A campaign group has been formed to reduce the amount of sugar added to food and soft drinks in an effort to tackle obesity and diabetes in the UK.
Action on Sugar has been set up by the team behind Consensus Action on Salt and Health (Cash), which has pushed for cuts to salt intake since the 1990s.

The new group aims to help people avoid “hidden sugars” and get manufacturers to reduce the ingredient over time.

Sugar is a widespread presence in our food and it’s often found in unexpected places, for example a can of cola contains nine teaspoons of sugar.  Some tins of tomato soup and bottles of flavoured water have four teaspoons of sugar crammed inside. And seemingly healthy fat free yoghurt often has a high sugar content.

The primary concern is obesity- being high in sugar also means being high in calories.

Nearly two thirds of people in the UK are overweight or obese – leading to other health problems such as type 2 diabetes and heart disease. Some argue that the problems with sugar are even deeper than the calorie content, and that high doses of the sweet stuff can increase the risk of diseases such as a fatty liver.

The cmapaigners believe that a 20% to 30% reduction in three to five years is within reach.

Like Cash, Action on Sugar will set targets for the food industry to add less sugar bit by bit so that consumers do not notice the difference in taste.

It says the reduction could reverse or halt the obesity epidemic and would have a significant impact in reducing chronic disease in a way that “is practical, will work and will cost very little”.

The group listed flavoured water, sports drinks, yoghurts, ketchup, ready meals and even bread as just a few everyday foods that contain large amounts of sugar.

Action on Sugar chairman Graham MacGregor, who is professor of cardiovascular medicine at the Wolfson Institute of Preventive Medicine and set up Cash in 1996, said: “We must now tackle the obesity epidemic both in the UK and worldwide.

“This is a simple plan which gives a level playing field to the food industry, and must be adopted by the Department of Health to reduce the completely unnecessary and very large amounts of sugar the food and soft drink industry is currently adding to our foods.”

Well known food and drink products and their sugar content:

•     Starbucks caramel frappuccino with whipped cream with skimmed milk (tall): 273kcal; 11 teaspoons of sugar
•     Coca Cola Original (330ml): 139kcal; 9 teaspoons of sugar
•     Muller Crunch Corner Strawberry Shortcakre Yogurt (135g): 212kcal; 6 teaspoons of sugar
•     Yeo Valley Family Farm 0% Fat Vanilla Yogurt (150g): 120kcal; 5 teaspoons of sugar
•     Kellogg’s Frosties with semi-skimmed milk (30g): 4 teaspoons of sugar
•     Glaceau Vitamin Water, Defence (500ml): 4 teaspoons of sugar
•     Heinz Classic Tomato Soup (300g): 171kcals; 4 teaspoons of sugar
•     Ragu Tomato & Basil Pasta Sauce (200g): 80kcals; 3 teaspoons of sugar
•     Kellogg’s Nutri-Grain Crunchy Oat Granola Cinnamon Bars (40g): 186kcal; 2 teaspoons of sugar
•     Heinz Tomato Ketchup (15ml): 18kcal; 1 teaspoon of sugar

Source: Action on Sugar

Dr Aseem Malhotra, a cardiologist and science director of Action on Sugar, said: “Added sugar has no nutritional value whatsoever and causes no feeling of satiety.  Aside from being a major cause of obesity, there is increasing evidence that added sugar increases the risk of developing type 2 diabetes, metabolic syndrome and fatty liver.”

Changes to GPs contracts will allow them to spend more time with patients.
The money GP surgeries received until now depended on how they performed against 969 different measures but under the new contract 300 measures will be cut- reducing form filling to free more time with patients, says the British Medial Association (BMA).

There will also be new financial incentives to encourage surgeries located close to each other to work together.

The new contract also aims to provide better care for people with early-stage cancer, for those at the end of their lives or the frail or elderly.

The Welsh government also says the changes should also help reduce the pressure on hospital A&E departments.

Charlotte Jones, chair of the BMA’s Welsh GP committee, said the contract has “removed some of the bureaucratic tick-boxing type of medicine and targets that we’ve had to provide”.

Speaking on BBC Radio Wales, she said doctors will be able to return to “looking after the individual patient, which will then mean that there will be more capacity within general practice surgeries to provide more care for the patients”.

“The whole GP practice team will see the benefits of this which should increase additional capacity because, as we know, GP practices are under enormous strain like the emergency departments are at this current time.”

