Efforts to ban the legal high mephedrone linked to the deaths of two teenagers were delayed by the labour Government’s sacking of its top drugs adviser, it has emerged.

The Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs was asked last year to report on the dangers of the substance, which is also known by its street name “miaow miaow”.

But drugs charities said that the report had been “extremely” delayed by the departure of Professor David Nutt, the ACMD chairman, who was sacked by Alan Johnson, the Home Secretary, last October for criticising the Government’s cannabis policy.

The report, which is now due on March 29, is expected to recommend a ban on mephedrone which can currently be bought legally as plant fertiliser.

Niamh Eastwood of Release, the drugs law charity, said: “There are a number of things that have been delayed in relation to the sacking and I think this report was delayed by about eight weeks.

“Our position is that scientists should be able to express their opinions without fear of being sacked, and the labour Government’s decision to sack Professor Nutt did a lot of damage to the ACMD.”

The ACMD wrote to the Government promising to report on the dangers of mephedrone last September, before Professor Nutt was sacked.

In a letter dated December 22 2009, Les Iverson, Prof Nutt’s successor as chairman of the panel, said he still planned to report to the Government “at the earliest possible opportunity” despite “the difficulties of the last two months”.

Pressure on the Government to outlaw mephedrone has intensified after headteachers called for action on the dangerous drug which has been linked to the deaths of four people.

Louis Wainwright and Nicholas Smith, both 19, took mephedrone – a legal stimulant sold as plant food – before collapsing. The substance can be bought on the internet for £4 and is known on the street as “miaow miaow”.

There have been two previous deaths in Britain linked to the drug which is illegal in other European countries including Norway, Germany and Finland.

Headteachers this morning joined calls for the Government to consider outlawing the substance.

Mick Brooks, general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers, told the BBC: “This drug clearly has the same inherent dangers as any Class A drug and I think serious consideration should be given to banning it.

“The problem with that is that you then criminalise the people who take it, so we need to think very carefully about what we do, but act with some speed.”

Dr David Wood, consultant clinical toxicologist at Guys and St Thomas’s hospital, said the dangers of the drug were clear.

“We know that it’s a stimulant drug similar to cocaine, amphetamine or MDMA,” he told Radio 4’s Today Programme.

“We’re already seeing patients coming in with significant acute effects like agitation, anxiety, fast heart rates and high blood pressure. There have been reports of patients having seizures and fits like epileptic fits.”

Dr Wood said the drug is also similar to the active component of Khat, the hallucinogenic plant leaf chewed by members of some Somalian communities.

Police are questioning three people over the deaths of the two teenagers who died after taking the drug this week.

On Monday, police were called to Mr Wainwright’s home in the village of Winteringham, where he was pronounced dead.

They were later called to a remote farmhouse in Winterton, the home of Mr Smith, a promising chef who worked at the Winteringham Fields restaurant. Mr Smith’s father Tony, a retired fireman, said his son was not a “druggie”.

Detectives fear the teenagers were killed by a contaminated batch of mephedrone. They have warned anyone with the group or at the same venues who had taken the drug recently to go to a hospital.

Their alleged supplier is under arrest in hospital and a woman was admitted for examination. Two men have been arrested on suspicion of supplying controlled drugs.

From:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/lawandorder/7463675/Efforts-to-ban-mephedrone-delayed-by-sacking-of-top-drugs-adviser.html

Some patients will not be warned before their private records are put on a controversial NHS database because confidential letters offering them the chance to opt out have gone astray, health officials admitted.

Around nine million patients are due to receive letters this month asking whether they wish to stop their medical records being transferred onto the £11 million system, but officials said the sheer scale of the project has made errors inevitable.

Patients should be notified 12 weeks before their records go live, but the NHS admitted that people scattered across three counties in the North East have not been informed because their confidential letters were sent to the wrong addresses.

The Summary Care Records system, which will eventually hold the medical details of more than 50 million patients, has been dogged by fears that the private information it stores will never be safe from hackers and data losses.

Deepa Shah of NHS Connecting for Health, which manages the database, said: “It’s very difficult not to make mistakes when you are mailing nine million people. It’s a shame that a handful of letters have gone missing, but it would be very difficult for us to monitor ever single one.”

Patients in Hertfordshire, Cambridgeshire and Norfolk have received letters addressed to the wrong person in the same envelope as their own letter.

NHS Connecting for Health claimed the error was confined to the North East, but inside sources said letters had also gone missing across Trafford in the North West.

The extent of the error, which occurred when staff began stuffing envelopes manually after machinery broke down, is unknown, but 25 cases of duplicate letters have already been reported.

Officials at the Central Office for Information, which manages Government mail-outs, said they would inform patients whose letters had been sent to the wrong address of the mistake.

But they admitted that none of at least 25 cases discovered by The Daily Telegraph had been reported directly to them, raising fears that many more letters may have gone astray without officials realising.

Lateral Group, the private company contracted by the Central Office for Information to carry out the mail-out, did not respond to questions about the number of letters that had been lost. A spokeswoman for the NHS said the company had taken the error “very seriously”.

