PR Blogs

The media – print, broadcast and social – is full of swine flu news. It’s also full of speculation, warnings, fear and hype.

Let’s get this in perspective. It’s very sad that so many have died in Mexico, but the figures are really very small. I am highly unlikely to die from swine flu. You are highly unlikely to die from swine flu.

Every year people do die from influenza. It is a serious disease, and we are going to get a serious new strain before too long. When it happens many will die, but probably not as many as Spanish flu around 90 years ago, when somewhere between 20 and 100 million died.

If we want to talk about deaths in 2009 let’s focus on much more serious matters. Many die every day from wars around the world. We could do something about these, if we had the will.

Every day, yes every day, around 16,000 children die from hunger-related causes. That’s 16,000 every day, almost 700 every hour, 11 every minute.

So in the time you have taken to read this another 5 or 6 children have died. We could do something about this.

For those families with children dying from hunger, for those in war zones, with bullets, landmines, cholera and other issues to concern them, swine flu is something of a trivial matter.

So let’s keep things in perspective. And let’s worry about wars, child deaths, global warming and those other things that swine flu have pushed out of our minds. We can keep flu at bay by washing our hands. Let’s not wash our hands of these other important matters.

The Nursing and Midwifery Council should be ashamed of itself. Its decision, to ban Maragaret Haywood from ever being allowed to practise nursing again, is misguided and is a disgrace.

For those who don’t know, Margaret Haywood was so appalled by the neglect of elderly patients at the Royal Sussex Hospital where she worked that she agreed to secretly film conditions for a BBC Panorama documentary. Her decision was not taken lightly. She had reported the issues to her superiors but nothing had been done.

The programme highlighted dreadful instances of neglect. Before the programme was shown everyone who had been filmed had either given their permission for it to be shown or their relatives had done so where the patient had since died.

However the Nursing and Midwifery Council said to undertake the filming was a major breach of its code of conduct and compromised the dignity of elderly patients in the last stages of their lives. Someone needs to tell the council that it was the neglect that compromised their dignity, not the exposure of it.

Margaret Haywood has been in nursing for 20 years and would not have taken such drastic action if the authorities had done their jobs properly. If the Council believes that it is more important to protect the interest of the nursing profession than to uncover and highlight such conditions, then it is not a fit body to rule upon these matters.

Sainsbury’s seems to think that pollack is not a fish its customers want to ask for. It appears they think that the name is just a little too close to something slightly suggestive.

Their solution is to rebrand it as colin, pronounced in the French way. Now apart from the fact that colin in France is hake, do they really think that this is going to make the fish so much more popular? And aren’t most people going to say Colin, as in the boy’s name, and isn’t that just as odd.

This appears to be a strategy to deal with a very silly and insignificant problem, by substituting a name which is not that easy to pronounce and one which is incorrect at that.

Name changing doesn’t hide the problem. Windscale became Sellafield but it still had nuclear leaks. And isn’t pollack, or colin, the rather tasteless fish that is mostly used in school fishcakes and which has put a generation of children off fish for life?

Seems to me that Sainsbury’s have started something they probably wish they hadn’t. A real load of bolins…