“We do hope that the feedback from patients will be that they have seen the positive effects of it as well as the GPs going back to being able to manage the individual and not chasing targets.”

However the deal, which comes into effect in April, will not lead to weekend surgeries or more out-of-hours opening, but it should mean that patients will find it easier to get appointments with reduced red tape.

Highlighting the 19m appointments made with GPs last year in Wales, she said: “So actually patients are seeing GPs in huge numbers but sometimes you do wait.  In some ways the opening hours issue is a bit of a distraction to the more fundamental question of how people get to see their GPs when they need to.”

The deal should not mean GPs getting more money. In 2011/12 the average salary for a GP responsible for running a practice was £92,300, while the average pay for a family doctor employed by the surgery stood at £55,000.

“The global sum, the total amount of money, remains the same. It’s just that what people get paid for and how they get paid has been re-negotiated to allow us to modernise the contract and to prioritise those things which we know really matter to patients.”

Some patients are going to Accident and Emergency (A&E) units more than 50 times a year.
Data from 183 sites obtained under the Freedom of Information Act revealed nearly 12,000 people made more than 10 visits to the same unit in 2012-13.

And a small number of those – just over 150 – attended more than 50 times.

Doctors warned that the issue, while confined to a minority of patients, was adding to the mounting pressures on the system this winter.  Many hospitals are already struggling to hit their waiting time targets- without these extra issues.

In England, the four hour target was missed in the first two weeks of December, but the numbers attending A&Es eased over the Christmas period and the target has been met for the past fortnight.

However, that overall figure masks the struggle the biggest units are facing.

Of the 144 major centres, more than 60 failed to hit the target during the Christmas week despite the number of patients dropping by nearly 10%.

Patients Association chief executive Katherine Murphy said: “These figures are of great concern and provide yet more proof that our already overstretched A&E services are being put under increasingly severe strain.

“It needs to be recognised that every inappropriate attendance at the A&E would detract health professionals from attending to the genuine and often life-threatening emergencies,” she added.

She said improving access to GPs could make a big difference – before Christmas, official NHS data showed the number of people waiting longer than a week to be seen by a GP was growing.

A spokeswoman for NHS England said the figures should be seen in context – in England alone there were more than 21 million visits to A&E units last year.

“The figures presented here suggest that the number of people attending A&E frequently is relatively small when considered against the big picture.”

Meanwhile, a spokeswoman for the Department of Health said steps were being made to improve access to community care through the launch of a £3.8 billion joint pot in April 2015 to encourage the NHS and local government to work together.

Health Direct wishes you a healthy New Year.
Health Direct wishes you a healthy New Year for the year ahead in 2014.

Health Direct wishes you a Merry Christmas.
Health Direct wishes you a Merry Christmas- though a happy and health one- rather than an intoxicated one.

The NHS in England is starting to miss its four hour Accident and Emergency (A&E) waiting time targets for the first time this winter.Over the past week, 94.8% of patients were seen within four hours compared to 95.6% the week before. The target is 95%.

The figures cover all 242 centres – major A&Es, smaller minor injury units and urgent care centres. The figures show two thirds of the 144 trusts with major units are missing the target.

It is the first time since April the target has been missed overall – although the major units have been below the 95% mark since July.

It is not unusual for performance to drop in December. For the last three years individual weekly figures have fallen below 95% before Christmas- indeed last winter the NHS was consistently below the 95% figure overall from January to April.

Hospitals are given a 5% leeway to allow doctors to prioritise the sickest patients.

NHS England chief operating officer Dame Barbara Hakin said it was “disappointing” performance had dropped, but said last week was the busiest so far this winter with more than 415,000 people attending A&E, while the numbers that needing admitting to hospital for further treatment – emergency admissions – hit its highest level since 2010.

She added: “We know the A&E standard is ambitious and that is only right. This is the first week since April the 95% standard has not been met, however we do know that sometimes this will happen.”

“Every year we see a dip in the figures for December, with week on week variations which is why we fully assess how local systems are coping with winter pressures over a longer period.”

“We knew this winter would be difficult but it is important to stress the NHS continues to deliver a good service. This is thanks to the hard work and dedication of our frontline staff.”

The drop in performance comes despite the government giving the NHS extra money to cope with winter – £250 million was announced in the summer and another £150m was pledged last month.

A Department of Health spokeswoman added: “We have always been clear that this could be a difficult winter – and there could be more difficult weeks ahead. But the majority of patients continue to get the excellent care they deserve.”

