about "apologies", in the context of the British government's decision to prohibit blood donations from people who had, or ever had, M.E., in which someone...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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,...
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...
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...
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...