At present 1.29 million people have had their details placed on the system and a further 8.9 million records are due to be added by June. By the end of next year, the NHS hopes to have more than 50 million uploaded.

The system is designed to link about 30,000 GPs to 300 hospitals, providing access to an online appointments system and electronic prescriptions.

The labour Government says patients would be able to access their own records online and will be asked before health care staff view their information.

But The Daily Telegraph disclosed on Wednesday that the British Medical Association had written to ministers to give warning that records are being placed on the database without patients’ knowledge or consent.

The chairman of the Association called for the project to be suspended amid claims that the Government is rushing it through before the Conservatives have a chance to cancel it if they win the General Election.

Hamish Meldrum wrote: “The breakneck speed with which this programme is being implemented is of huge concern.

“Patients’ right to opt out is crucial, and it is extremely alarming that records are apparently being created without them being aware of it.”

He warned that people were not receiving their letters because they were being sent to the wrong addresses and many patients who have received them are unsure of what they mean.

Some patients have also complained of being made to answer a series of personal questions before being allowed to opt out of having their confidential records placed on the database.

Staff on the Summary Care Records helpline are told to ask a person’s name, address, date of birth, ethnic group and whether they work for the NHS before agreeing to send them an opt-out form.

Chris Mannering, a 57-year-old housewife from Sussex, said: “It’s intimidating when you’re told that all you have to do is ring the number and ask for a form, and in fact you are interrogated. It made me very cross.”

Dr Katherine Murphy, director of the Patients’ Association, said: “There is a real danger that an initiative that will benefit patients is going to turn into the usual complete mess. Many patients are rightly concerned about their confidentiality and consent and if there is even the slightest impression that this is being pushed through it will generate a feeling of mistrust.

“People who might otherwise have consented could end up opting out which would be the last thing everybody wants.”

A spokeswoman for the Central Office for Information said: “As soon as we became aware [of the mistake] the contractor acted promptly to put in place additional quality checks to safeguard against a repeat of the issue. We remain committed to patient confidentiality and the local NHS will write to those affected to apologise and provide reassurance.”

She added that the letters do not themselves contain any confidential medical information, although they do contain names, addresses and details of the GP surgeries attended by the individuals concerned.

From:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/Patients-will-not-be-warned-before-medical-records-go-online-after-vital-letters-lost

Women who have taken the contraceptive pill are less likely to die of cancer and heart disease, a study has found.

The research, which studied 46,000 women over almost 40 years, was led by Prof Philip Hannaford of the University of Aberdeen.

He said that earlier data from the study had suggested there was an increased risk from using the pill but this disappeared in the longer term.

The professor said: “I think it is really reassuring for women.”

The results are from the Royal College of GPs Oral Contraception Study, one of the world’s largest investigations into the health effects of the pill.

The study was published online in the British Medical Journal (BMJ).

Prof Hannaford told BBC Scotland: “We have known for a while that whilst women use the pill they have a small excess risk of disease but that seems to wear off. What we have never known is, what are the really long-term effects?”

“This study, after following up a large group of women for 39 years, has shown there is no increased risk among women who have used the pill, in fact there is a small 12% drop.”

He said women who had taken the pill were less likely to die from cancer, heart disease or stroke.

The professor added: “There are some risks whilst you use it but you can minimise those risks by avoiding smoking, having your blood pressure checked, taking part in screening programmes.

“What we know now is once the pill is stopped those risks disappear and in the very long term there is no increased risk, in fact, if anything, a small benefit.”

He said the results of the survey related to the first generation of pills.

Prof Hannaford said pills had changed over the years and methods of assessing risk were now different.

He added: “It would be wrong for me to say these results directly apply to today’s pills, today’s women, but from the few studies that have been done on the newer pills we are finding similar effects as the older pills. So one would suppose that the overall benefit from the newer pills is equally as good.”

From:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/north_east/8563606.stm

A “gaping hole” in the rules on foreign doctors working in Britain is putting patients at risk, MPs have heard.

The General Medical Council has told the Health Select Committee that it is prevented from testing the qualifications of European locums.

Niall Dickson, the GMC chief executive said the council is forced to accept skills competency certificates and qualifications “at face value” and is not allowed by European law to check English language skills.

Mr Dickson told the House of Commons Health Select Committee the GMC cannot impose tests on doctors from the European Economic Area.

“For them we are not allowed to language test and we are not allowed to competency test,” he said.

Nor can the GMC query the value of medical qualifications held by European doctors.

“We can’t say that qualification doesn’t mean very much. If it’s approved and it’s on the European list we simply have to accept them.”

Mr Dickson said the restriction comes from a European Union directive ordering member states to allow workers to move freely around Europe.

He said: “Free movement of labour is fine but, in our view, patient safety trumps free movement of labour.”

The committee is investigating out hours care following the death of David Gray in Cambridgeshire in 2008.

He was killed by a German doctor, Daniel Ubani, who administered 10 times the normal dose of diamorphine.

Dr Ubani had flown to Britain to provide out of hours care under a contract from the local health authority.

In 2004, ministers gave GPs a controversial new contract that allowed them to give up responsibility for out-of-hours care.

