Thrill seekers

This week a York academic Professor Trevor Sheldon likened staying in an NHS hospital to bungee jumping, because up to 10% of hospital stays resulted in some kind of mishap.

I wonder if this says more about how safe bungee jumping has become, or perhaps hints at a new thrill seeking pasttime for middle Englanders.

Now there’s no need to try an extreme sport like snowboarding, or throwing yourself out of a plane. Why not get yourself down to your local NHS hospital. Wonder where the MRSA is lurking? So do the staff. Their guess is as good as yours, and if its smeared around your bed waiting to infect your open wound, chances are the cleaners will miss it too.

Trouble with your kidneys? Try having one of them removed. Just hope it’s the right one.

Time to save the world again

The Environment Agency has asked an expert panel to list the top 50 things that will save the planet. I’m pleased to see that quite a few of the top priorities are actions that decision-markers need to take, rather than making us green people feel even more guilty. We need more government action on this! Also see Leo Hickman in the Guardian, who assesses whether they got their priorities right.

The top 20: What the panel prescribes
1 Dramatically improve the energy efficiency of electrical goods
2 Religious leaders to make the environment a priority for their followers
3 Encourage the widespread use of solar power throughout the world
4 Secure a meaningful post-Kyoto treaty on reducing the emissions that contribute to global warming
5 Encourage households to generate much more of their own power
6 Introduce tax incentives to "buy green"
7 Tackle the rapid growth in aviation emissions
8 Wean ourselves off dependency on petroleum
9 Encourage individuals to buy less non-essential "stuff "
10 Dramatically improve public transport
11 Aim for a "zero waste" culture
12 Install "smart energy" meters in all homes
13 Introduce a measure of economic success that includes the environment
14 Fully harness Britain's huge potential for generating renewable energy
15 Seek alternative, less damaging sources for biofuels
16 Bury carbon dioxide from power stations underground
17 Encourage hydrogen fuel cell technology in cars
18 Implement government policies to control global population growth
19 Reach international agreement on preserving rainforests
20 Create better incentives to improve energy efficiency in the home

I’m also getting worried about biofuels. The idea seems so nice. Petrol = bad, so let's turn plants into energy instead. But the benefits of biofuels may have been underestimated, and subsidies to produce biofuels is both creating an excess of bio-ethanol and skewing agriculture away from food production.

"The net greenhouse gas emissions of expensive European rapeseed oil-based diesel are a mere 13 per cent less than those of conventional diesel", says Martin Wolf in a thoughtful piece in the FT. I've also read in the Wall Street Journal that the biofuels gold rush is threatening the last bits of existing prairie-land in the US. Collecting bio-gas from landfills intuitively seems like a better idea, but don't know how this compares.

Chaos fans

Fantastic site by The Institute for Figuring - "an organisation dedicated to the poetic and aesthetic dimensions of science, mathematics and the technical arts". Including fractal crochet!

Climate change: little things won't make all the difference

Green tips are all well and good, but are they just a salve for our conscience? Can they really make an appreciable impact on climate change?

No, says George Marshall, an environmental campaigner type who is founder of the Oxford-based Climate Outreach & Information Network.

This is a fantastic article of his about how there can’t be any real action against climate change without political change.

So forget about those top ten eco tips you've been following (or Wandworth Council's top 32).

Forget recycling carrier bags: "Their contribution to climate change is vanishingly small. The average Brit consumes 134 plastic bags a year, resulting in just two kilos of the typical 11 tonnes of carbon dioxide he or she will emit in a year. That is one five thousandth of their overall climate impact," says Marshall.

Or turning TVs off standby: "The electricity to keep a television in standby mode for a whole year leads to 25 kilogrammes of carbon dioxide. It’s more than plastic bags, but still very marginal: one fifth of one percent of average emissions."

Or even boiling the correct amount of water in the kettle: "According to the government’s own figures even if you are constantly boiling full kettles this will save all of 100 kilos of carbon dioxide a year, less than one percent of average emissions."

Well, actually don't forget about doing all these things. But don't expect them to save the world.

And be aware that thinking you are eco-good could allow you to turn a blind eye to the much more carbon-heavy lifestyle choices.

