No real winners in blood inquiry
Parents used to worry about too much TV, but didn’t call it a disorder
Medicine is a risky business, an errorprone activity where, despite the best of intentions, things can go disastrously wrong – though rarely on the scale of the contaminated blood tragedy of the Eighties, when potentially lethal viruses, including HIV and hepatitis C, were passed to an estimated 7,500 patients with the clotting disorder haemophilia.
Starting last week, an independent inquiry, chaired by retired High Court Judge Sir Brian Langstaff, seeks to clarify how this came about. Still, its portrayal as “a scandalous secret festering at the heart of the NHS” presupposes a negligent culpability, with patients being knowingly exposed to this hazard, which is certainly not the case.
The viruses responsible were only identified subsequent to their infective transmission – HIV in 1983, the hepatitis C virus six years later, in 1989. By definition, it was not possible to test blood products for the presence of a virus that was, at the time, unknown to medical science.
It is possible, in retrospect, the relevant authorities failed to respond appropriately to the gravity of the situation, though the wisdom of hindsight can be deceptive. Perhaps the inquiry’s scrutiny of an estimated 100,000 documents will reveal more than is already established – but the legal teams involved are likely to be the major beneficiaries.
Halt the moral panic
Parents are naturally concerned about the potentially adverse effects of social media, and the internet generally, on impressionable young minds. Still, it is necessary to guard against the moral panic of supposing, as claimed last week, that they are “fuelling a mental health crisis in every classroom”. The issue of “addiction” to video games, played by the overwhelming majority of teenagers, is a case in point.
Internet gaming disorder has been recently designated as a psychiatric condition, on the basis of several fairly elastic criteria; they include “preoccupation”, “withdrawal” (anxiety if denied access) and “escape” (to avoid uncomfortable feelings). But such criteria could apply to many who, after a hard day’s grind at school, seek relaxation by playing their favourite games.
To be sure, internet gaming disorder may be associated with adverse outcomes – attention deficit, social anxiety, low mood – but it is difficult to establish whether this is the consequence, or cause, of enthusiasm for video games.
The likelihood must be that, as with previous generations of adolescents whose behaviour has caused concern to their elders, they will turn out all right in the end. At one time, not so long ago, parents were concerned about the damaging effects of watching too much television, but no one thought of labelling it as television-watching disorder.
Contrasting vision
This week’s medical query comes courtesy of Mr N N from Birmingham who, for the past several weeks, has noted the vision in his left eye goes lighter and darker in synchrony with his pulse – “like turning the contrast button on the television back and forth”. His optician could find nothing amiss with his eyesight or retina, and an ultrasound of his carotid arteries showed no impediment to blood flow. The two eye specialists he has consulted are mystified. Might anyone similarly afflicted, he wonders, have an explanation?
Sweet sensation
Finally, my thanks to a Devon reader for passing on his experience of how a simple change in diet restored his mobility. He had been troubled for the past decade with swollen arthritic joints of the hands and feet, seriously compromising the enjoyment of his favourite pastimes of golf, walking and gardening. The standard anti-inflammatory drugs prescribed by his family doctor certainly helped, but when a couple of months ago his wife suggested his sweet tooth might be a factor, he cut out all sugar-rich foods, save for a dribble of honey on his breakfast bowl of porridge. “Within eight days, I was as good as new, or very nearly,” he writes. So improved, he is just off for a walking holiday in the Alps, though “will have to resist the apfelstrudel”.