Poor vision
Not even Kim Jong-un in North Korea stoops so low as to spy on his doctors, writes Maurice Gueret, who thinks short-sightedness may be Leo’s big problem
State spies
The Irish health service reached a new nadir in June, with news filtering out that the Department of Health had sanctioned private investigators to spy on senior doctors, the bulwarks of our hospital service. I shuddered to hear Leo defend this in the Dail. Trust has been eroding away for years between those who work at the coalface and those who pull the strings. But I never thought we would see the use of spying by either side to sort out contract or pay issues. Very, very few consultants abuse this State. The same Department encourages public hospitals to shake down as many patients as possible by hiring out private and semi-private rooms, securing insurance payouts and charging extortionate casualty and outpatient fees. Irish patients with haemochromatosis are the only ones in Europe who are fleeced every single week so they can have their blood drained in so-called public hospitals. We have a mongrel of a health system in Ireland that no other nation has followed, planned or conceived. I doubt even North Koreans would spy on their own staff.
Short Sight
The most interesting piece of medical research this summer concerns short-sightedness. An ever-increasing number of young people are becoming myopic, with rates in some oriental countries approaching 80pc. In Europe, rates of close to 50pc have been recorded. The culprit, and I wish we had this excuse when I was in my teens, appears to be too much study. A new paper in the British Medical Journal suggests that the longer we spend in education, the worse our eyesight becomes. Each year spent over books causes an average refraction error of minus 27 diopters. More research is needed, but it is being suggested that too much study is being done indoors, away from natural light. It wouldn’t surprise me if dim LED lighting and an overreliance on mobile phones will shoulder a fair amount of future blame. If CAO forms need to be rewritten this summer, might I suggest a career in optometry? The eyes are going to get very busy.
Eureka!
I was nearly 20 years of age before realising that short-sightedness was a serious problem for me. During a particularly dull medical physics lecture, I picked up a pair of spectacles from a classmate and had that eureka moment, realising how underpar my eyesight had been for so long. It’s a terrible pity that every secondary school in the country doesn’t screen its pupils every few years for short-sightedness. If this country wasn’t so petrified now of being sued further down the road, we could do a lot more good for our young people.
Wexford’s flu
As the centenary months approach, we’ll be hearing a lot more soon about the 1918-19 Spanish flu. Stacking
the Coffins is a superb new book on how this influenza affected Ireland. Written by Dr Ida Milne and published by Manchester University Press, I cannot recommend it enough for libraries and general readers. It’s based on oral stories with survivors and families, and packs a riveting read, with new local details about an illness that ravaged Ireland’s eastern counties. I was fascinated by how Wexford coped with the illness. One of the recorded deaths, that of a farmer called Thomas Byrne, took place in the rural hinterland of Ballindaggin, where I was married almost 30 years ago. Enniscorthy’s newspaper supported local businesses, and told readers to warm some Cousins’s lemonade in a pan to make the perfect drink for influenza sufferers. Mr Cooke, a local chemist in Gorey, went further by claiming that his cod liver oil could protect against it. The disinfectant business thrived, and one reporter wrote that every second person you would meet in the street reeked of eucalyptus. Down in New Ross, there were almost 1,000 cases. They weren’t helped when the local doctor himself took ill. Wakes were discouraged. Schools closed. Three young children from Newtownbarry (now Bunclody) died on the same day. Considering the devastating effect of influenza, it’s extraordinary that in February 1919, Wexford won a record fourth All-Ireland football title in a row, in a match deferred by the epidemic. Those who gained most from Ireland’s worst flu weren’t doctors and nurses, many of whom died in front-line duty. It was the timber merchants and the undertakers, who cleaned up from stacking all those coffins.