But the point really is that the burden of slowing down carbon consumption cannot be carried by individuals alone. It needs collective action. And what is really sinister about the government offering us "eco tips" is that it gives us the idea that they are proactively helping the environment, when they are actually foisting the blame onto us and sweeping things like aviation taxes back under the carpet.

"No major social or economic change has ever arisen from volunteerism and the suggestion that it can is a deliberate strategy to prevent any real challenge to business as usual."

Links:
* Abolish plastic bags - an admirable aim - plastic bags as rubbish are ugly and the production of a new plastic bag for every time we shop is wasteful but the campaigners energy could be better directed elsewhere, says Marshall. Although I have to admit I'm really attracted by plastic bag crochet. Pretty non-plastic bags that encourage you to shop green by giving you a discount in certain shops.

* Marshall has written a book called Carbon Detox. "Don't despair and don't give up," he concludes as he tries to combat "Eco denial".

* Eco blogs

Urban wildlife watching

I went to Clapham Common yesterday and the common-or-garden mallards I saw were outnumbered by: two herons, two cormorants, a solitary moorhen, batches of coots, two Greylag geese, a flock of Canada geese (startling runners by trying to take off in front of them), a jay and a wagtail.

I have re-reminded myself that coots are the ones with a white face and moorhens the ones with red beaks (left). I'm sure I will forget this again instantly.

The angling pond is apparently full of toxic blue-green algae, but it doesn't seem to be doing the birds any bad.

Amy, Amy, Amy

Global warming? David Cameron’s new Conservatives with balls? The deterioration of the social fabric of Britain? No, I’m going to add to the litres of ink already spent over Amy Winehouse.



Firstly, a disclaimer. I think Amy Winehouse is a fantastic musical talent, and if I could listen to Back to Black back to back all day I would.

It’s more-or-less a given that any sensible human being does not want to see someone with so much potential going mad on drugs.

But should we really be so critical of her drug taking when it goes hand in hand with her music? As her friend/producer Mark Ronson was quoted in the press this week: “That's Amy — taking her pain and turmoil and making it into the music we enjoy.”

I can’t stand the Daily Mail-esque moralising over Amy Winehouse. (See this one. Thanks for the marvellous insight that "it would be a tragic waste if her wild lifestyle destroyed a brilliant singing career". Actually I think most right wing commentators would be pleased for another told-you-so lecture on the evils of drugs.)

If her music comes from the same place as her more destructive behaviour then it’s hypocritical to blame her for it.

I think we should leave Amy Winehouse alone, unless we want to produce a million James Blunts. Please no.

We need people to live on the edge and to feel the emotions we are too busy to take notice of. The Amys of this world remind us that there is life outside a cosy suburban workaday existence. But it’s an uncomfortable place that perhaps we don’t want to visit too much. Poor old Amy has to live there all the time.

This article on the Guardian arts blog has come nearest to my thoughts on Amy.

"Every culture needs a totemic figure who is prepared to go into the wilder terrain of subtance usage, a place where the rest of us don't want to or don't need to go. And there is something defiantly totemic about (Amy) Winehouse. The tall figure, the tattoos carved into the arms, the boldly painted face, the huge pile of hair - they all resemble some fabulous totem pole.

"And the great, yodelling, soulful voice brings us news of a place we don't want to go to ourselves."

Crazy Catholic ranting

This is really crazy.

Mozambique's Roman Catholic archbishop has accused European condom manufacturers of deliberately infecting their products with HIV "in order to finish quickly the African people".

Some conspiracy theories are easy enough to dismiss, but the ones about HIV can have a far more deadly effect, says Priya Shetty in her Guardian blog. She points out that some HIV conspiracy theorists are key political figures such as Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, South Africa's health minister.

Proscrastinating

I’m officially “thinking about thinking about” a change of career.