A new review of legal highs could finally lead to sweeping changes to UK drug legislation, the Home Office has said.
Legal highs – officially known as psychoactive substances – are synthetic drugs which can be bought online and sometimes in shops.

The review follows concern drug laws are not flexible enough to tackle them.

Deaths from legal highs in England and Wales almost doubled to 52 last year. The government said it was “determined to clamp down on the reckless trade”.

It is estimated that across the EU one new substance a week is being detected.

Among options the review will consider is legislation modelled on US laws. In the US, drugs are automatically banned if they are “substantially similar” to the chemical structure of substances that are already illegal.

The review will also look at whether those who supply legal highs over the internet and in “head shops” should be required to prove substances are safe and are not being used as a drug. Similar laws have already been introduced in Poland and the Republic of Ireland.

The review panel – which will include police, prosecutors, health experts and local council officials – has been asked to report back in the spring 2014.

Crime prevention minister Norman Baker said: “Despite being marketed as legal alternatives to banned drugs, users cannot be sure of what they contain and the impact they will have on their health.”

“Nor can they even be sure that they are legal. Our review will consider how current legislation can be better tailored to enable the police and law enforcement officers to combat this dangerous trade and ensure those involved in breaking the law are brought to justice.”

The review is being launched on the day the government has announced a permanent ban on two party drugs which were previously legal highs. Hallucinogenic NBOMe – also known as N-Bomb – and the ecstasy-like BenzoFury were banned for a year in June.

Under legislation to be passed next year, NBOMe – a powerful hallucinogen which causes euphoria but can also lead users to feel nauseous and panicky – will be made a class-A substance.

The government has banned more than 200 substances since coming to power.

Health Direct warns that whilst many governments have often had reviews of drug policies- they have all ducked out of making any constructive decisions.

On August 02, 2006 in Risks of taking drugs compared- Scientific review of dangers of drugtaking- Drugs, the real deal we reproduced the first ranking based upon scientific evidence of harm to both individuals and society.

It was devised by government advisers – then ignored by ministers because of its controversial findings. The analysis was carried out by David Nutt, the then senior member of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, and Colin Blakemore, the chief executive of the Medical Research Council.

The boss of the French company PIP which made faulty breast implants has been given a four years jail sentence.Jean-Claude Mas, the founder of the PIP company, was also fined £63,000 (75,000 euros) by a court in Marseille. However,  he will remain at liberty until a French court hears an appeal lodged by his lawyer.

PIP’s sale of faulty implants caused a global health scare which affected about 300,000 women in 65 countries.

The company was found to have used sub-standard silicone gel – rather than medical-grade silicone – which the result that many implants ruptured.

Apart from Mas, four other former PIP executives were convicted and given lesser sentences.

The health scare came to public attention in 2011 when the French government recommended that women have PIP implants removed due to an abnormally high rupture rate.

There was confusion as British health authorities said there was no need for routine removal. However, they later agreed to remove the implants to put women’s minds at rest.

The company’s head of quality control received two years, one of them suspended, and the head of research and development was sentenced to 18 months, suspended.

When an implant ruptures, the silicone gel filling can leak into the body. Some women will not notice anything at all, and there is no evidence of an increased cancer risk.

However, it can result in the formation of scar tissue that can change the shape and feel of the breast. The gel can be an irritant, causing pain and inflammation. It can also be more difficult to remove an implant once it has ruptured.

France’s Health Products Agency (ANSM) has to date registered more than 7,500 implant ruptures and 3,000 cases of undesirable effects, mainly inflammations, among the 30,000 women using PIP products in France.

In a report released in June, the ANSM said such incidents tended to be under-reported, and so “the number of women actually explanted may be greater than the number of cases reported to the agency”.

Dementia has been described as a “global disaster waiting to happen” and the biggest health and care problem of a generation.Someone is diagnosed with the disease every four seconds and cases are expected to soar from 44 million now to 135 million by 2050.

The disease already costs the world £370 billion each year. This week ministers from the G8 major economies are meeting in London to discuss how to tackle this devastating disease.

What is dementia?

• It’s an umbrella term that describes around 100 diseases in which brain cells die on a huge scale.
• All damage memory, language, mental agility, understanding and judgement.
• Alzheimer’s disease is the most common form, affecting 62% of those living with dementia.
• It gets worse with time and eventually people are left completely dependent on carers.
• It is incurable.

So what are the key actions required?

