A Funny Turn On Friday
Thursday, 3rd August
I’d slept with the window open, as I often do and woke up to a very damp bedroom. I suspect, that I’d had a similar incident to the one in My Strange Skin.
I measured my INR at 0800 and it was 2.4.
I had my usual bath and breakfast in Leon on Moorgate.
Afterwards, I just went home and added to this blog.
One thing I noticed was that my left leg was going dead, as I sat on the chair typing. but then that happens regularly. It was similarly to the incident in Saved By A Beer?.
Later I had a tremendous itch in my left foot which I treated with copious amounts of the Body Shop’s Hemp Foot Protector.
Friday, 4th August
I had intended to go to the section of the city wall, that has been put on display at City Wall At Vine Street.
But as I was bumping into people and street furniture, I thought there might be something wrong, so I diverted to the A & E at the Royal London Hospital. I was also dropping my brief-case, when I held it in my left hand.
After various tests, including a CT-Scan, I finally left at 21:30, after they’d found nothing serious.
They measured by INR and they said it was 1.9. As I’d not eaten or drunk, large amounts of food and drink, that would drop my INR, how did it drop by 0.5 in 24 hours?
I went home on the Overground and a bus.
Saturday, 5th August
I wasn’t feeling unwell at all.
I was in all day watching the sport.
I was drinking a lot. Perhaps it was 4-5 mugs of tea and a 500 ml. bottle of Adnams 0.5 % Ghost Ship.
Sunday, 6th August
Very much like Saturday, except that I had lunch with my granddaughter.
I had two bottles of 0.5 % beer.
Monday, 7th August
I measured my INR at 0800 and it was 2.8.
Saved By A Beer?
Last night, I was feeling distinctly unwell. My left foot was itching like mad and I couldn’t walk without hanging onto the furniture.
I decided to take serious action.
- I took off my left sock and plastered it with Body Shop Hemp foot protector, which usually stops the itch.
- I also drunk a bottle of 0.5 %-alcohol Ghost Ship from Adnams.
- The beer went down quickly and cured the unsteadiness.
Twenty minutes later my foot was back to normal.
I really should get hold of this unsteadiness, as I’m sure it’s caused a couple of falls and visits to hospital.
It should be noted that yesterday, I’d been drinking tea all day, as I often do.
Is it just that I get dehydrated very quickly?
Asbestos In M&S Killed My Wife — Gove’s Ruling Is A Disgrace
The title of this post, is the same as that of this article in The Sunday Times.
It is in a section of the paper, which is entitled Act Now In Asbestos, where the paper has a campaign.
These are the first three paragraphs.
Janice Allen met and fell in love with her husband, Stuart, when they worked together at Marks & Spencer’s flagship store in London’s Marble Arch.
The shop would end up killing her.
Janice died of mesothelioma, a cancer she got from exposure to asbestos. The M&S store was constructed using the toxic building material and it was found in several locations where she worked. The department store would award her substantial damages before she died at a hospice in Kent in June 2018.
I have only worked with asbestos once.
This picture shows my father’s printing works in Station Road, Wood Green.
They were not the most salubrious of premises and my father was always making improvements.
My father was a very good practical carpenter and an accomplished painter and decorator.
The back wall of the building was covered on the inside with damp and mould, which even in the 1950s, he thought could be a health hazard, so he decided to do something about it.
- Above a certain height he cleaned the wall and painted it with a standard magnolia paint.
- About two metres above the ground, he fixed a two-by-two batten piece of wood to the wall.
- He also fixed another one to the wall, perhaps halfway up.
- To cover all the damp and mould, he then fixed corrugated asbestos cement sheeting to the two battens with galvanised roofing nails.
- To finish it off he screwed a piece of slatting to the top batten, which he painted a fetching blue colour.
The damp and mould was now out of sight and out of mind.
I remember how this construction was done, as I was my father’s ten-year-old assistant.
Although we’d used asbestos cement sheeting, I don’t think either my father or myself inhaled any asbestos dust, although we weren’t wearing masks, as no-one did in those days.
ICI And Asbestos
My next encounter with asbestos was at ICI in the late 1960s.
- A lot of chemical plants, built before the Second World War were riddled with it.
- But ICI, knew of the problems, and I was given strong warnings about asbestos.
- As I was only putting instruments on plants, with experienced plant fitters, I didn’t have an real encounters with it.
But why if ICI were so anti, were builders still using it and otherwise sensible companies not removing it from their buildings?
This is the large paragraph in The Times article.
An M&S spokesman said: “Like many older buildings, Marble Arch dates back to the interwar era when asbestos was commonly used in construction, and sadly our former colleague Janice Allen worked in the store over 40 years ago, before the consequences of asbestos use were known. Today we rigorously manage asbestos where it is present and ensure the store is safe for every colleague and customer.”
If ICI were worried about asbestos in the late 1960s, why weren’t Marks & Spencer worried about asbestos in the late 1970s.
A Barn In Suffolk
In the 1980s, I put up a new barn, where we lived.
Often, in those days, asbestos was still used for roofing, but I was recommended to use a new British Steel product, where steel was covered in a coloured weatherproof coating.