But before I can move onto actually thinking, I have a number of essential tasks I need to get out of the way. Such as:

Defrosting the freezer
Defrosting the fridge
Cleaning the cooker
Cleaning out the grotty trays of bathroom stuff in the bathroom

But damn, I’ve done all of these this weekend. So now I need to move onto the more endless tasks…

Hacking the Triffid-like Wysteria
Putting plants in pots, doing bulbs for spring
Going through ten years worth of photos
Adding all the CDs I own onto iTunes

And if things get really bad:

Putting all my books and CDs into alphabetical order (no I’ll never do that)
Painting – the hallway, the front room, the bedroom, the backroom
Cleaning the carpets, cleaning the rugs
Chucking away old clothes and general rubbish
Finding piles of paper, looking through them, putting them back again
Cutting things out of newspapers, putting them in a new pile, forgetting to read them
Thinking of creative things to do, doing something else
Writing letters to aunties, old friends and school teachers
Baking cookies, making more mess to tidy up later
Treading water
Achieving a Zen-like state through continual housework

I could spend years just writing the list. Who has time to think about the important things in life?

A clean slate

I’ve just wiped my iPod (after successfully transferring the tunes off it first, phew) and now I’m back to zero in my Most Played list.

I listened to so much Super Furry Animals about a year ago that nothing could replace them on my personal leader board. Haven’t listened to any SFA for, ooh, two weeks now. I look forward to seeing what I'm going to play to death next!

Current candidates include Ryan Adams, Amy Winehouse and Spoon.

This lunchtime, in between fighting off scraggy dogs for possesion of my dubious "chicken" sandwich and fending off offers from buff young men to lather me in suncream, I had a lovely time sitting in the sunny park enjoying the contrast with angry In Utero in my ears.

Who are you calling primitive?

Yes, I admit it. I'm only writing this post for the gratuitous coelacanth shot below. And the fact I need to write something because its very slow in the world of pharmaceutical news this week and I'm not used to being bored at work.

That aside some really quite interesting new research is out that challenges the notion of evolution as some sort of escalator of superiority.

Coelacanths are thought of as the original "living fossil", since the first living (well only recently dead) example was fished out of the Indian Ocean in East London in 1938. (That's East London, South Africa.) Previously, this group of lobe-finned fishes had only been known from the fossil record.

But new research suggests we shouldn't dismiss coelacanths as being primitive.

For some time now, scientists have hoped that examining the lobed fins of coelacanths and lung fishes would hint at how fishes' fins evolved into the limbs of the first land-dwelling vertebrates.

But now researchers from the University of Chicago say that the fins of living coelacanths are just too specialised, after discovering a new coelacanth fossil.

"Our fossil shows that what we've using to define a primitive state is actually very specialised," says lead author Matt Friedman. "It might give a deceptive view of what evolution was like for these fin skeletons.

"If you're going to figure out how limbs evolved you need to have a good idea about pre-conditions," he adds.

This is where the new fossil has helped. It shows that the ancestral pattern of lobed fins closely resembles the pattern in the fins of primitive living ray-finned fishes.

It challenges the idea of coelacanth as a "living fossil" because the fishes have continued changing since coelacanths were fossilised, by continued evolution or random genetic drift, which surely must have happened in the 4 million years since coelacanths disappeared from the fossil record. Perhaps the lovely term of a lazarus species is more suitable.

It also reinforces the notion that every living thing adapts to its own niche, as Darwin tells us.

So a duck-billed platypus is only inferior to humans in our minds. A duck-billed platypus is perfectly happy is its own niche and has no desire for consciousness or opposable thumbs. (And that's the point, the idea of a platypus being happy or otherwise in this sense is a concept only we can think of.)

The identification of the first coelacanth's is a great tale of scientific discovery (see here) and is re-told in A Fish Caught in Time.

Desolation in Old Street

When I feel that human beings can do nothing but mess up this really quite nice planet we live on I like to retreat to the idea that in a bleak dystopian future, the unloved bits of waste land will be some of the only places that wildlife will survive*.

Well you might think that the Old Street area is desolate enough already, but the car park where I park my bike during the day, while by no means a latter day Garden of Eden, was until recently a happy little place of sprouting buddleias, opportunistic nettles, the odd bramble and copulating lady birds.

I loved smelling the buddleias when I got off my bike. I kept on leaving my bike nestling against them even when the purple flowers were making it quite difficult for me to get to the railings to chain my bike to.