1) Diagnose dementia early

Early diagnosis will be key to tackling dementia. On the day your doctor tells you that you have dementia you might think that’s the early stages of the disease, but it’s not

It takes 10 to 15 years of brain cells dying before memory problems become noticeable and memory tests lead to a diagnosis.

By this stage a fifth of the core memory centres of the brain will be dead.

It’s why doctors think drug trials have failed, they’re simply trying to treat the disease way too late.

However, developments are being made. It is now possible to see one of the damaged proteins closely tied to Alzheimer’s disease in brain scans, but the challenge is to use these tools to predict the development of dementia.

Other methods, such as finding chemicals in the blood which might predict the onset of dementia, are being investigated as well.

Dementia is also not one disease, but many. Alzheimer’s disease, vascular dementia and dementia with Lewy bodies all have similar symptoms, but may need different treatments. Scientists will need to come up with techniques which can readily distinguish between different forms of dementia.

2) Stop brain cells dying

Currently, there is no drug which can halt or even slow the progression of any form of dementia.

A lot of hope was placed on two potential Alzheimer’s drugs – solanezumab and bapineuzumab – but they failed in trials which showed no benefits for cognition.

However, there were hints that solanezumab may work in people with the earliest stages of the disease. A new trial has started looking at patients with mild dementia.

A cure is obviously the dream, but just slowing the pace of the disease would deliver massive rewards. Delaying dementia by five years could halve the number of people living with the disease.

3) Develop drugs to treat the symptoms

There are dementia drugs, which help people to live with the condition, but there are not enough.

Medication can boost the chemical signalling between surviving brain cells. But the last new medicine, memantine, was approved by the US in 2003. Since then there’s been nothing.

4) Find ways to reduce the risk

Want to massively cut the risk of lung cancer? Don’t smoke. Want to avoid a heart attack? Then exercise and have a healthy diet. Don’t want dementia? Then the answer is less certain.

Age is the biggest risk factor. In the UK, one in three people over the age of 95 has dementia, but there’s not much that you can do about that.

Many of the familiar messages – exercise and eat healthily – have been linked to preventing or delaying the onset of dementia. But the full picture of how family history, lifestyle choices and the environment combine to result in dementia is still unclear.

Prof Peter Passmore, from the British Geriatrics Society and Queen’s University Belfast, says the best advice so far is: “To do what’s healthy for the heart to reduce blood vessel damage to the brain.

So avoid obesity, don’t smoke, regular exercise, control blood pressure, sugar and cholesterol.

5) Work out the best care

Dementia has huge costs for society, but medical bills account for only a small fraction of the overall bill. The real cost is in time in care homes and the lost income of families quitting work to care for relatives.

Research will also need to focus on the best ways to care for patients with dementia and to keep them independent for as long as possible.

Studies have already shown that antipsychotic prescriptions can be halved with the correct training for staff.

Thousands of people who go on to be diagnosed with cancer were not referred to a specialists by their GP.
NHS England data from around 4,000 GP practices suggests symptoms were picked up in other ways, for example by accident and emergency departments.

The NHS said not all cancer patients went to their GPs and the figures were not a clear measure of performance.

Patients who do go to their GP with cancer symptoms should be seen within two weeks in 95% of cases, the NHS said.

Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt said the government was tackling the “unacceptable variation” across different practices.

National performance data allows patients to look up their GP surgery and see how it performs against dozens of diagnosis and treatment indicators.

NHS England collected the figures on cancer referral rates from GP surgeries across the country as part of a drive to make the health service more transparent.

The NHS has a target that 95% of patients with suspected cancer should be seen by a specialist within two weeks – a target it says is consistently met.

But in around half of the GP practices sampled, fewer than 50% of patients on their books who were subsequently found to have the disease were referred to a specialist by their doctor.

Sean Duffy from NHS England said: “We know that early diagnosis is the single most important factor in cancer survival, and that’s why patients who visit their GP with ‘red flag’ symptoms like very persistent coughs, blood in urine or faeces or breast lumps should always be referred for further tests on two-week pathways.

“But not all patients visit their GP about these symptoms and others may have cancer without developing specific symptoms.

“These patients will therefore have their cancer diagnosed after going to a hospital as an emergency, or have it spotted incidentally while receiving treatment for another, unrelated issue.”

Mr Hunt said: “Every single patient in the NHS has the right to the very best care – and to see a GP who can spot cancer symptoms early enough to make a difference.