I Sneeze A Lot
These days, I sneeze a lot, but I didn’t sneeze this much before I was diagnosed as coeliac and went gluten-free.
Could it be that my immune system is so much stronger and when there is something in the air, it is only giving it a good kicking?
I’ve been sneezing a lot for the past few days, as the Council removed a dead tree from outside my house.
But we do know, that Nottingham University have shown, coeliacs on a gluten-free diet have a 25 % lower cancer rate than the general population.
Could this be due to a stronger immune system?
My Coeliac Son Died From Cancer
I believe my youngest son was an undiagnosed coeliac and he lived the rock-n-roll lifestyle on a diet of ciggies, cannabis and Subways, as he was a sound engineer in the music business. He died virtually out of the blue of pancreatic cancer at just thirty-seven.
So on the one hand being a diagnosed coeliac on a gluten-free diet gives you a certain immunity to cancer and other diseases and on the other hand undiagnosed coeliacs are prey to all the nasties we have to live with.
To return to the tragic story in The Times, which gives Stuart’s age as 62, so that places him as being born around 1960 and his late wife; Janice looks about the same age.
I think it is true to say, that in the 1960s, medicine started to change dramatically.
- Serious heart operations and kidney transplants became commonplace.
- The first heart transplant was performed in 1967.
- Drugs were improving.
- Vaccination was stopping polio and other diseases.
- The first test for coeliac disease in children was developed. Sadly, it wasn’t used on me.
But we had little inkling of the role of genes in diseases.
Incidentally, I didn’t come across my first coeliac, until 1972, when a neighbour had a coeliac baby son called Nicholas.
So was the poor lady in The Times story, in some ways a victim of her time?
- Asbestos was wrongly ignored by Marks & Spencer.
- Medicine hadn’t advanced enough to be able to identify, those susceptible to cancer.
- I have heard so many stories of bad use of asbestos.
Sadly, the dangers of asbestos are still ignored by many companies and organisations today and that includes the NHS.
One of my colleagues at ICI in 1968 will be livid at how we are ignoring asbestos.
Is This A Possible Scenario?
Consider.
- Someone is born coeliac and they are not diagnosed.
- If they were born before 1960, there was no test for coeliac disease in children.
- The simple genetic blood test came in around the turn of the century.
- They work with asbestos in their twenties.
- Their immune system is not good enough to protect them.
Just like my son, will they get a serious cancer?
Coeliac Disease And Covid-19
In Risk Of COVID-19 In Celiac Disease Patients, I look at a pier-reviewed paper from the University of Padua.
This sentence, sums up the study.
In this analysis we report a real life “snapshot” of a cohort of CeD patients during the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak in Italy, all followed in one tertiary centre in a red area of Northern Italy. Our data show, in accordance with Emmi et al., the absolute absence of COVID-19 diagnosis in our population, although 18 subjects experienced flu-like symptoms with only one having undergone naso-pharyngeal swab.
There were 138 coeliac disease subjects in the study and they had been gluten-free for an average of 6.6 years.
The downside of this, is how many undiagnosed coeliacs, suffered a severe dose of Covid-19.
Conclusion
Given the pain coeliac disease has inflicted on my family over the years, I believe that all children should be tested for coeliac disease.
I would also recommend, that anybody thinking of working with asbestos or taking a job with a high cancer risk, should get themselves tested for coeliac disease.
Being found to suffer from coeliac disease will not in itself kill you, and with the right diet, it might even prolong your life.
£20 Per Hour Is A 43 % Pay Increase Over £14 Per Hour
The BBC has just reported on the Junior Doctors Strike from outside University College Hospital.
- Banners were showing that their current pay rate is £14 per hour.
- In an interview, a strike leader said that junior doctors need an offer of £20 per hour.
That would be a pay increase of forty-three percent.
I’m sure we’d all like a pay or pension increase of that amount.
British Five-Year-Olds Up To 7cm Shorter Than Western Peers
The title of this post, is the same as that of this article in The Times.
This is the sub-heading.
Poor diet and health service cuts blamed for ‘pretty startling’ trend
These are the first two paragraphs.
Five-year-olds in Britain are on average up to seven centimetres shorter than their peers in other wealthy nations, in a trend described as “pretty startling”.
A poor national diet has been highlighted as a major culprit in Britain’s fall down international rankings of child height.
I am coeliac and am only 170 cm.
During the pandemic, I did some statistical research on coeliac disease and the covids for my own interest.
I found a peer-reviewed Indian medical paper entitled Coeliac Disease: Can We Avert The Impending Epidemic In India? The author felt that modern high-gluten wheats, were increasing the rate of the disease.
The author also said this about introduction gluten to babies in Sweden.
The time of first exposure to wheat influences the development of celiac disease. In countries such as Finland, Estonia, and Denmark, characterized by low gluten consumption in infancy, celiac disease prevalence is much lower than in Sweden where gluten consumption is high in infancy. A natural experiment occurred in Sweden about two decades ago when national recommendations were made to introduce wheat into the diet after cessation of breast feeding at six months. This change was coupled with increased wheat gluten consumption through infant feeds. Together these measures resulted in a two-fold increase in incidence of celiac disease in Sweden, which was attributed to introduction of wheat into the diet after cessation of breast feeding. In 1996 this recommendation was changed to introduce gluten in gradually increasing amounts while the infant was still being breast fed. This led to a dramatic decrease in celiac disease incidence.