I think having some contact with wildlife must be really beneficial. A few years ago some researchers found that inmates of a prison with a view of greenery (trees etc outside the prison) had better mental health than those looking at the prison yard**.

Anyway, I think nature’s a powerful thing. I always feel calmer walking back to my Mum’s house along past the woods and the fields.

So last Monday I got to the car park to leave my bike and knew there was something wrong instantly when I arrived to see big yellow skip. The place isn’t really run by house-proud owners – in the brambly and nettly corners there were layers of everyday rubbish that must have built up over years…

But looking around the rest of the site I was met by desolation. Some neat and tidy person had scratched up every living thing in quite a terminal way. No more buddleia, no more happy little ladybirds, and no more the excitement of tying up my bike without being stung. It was rather sad.

May be I should do a bit of guerilla gardening and scatter some wild flower seeds. This could be another pledge!

*In fact this is not necessarily true – humans have intimately managed the land for so many years, particularly in the UK that we actually need to keep on managing it to preserve diversity. So on patches of railway land you get sycamore and Japanese knotweed – invasive alien species that distort the natural balance of things, so although “nature thrives” it’s not necessarily the “right” nature, or at least the nature that needs preserving most, or at least the most diverse bits of nature. It also doesn’t help that abandoned land is prime dumping ground for fly-tipping morons.


**I haven’t been able to find this on Google, so I hope it isn’t an urban myth. Also, it occurs to me that the yard side might also have been more depressing because they might have felt even more isolated from the outside world.

My Thursday night at the Foundry in list form

Person next to me is reading “The Hominid individual in context”, conglomeration of courier cyclists, reggae version of Smokey Robinson song Get Ready (I know it from Ash cover), angel dolls hanging from the ceiling (some look gruesomely like being hanged), traffic cones, too much, posters, art, chalk boards, confusion, organic lager, mirror rounded by gold flames, Banksy CCTV sculpture, candles dripping bottles, flyers, dreads, revellers photos, old sofas, school chairs, wooden ladybirds, swap tables with old school friend, A-level looking fashion sketches.

John arrives with a copy of The Age of Reason by Jean-Paul Sartre and a roll of brown paper.

Keep em keen, keep em green

Thanks to Pudsk for alerting me to Wandsworth's new green agenda.

For the record - here are my pledges:

* Push the off button and don't leave electrical appliances on standby: I already
* Sign up for a Home Energy Check with the Energy Saving Trust: I pledge to
* Walk short journeys of one mile or under: I already
* Drive down vehicle emissions and run my car in a more environmentally friendly way: Not yet
* Use the orange sack or orange banks to recycle all my paper and card, tins and cans, aerosols, glass bottles and jars and plastic bottles: I already
* Drink tap water rather than bottled water: Not yet
* Turn off the tap when brushing my teeth: I already
* Replace one bath a week with a shower: Not yet
* Stop taking plastic carrier bags from shops: I already I'm not always successful, but really try
* Write a shopping list and stop buying more food than I need: Not yet
* Not use pesticides in my garden: I already No, it's harmony with the slugs apart from those unlucky enough to come across "slug stinger" tape round my pots
* Plant a window box: I already Very nice geraniums, since you ask
* Leave washing to dry in the open air instead of using the tumble dryer: I already
* Replace all light bulbs in my home with energy saving bulbs when they run out: I already However, I think it is a myth that they last 7 years, some I've had to replace them much sooner than that. Very annoying bought a special shaped ecobulb the other day for about £15, but it blew when I put it on a dimmer switch - be warned!
* Get on my bike and cycle to school or work: I already Hooray for my lovely bike
* Leave my car at home and use public transport to go to work: I already Don't have a car, but do catch tube when I don't cycle
* Reduce the amount of junk mail I receive: I already Yep, have got a "no junk mail" sign and put myself on the mail preference service. Not entirely effective. Plus Abbey send me a pile of credit card cheques every month despite my repeated pleas not too.
* Find a new home for unwanted household items: Not yet well ish, do take quite a bit to the charity shop, but I am a bit of a hoarder
* Put a Hippo or a save-a-flush device in my toilet cistern: I pledge to - I used to have one, really easy way to save water. Hoping to get a double flush loo when I get a new bathroom
* Use water collected in a water butt to water my garden: I already v proud of my water butt, thanks Mum
* Buy products made from recycled materials, such as paper for my printer: I already
* Have milk delivered by local milk man: I already doesn't say why this is on the list, but certainly reduces a lot of plastic waste
* Give a home to birds by putting up a nesting box: Not yet I'm sorry little birds. I did try to feed you but you never visited the seed balls I put up and they melted last summer. I do have a box for red Mason bees though (sadly uninhabited).
* Plant native plants in my garden: I already Apple tree... actually thinking about it, not much else
* Sign up to a renewable energy provider: I already from Ecotricity
* Insulate my home effectively: Not yet Don't have a roof, but have been meaning to get that shiny stuff to put behind the radiators for ages
* Join a car club or car share: Not yet
* Take a 'no flying' holiday this year: I already Brecon Beacons here I come!
* Use a home composter for my garden and kitchen waste: I already in a wormery I designed which houses worms from my Mum's compost heap
* Encourage my school or work place to set up a recycling scheme: Not yet Not officially! I take home all bits of cardboard and stuff from work to recycle at home.
* Have my water company install a water meter: Not yet I know I should, just one of those things that seems like a lot of hassle.... bad me
* Volunteer to make Wandsworth's waterways cleaner and more bio diverse places: Not yet but it sounds fun
* Use green cleaning products: I already
* Reduce my 'food miles' by buying seasonal fruit and vegetables produced in the UK whenever possible: Not yet I try to shop at our local greengrocers when I can. Plus he's cheaper than the supermarket
* Construct a pond to provide homes for water loving wildlife: Not yet Although mini-pond in bucket plans afoot.
* Use grey water to water my garden: Not yet Although a really good eco tip is to stand a bucket in the shower to catch the water while its warming up. Enough to water all my plants. I've stopped doing it, so now should start doing it again.

I'm afraid I've not made that many pledges, so as not to let myself down.

I think these are all really good ideas, but I think its still a bit depressing that I think these are important and helpful things to do, but their effect is so limited. You could do all of these things for a year and wipe out all the good with one Easyjet flight.

Not green, just rich

Very interesting piece from George Monbiot in the Guardian, which expresses my uneasiness at the idea that buying green products can somehow solve the climate change crisis and my dislike of the new fascism of greenies over non-organic shopping choices.

He writes about a new organic bible by Sheherazade Goldsmith - married to the very rich environmentalist Zac – on how to "live within nature's limits".

“It's easy. Just make your own bread, butter, cheese, jam, chutneys and pickles, keep a milking cow, a few pigs, goats, geese, ducks, chickens, beehives, gardens and orchards.” A fellow commuter sums up to Monbiot the fundamental problem with this approach: "This is for people who don't work."

I think that consumers can reduce their impact on the planet by choosing wisely when they shop.

But how helpful is it to approach life with an all-pervasive eco-guilt when often the government doesn’t give us the tools to making green choices easy?

It is often easier and cheaper to make the choose grey, so it is disproportionately difficult for people with less money to be green. A trip to Somerset for two on a Friday night costs £100 return (if you don’t book in advance) but £40-60 by car. Flying to Europe is too easy and too cheap – we should take the train. A friend with a new baby told me that to buy a complete set of washable nappies costs £300, quite apart from the cost of washing etc.

It can also be difficult to determine which option is greener - especially given the lack of clear labelling on how much energy is used producing something - eg food miles are not obvious. Even then, the best option for the environment difficult to see. For example, when green beans are out of season, it is apparently better to buy beans shipped from Kenya than organic ones those grown in Europe, because the energy costs of hothousing the beans in Europe are so great.

I really resented the government pushing eco-guilt around five years or so ago when consumers were told they should “take responsibility” for recycling when services provided by local councils was so poor. “Taking responsibility” for me meant manically storing up any recyclables until I could borrow a car, or struggle with them on the bus. Now improvew local services – including advent of doorstep recycling - have made it much easier for consumers to take action. (Although there are problems with this approach – it is more energy intensive than separated-at-source recycling and results in lower quality product.)

