Review of the Papers, Thursday 02 August

Government

• A battle has broken out within the Department of Health and much of the rest of the National Health Service over whether the new health and social care regulator should assess the quality of commissioning undertaken by primary care trusts. PCTs will shortly control a budget of about £75bn a year from which they can buy care on behalf of patients while still running some services themselves. In theory, at least, current government policy will see them purchasing that care from a wider range of public, voluntary and private providers. But as the government draws up plans to create Ofcare, the single replacement for the current health and social care regulators, there is disagreement over whether PCTs' purchasing performance should be independently inspected or merely managed by strategic health authorities. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/973f18ae-40a3-11dc-9d0c-0000779fd2ac.html
• A drug that may help thousands of people with severe arthritis should not be provided on the NHS, according to draft guidance from the National Institute for Clinical Excellence (Nice). The body responsible for deciding what medication should be available on the NHS said abatacept, manufactured by Bristol-Myers Squibb under the brand name Orencia, was not cost-effective. The chief executive of the National Rheumatoid Arthritis Society, Ailsa Bosworth, said that about 12,000 people with an aggressive form of the disease who did not respond to other treatments would be "condemned to a life of pain and disability, which could be equally expensive to the NHS". http://www.guardian.co.uk/medicine/story/0,,2139853,00.html
• About 30,000 junior doctors moved into new NHS posts across Britain yesterday without the disruption to patient care forecast by the British Medical Association, health service chiefs claimed last night. Sian Thomas, deputy director of NHS Employers, said able candidates had been appointed to hospitals throughout the country instead of clustering disproportionately in the elite metropolitan teaching hospitals. She said the decision to start all the new appointments on a single day would have to be reviewed next year. Hospitals might be able to cope more easily if the starting dates were phased, as they were in previous years. http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk-news/story/0,,2139552,00.html
• British Airways and Virgin Atlantic face a £300m lawsuit brought by millions of air passengers, after their roles in a price-fixing cartel were exposed by the authorities yesterday. The class action lawsuit will be fought in the UK and US, and could see the airlines being forced to repay hundreds of millions of pounds to customers. The revelation came as BA was hit by record fines totalling almost £270m from the Office of Fair trading and the US department of justice for fixing the price of fuel surcharges for long-haul passenger flights and its cargo business. http://www.guardian.co.uk/ba/story/0,,2139783,00.html
• Eight million Britons have unsecured debts of more than £10,000 and are struggling to meet monthly repayments, according to new research. Debt on credit cards and store cards is largely to blame for the soaring levels, which have risen considerably over three months. In April this year 14 per cent of people owed £10,000 or more. That proportion now stands at 18 per cent - almost a fifth of all adults, according to Thomas Charles, a debt consultancy firm. The research also showed that a quarter admit that they regularly struggle to meet repayments. The research comes as the Bank of England's Monetary Policy Committee debates its sixth interest rate rise in less than a year, which will push even more people into debt. Rates were increased to 5.75 per cent last month - their highest level for six years. The Bank has already been warned by business leaders that another rise will cause "serious economic damage" and would be "very dangerous" for the housing market and industry. Many families are struggling as the cost of living - particularly fuel and food - keeps increasing. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/08/02/nmoney102.xml
• Wireless internet use in schools should be suspended amid fears million of children may be exposed to a risk of cancer, teachers have said. Until it can be proved the technology is safe, pupils are being used as "guinea pigs in a large-scale experiment", according to the Professional Association of Teachers (PAT). The comments follow claims - disputed by officials - that "wi-fi" networks give off three times as much radiation as a typical mobile phone mast. Official guidance already recommends a "precautionary" approach to building masts near schools, saying parents must be notified first. Now teachers say the same rules should be extended to wi-fi use in the classroom. Philip Parkin, PAT general secretary, said: "A full scientific inquiry should be commissioned in order to better understand the issues. "Schools should be discouraged from installing further networks until the results of such an inquiry are known. My real concern is that until there is a full inquiry based on both existing evidence and on newly-commissioned research work, the nation's children are being treated as guinea pigs in a large-scale experiment." http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/08/01/nwifi101.xml
• Police are seeking powers to take DNA samples from suspects on the streets and for non-imprisonable offences such as speeding and dropping litter. The demand for a huge expansion of powers to take DNA comes as a government watchdog announced the first public inquiry into the national DNA database. There is growing concern among MPs and civil liberties groups about the number of children under 10 and young black men on the database - the biggest in the world. But a number of police forces in England and Wales are backing proposals that would add millions more samples to it. The Association of Chief Police Officers gave a warning, however, that allowing police to take samples for non-recordable offences - crimes for which offenders cannot be imprisoned - might be perceived as indicative of "the increasing criminalisation of the generally law-abiding public". http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/crime/article2183105.ece
• The restoration of eastern England's ancient watery landscape, the Fens, has moved a step closer with the award of a multimillion-pound grant to turn farmland back into wetland. The record £8.9m donation from the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) will finance the Great Fen Project - the creation of a sweeping stretch of marsh, reed beds, wet grassland and lakes in Cambridgeshire, which will be one of the biggest habitat restoration schemes in Europe. The aim is to bring back part of the historic, wildlife-rich wilderness which once covered 3,000 square miles of the low-lying ground between Cambridge, Peterborough and The Wash, but which has been steadily drained over the past 400 years until more than 99 per cent of it has now gone. http://environment.independent.co.uk/lifestyle/article2826193.ece
• The image of the country vet, accompanied by his dog, driving up hill and down dale to reach outlying farms was made famous by James Herriot in All Creatures Great and Small. But under a new edict government vets, responsible for the protection of millions of farm animals, will no longer be free to take their pets with them. Animal Health, the agency responsible for the state veterinary service, has banned vets and other staff from taking their dogs in cars on visits to farms or other premises when on official business. It is also to extend the ruling to another 2,000 private vets for work carried out under contract to the Government. The diktat was introduced after a member of the public complained about a dog locked inside an employee's car at an agency car park on a hot day. The employee was not a vet or anyone trained for animal health work but senior agency staff were concerned that the practice of allowing dogs on duty risked the possibility of a prosecution and also compromised bio-security on farms. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article2183109.ece