It is interesting to look at heights of five-year-olds given in the Times article for the four countries.
- Denmark – 117.4 – 118.1
- Estonia – 116.9 – 115.7
- Finland – 116.3 – 114.5
- Sweden – 115.1 – 115.1
Note that all heights are in centimetres, with boys first.
As according to the graphs in the article the UK and the US have shown the biggest declines in height, is gluten-rich junk food, the major cause of this decline?
More research needs to be done!
Bonus For GPs If Patients Join Drug Trials In Plan To Lure Firms To NHS
The title of this post, is the same as that of this article on The Times.
This is the sub-heading.
£650m boost for medical research after number of participants slumps
These three paragraphs outline what is to be done.
Tens of thousands more patients will be signed up for clinical trials as ministers promise drug companies better access to the NHS to expand the economy and develop cutting-edge treatments.
Jeremy Hunt, the chancellor, is promising a £650 million package to boost life sciences as he attempts to lure pharmaceutical giants to Britain.
GPs will be offered financial incentives to recruit patients into trials of new treatments and hospitals will be given research targets under plans to reverse a slump in clinical testing while the NHS struggles with the backlog from Covid-19.
It all sounds good to me.
I have been involved in several trials and medical research projects.
- As part of my coeliac disease diagnosis, one endoscopy was performed by Rebecca Fitzgerald at Cambridge, as she was taking samples of bile fluids for her research into Barrett’s esophagus.
- After the death of my wife, I was interviewed by PhD students in the Psychology Department at Liverpool University for their research into widowhood.
- Oxford University interviewed me on diet for their coeliac disease research.
- After my stroke, I spent an entertaining afternoon at the University of East London doing balance tests by computer. Their aim was to develop a reliable balance test for stroke and other patients, that could be carried out by physiotherapists quickly, than by more expensive doctors.
- I have also been on a drug trial at Queen Mary University, but that drug was useless and had no good or bad affects, so the trial was halted. However, it did lead to other enjoyable activities in the field of patient relations with treatment and research.
As a confirmed coward, I should note that with the exception of the drug trial, all of the other projects were low risk.
I should say, that I also sponsor pancreatic cancer research at Liverpool University, in memory of my son, who died from the disease. I wrote about the first Liverpool project in There’s More To Liverpool Than Football And The Beatles!.
A Database Of Projects Open For Volunteers
I believe that this is needed, so that those like me, who like to contribute to research can volunteer.
Perhaps some of the £650 million, that has been promised by Jeremy Hunt, could be used to create the database.
I also believe the database could be used for other non-medical research.
The Lady In A Sari With A Fag
She was standing in Leicester Square watching people with a partner.
It just didn’t go!
Simon Reeve’s South America
I am just watching episode two of this television series on BBC2.
It is definitely a must-watch. You can watch it here.
Interestingly, the program was giving a similar message about the rain forest, that I talked about in The Enforcer From The World Bank.
Is Putin Coeliac?
Under Construction
Coeliac Journey Through Covid-19 – More Research Needs To Be Done
More Research Needs To Be Done
I am inevitably lead to the conclusion that more research needs to be done.
Gluten-Free Hospital Food
I have discussed possible research routes with friends, who are research doctors and I feel, one piece of research that could be done, would be to look at how many gluten-free meals are served on wards, where covid patients are treated.
- I have been into hospital several times since I was diagnosed as a coeliac and there has been a couple of problems.
- But like all coeliacs, I complained and got what I need.
- By looking at the food, you would also pick up those, who hadn’t got a gold-standard diagnosis, but went gluten-free for good personal reasons.
- I used to monitor a forum for coeliacs and there were a lot of complaints about hospital food.
I believe that monitoring gluten-free food on wards, where covid patients are treated, could give a good insight into how diagnosed coeliacs on a gluten-free diet respond to the covids.
It is also something that could be applied easily at a hospital.
Testing Covid Sufferers For Coeliac Disease
This is supposedly a true story.
- A lady in Hampstead, wakes up one morning and she’s gone yellow.
- She phones her GP, who says she better come in to the surgery.
- The GP phones the local Royal Free Hospital, who are London’s experts on livers and they advise the lady to come straight in.
- The hospital say, it looks like her liver is packing up and she will need a transplant.
- So a doctor showed the lady a series of tests they would be doing.
- The last one was for coeliac disease and she said. “Why that? I can eat anything I want!”
- The doctor replied. “With 1-in-100, that is the cause of your liver problem!”
- She tested positive for coeliac disease and went gluten-free.
Last heard of, she was running a B & B in Corfu.
Given what I said in Coeliac Journey Through Covid-19 – Long Covid, where there is circumstantial evidence linking undiagnosed coeliac disease to long covid, if it works in a proportion of cases, why shouldn’t it be tried?
The Anonymous Widower 