I agree with Monbiot that we should buy less not just buy green and his conclusion: “Green consumerism is another form of atomisation - a substitute for collective action. No political challenge can be met by shopping.”

Getting it on in your fishnets

“You used to get it in your fishnets
Now you only get it in your night dress
Discarded all the naughty nights for niceness
Landed in a very common crisis”
Fluorescent Adolescent, The Arctic Monkeys

I really like these lyrics from the Arctics. But I can’t help thinking this is a really male view of sex, or at least quite a crude way of looking at what makes exciting sex. Come on boys, fishnets is a bit of a cliche. And sometimes niceness is not such a bad thing.

As an aside, Google’s ability to match adverts with internet user is just too shrewd, but not so this music lyrics site. It marries these lyrics with details of where young Arctics’ fans can buy and dispose of fluorescent lighting.

QUICK.SAND.

I’m not usually a big fan of advertising, but I do like words. I love the expressiveness and humour of this ad from lastminute.com despite its brevity.

I enjoy my retreat into infantilism with Harry Potter...

But I agree with Nicholas Lezard on the Guardian's site. The writing ain't much cop.

"A nine-year-old might feel quite pleased with the writing in the Harry Potter books. It's pretty embarrassing coming from an adult," says Lezard.

The books are really gripping, but why so long? When I got to number 4 (Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire) I thought this woman needs is a good editor. In the middle it meanders off into boring details about the kids' homework, chop it out I say.

I think JK Rowling has imagined all aspects of Harry's world so acutely she doesn't want to leave anything out. So someone else should do it for her. But I think the first books were so successful that her editors treated her with kid gloves for the latter books.

I applaud Lezard for taking an intelligent adult look at the Harry Potter books. Too many people have opinions about them without taking the time to read them.

For me, writing’s like falling asleep

Writing is like falling asleep. Not so easy, it's like falling asleep, but in that if you can’t watch yourself, you can’t do it.

You get into bed and are looking forward to a nice sleep, and start gradually dozing off. But if you consciously realise you’re doing it – ah, sleep comes at last – bang! you’re awake.

I think writing is the same. If after spending a morning of scratching your head checking your emails and generally proscrastinating you give yourself a sideways glance and realise you're writing away happily, the moment goes and poof! you’re scratching your head and wondering how you can start again.

So don’t look at the first spark of inspiration in case you get too dazzled to carry on.

Good angel cyclists (letter to Time Out)

I’m sure Michael Hodge’s Slice of Life last week (Time Out 1915) was calculated to get hundreds of letters from irate cyclists, but I’m going to ignore that fact and write anyway.

I think his column misses the point. Every day I see the vast majority of my cycling colleagues flouting the rules of the road, often creating dangerous situations because of their carelessness.

But a leaked Transport for London report two weeks ago (reported in The Times) came to the shocking conclusion that cyclists who stop at red lights are more likely to be killed on the road than those who don’t.

Many pedestrians put themselves and others into danger by dashing across the road in front of cars and stepping out when they aren’t looking. But when do you hear the whole class of pedestrians being vilified, except perhaps by Jeremy Clarkson?

Law abiding “good angel” cyclists don’t deserve death on the roads just because fellow cyclists don’t obey traffic signs.

Noisy neighbourhood

I'm working at home this week and have discovered my upstairs neighbour vacuums her floor about three times a day, no exaggeration.

I do mine er... up to once a week. Am I a slob or is she crazy?

(She does have builders in at the moment, but even so is three times a day necesary?!)

The noise is, incidentally, more irritating than the screams of her month-old baby.

I won't even go into "tuneless whistling man" who lives over the fence or the icecream van that plays the Match of the Day theme tune. (Gah!)

On a more positive note, I'm rather proud to have discovered a blackbird using my garden as a foraging patch.

Funky Mary

Her name was Mary Func, so she couldn’t help being known as Funky Mary. But she wasn’t funky in the least sense, which made it worse. And it wasn’t the sort of easy nickname people tossed around like Sharpie, Mikey or Red. It was just another needle to needle her with.