Speaking to the committee, Mike O’Brien, a health minister, conceded that the 2004 contract had been flawed.

He said: “There are all sorts of things everyone might like to rewrite on that.

He added: “GPs got the best deal they’ve ever had on that. Ever since, we’ve been recovering from it. They probably all voted Labour in 2005.”

From:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/Gaping-hole-in-rules-on-foreign-doctors-GMC-says

Thousands of people are needlessly having legs, feet and toes amputated because of a failure to treat foot diseases properly.

More than 11,000 people in England suffered amputation of a lower limb because of disease last year – a 7 per cent rise since 2004/05. Half of these amputees die within two years because of circulation problems that lead to heart attacks or stroke.

At least half of amputations caused by diabetes and peripheral arterial disease (PAD) could be avoided if patients were seen by foot specialists more quickly, according to research.

Yet a new audit presented at a conference last week found that one in three diabetics in hospital did not have their feet examined despite the fact that 100 diabetics have lower limbs amputated every week. There are three million diabetics in the UK and they are 24 times more likely than the general population to suffer an amputation.

Lower limb amputations cost the NHS between £50m and £75m every year while properly treating the preceding diseases costs just a fraction of this amount. In a Commons debate last week about the scandal of Britain’s amputees, the Labour MP Brian Iddon said: “We could save legs and save money, even in an age of austerity.”

The country’s leading vascular surgeons meet tomorrow for the Saving Legs conference to discuss how to reduce Britain’s shameful amputation rate, among the highest in Europe.

Dr Gerry Rayman, a diabetes expert from Ipswich, said: “This is not rocket science, so why are we not doing it? It is a scandal that we have been talking about better organised services for more than 10 years, but nothing much has changed. If this continues then we will see more and more amputations in younger people because the rates of obesity and diabetes are on the rise.”

PAD is caused by narrowing of the arteries, usually in the legs. This leads to poor blood flow, causing pain and cramps in the calf, thigh or buttocks. Without proper blood flow, wounds cannot heal, causing infection, ulcers, gangrene and, if left untreated, amputation. PAD affects 30 per cent of over-55s; diabetes and smoking are major risk factors. PAD and diabetes together are a dangerous combination.

In a handful of areas such as Ipswich and Middlesbrough, small, cheap but well-organised NHS teams of foot specialists reduced leg amputations by at least 50 per cent within three years.

These teams include a podiatrist, dietician and medical experts in diabetes, blood vessels and orthopaedics. In other areas, most patients are referred to a vascular surgeon when it is too late to save the limb, says the Circulation Foundation.

Louise Stewart, a specialist podiatrist in Manchester’s foot clinic, said: “Podiatrists everywhere are firefighting because services are so patchy. It is shocking that more than 100 limbs, in patients as young as 35, are lost every week. It is a devastating loss which could often be avoided.”

The Government says its new health-check programme for 40- to 75-year-olds launched last year will improve detection of PAD and diabetes.

From:
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/health-news/thousands-of-needless-amputations-and-deaths-could-be-prevented

Sir Gus O’Donnell, the Cabinet secretary, has been urged by the Conservatives to ensure that no big IT contracts are signed in the run-up to the general election.

Francis Maude, the shadow Cabinet Office minister in charge of plans for a transition to government should the Tories win, has told Sir Gus that “there is no conceivable reason why these contracts need to be signed now”.

In recent weeks, the Department for Work and Pensions has signed some big IT deals which, it is claimed, will result in sizeable savings over the current deals.

This week, the Personal Accounts Delivery Authority has announced a preferred bidder to run the new personal pension accounts from 2012 – although that deal has a specific break clause at seven months that would allow an incoming government to scrap it.

At the Department of Health, ministers aim to complete negotiations this month on a revamp of the big local supplier contracts for the NHS electronic patient record. The renegotiation is aimed at cutting £600m out of the contracts’ present value.

But the Conservatives say they fear the price for that may be even bigger cancellation penalties than the large penalties that already exist.

Mr Maude said that if that happened, “then the cost to the taxpayer of terminating these contracts – signed only weeks before – could be literally billions of pounds. This would be scarce taxpayers’ money completely wasted”.

In a letter to Sir Gus, he said: “As you know, we have said that an incoming Conservative government would impose an immediate mortatorium on ongoing ICT procurements so they can be reviewed in the light of the continuing fiscal crisis. This includes contacts for telecommunications services”.

He added that “there can be no possible damage in waiting the few weeks until the election is over”.

The Tories would expect any senior civil servant signing such deals as the accounting officer to require specific written instructions from ministers before their approval. “Without such written directions,” he said, “those officials would have to expect to be held fully to account for any loss of taxpayers’ money that followed.”

Mr Maude said he hoped Sir Gus would “be able to confirm that no major contracts, either new or renegotiated, will be signed this side of the election”.

In view of the “huge amounts of taxpayer’s money at stake,” Mr Maude said he was copying his letter to the National Audit Offfice. No comment from the Cabinet Office was immediately available.

From:
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/c71f0886-27b4-11df-863d-00144feabdc0.html?nclick_check=1