She had short brown hair and moony glasses, because one could never be pretty with a pair of specs. Her skirts stopped below the knee showing a short length of stout calf before the start of her socks which led to her flat shoes.

And anyway, as a surname Dysfunc would have been more appropriate.

Did I wrong Stephen Isserlis?

Listening to Classic FM while working at home today, a Bach cello piece was played. It would normally have been delightful, but now filled me with a sense of shame.

It was played by Stephen Isserlis, who I saw perform at a concert more than 15 years ago. I was learning to play the cello and my music teacher had secured front row tickets for me and my family in the (er) renowned Dorking Halls.

But I was foolish, I was young, I was bored. I took to flicking through the programme during an Isserlis solo. He was scraping away just in front of us and (according to my Mum) glared at this impudent audience member affecting studious scrutiny of his biographical details, rather than sitting listening awe-struck. My Mum snatched away the programme and I waited for the dressing down later.

So now I can’t listen to Stephen Isserlis without a feeling I’ve let myself down, whereas really I was a bored teenager and he was the seasoned professional who must have played to tougher audiences than you find in the Dorking Halls!

Gah, European bureaucrats

I’m not always in agreement with the ways of the United States. But what I do admire is what must be the greater openness of government agencies – in particular in comparison with lumbering, backward bureaucrats in the EU.

In the US, for example, there is far more public scrutiny of the process of approving new medicines than in the EU. Where there are tricky scientific issues at stake when the federal agency the FDA is considering approving a new drug it calls in the heavyweight experts – a different committee for every discipline. These experts – who are usually academic clinicians at the top of their fields – openly discuss the issues in a public meeting.

The meetings are public in the truest sense. Patients can stand up and say what a difference being on the product in a clinical trial has made to their lives. Or family members can express concern that the drug could have harmful effects on their relatives. The experts, meanwhile, bat scientific arguments back and forth and then decide on the balance of the evidence whether a drug is safe and effective.

Science is not all black and white, and there is often subtle weighing up of the pros and cons involved in approving a drug. Regulatory agencies must decide whether on the whole the drug’s benefits outweigh its risks.

But in Europe, things are done very differently. The European Medical Agency convenes a scientific advisory meeting to discuss each drug up for approval, sometimes also inviting in external experts. But this is behind closed doors and rather than the committee voting in favour of approval of a new therapy, it “issues a positive opinion”.

This bureaucratic mincing of language acts to obfuscate who is actually making a decision. Rather than allowing us to see that a committee of highly educated people teases out the good points and bad points of a potential medicine – taking into account their different areas of expertise, different particular schools of thought they have been brought up with, varying points of view that they have adopted over the years and perhaps personal prejudices and professional jealousies. “Issuing a positive opinion” removes this human element and makes us more reluctant to argue.

CLINICAL TRIALS

I think the best example of the difference in approaches is the way the agencies have responded to calls for greater public access to information on what clinical trials pharma companies are carrying out.

This has led in recent years to firms with studies running in the US pledging to register them on the US government website clinicaltrials.org. The site gives a snapshot of all the studies currently testing new asthma drugs or new typical of cardiovascular surgery, for instance.

But in the EU, it’s, surprise surprise, not that simple. While separate drug companies publish information on their websites, a pan-European website is only available to drug companies and other organisations running studies. And even they have to plough through a Machiavellian security system.

WHY?

Perhaps the EU fears making information on new drugs and trials available and opening the doors of its expert committees because of the possible misinterpretation of scientific argument…

But surely it is far better for all the arguments to be aired publicly in the first place, rather than leave the agency open to claims it overlooked, for instance, a key safety issue which rears its head in later years. The FDA is more transparent and allows the public and the media to see shades of grey.

When I contacted the European Medical Agency to ask whether I would be allowed access to the clinical trials database, I was told this was not allowed at present but there were exceptions which would make some data available in future.

“As these two derogations to the confidentiality of directive 2001/20/EC are still in the process of being implemented there is no current publicly accessible database at the EU level,” the agency continued with a brilliant example of the turgid bureaucratic language that makes it so difficult to get to the bottom of what’s going on. European bureaucrats should stop tying themselves up in linguistic knots and be as open as possible.