back to menuIt may have escaped your attention but sight testing (though not the spectacles) is now free to people over 60 years of age.
For the past ten years it has only been free to a much more restricted category. Now it is expected that 12 million people over 60 will be screened each year and, it is claimed this could save the sight of over 2 million people.
"School milk experts from around the World met in Windsor", claimed a news release from MAFF. Whatever is the difference between school milk and other milk? They all come from the same cows.
The Ministry is trying to promote free milk under EU subsidies in primary and nursery schools. Although provision of such a scheme is mandatory in member States, participation of the schools themselves is voluntary. On offer are whole and semi-skimmed milk, plain or flavoured, and unsweetened unflavoured whole milk yoghurt. Surely, a spoonful of flavour helps
the yoghurt go down?
The impression is that counterfeit goods come into this country from the Far East, but some are home made. Currently counterfeit goods on sale include Levi, Polo, Calvin Klein, Fila, Ellesse and Kickers.
A successful prosecution at Cullompton Magistrates Court was for possessing registered trade mark signs for the labelling of goods which brought a stiffer penalty than for the selling of the goods themselves. Local authority costs of £1064 were also imposed.
At least these prosecutions usually provide free sources of clothing for refugees and needy people in poorer parts of the world.
At last the Co-operative movement is rationalising rather than continuing with internal competition. The Co-operative Wholesale Society (CWS) and the Co-operative Retail Society (CRS) have pooled their buying power. Let us hope that this will provide improved quality under the venerable "Co-op" label.
The CWS was originally set up in 1863 to buy all the food - buy in bulk; buy cheap; let everyone share the profits. Competition from the big supermarket chains has seen the number of individual co-operative societies fall from 1,400 to 48. The CWS now runs 560 stores, farming and funeral businesses, and the 470 CRS stores.
A vision of the future - "A chip will be embedded in all humans at birth to store personal date and control harmful activities. Students will live in egg-shaped digs with self-cleaning work surfaces."
This report of life in 2020, according to a thousand A-level students (who obviously do not like cleaning) is not so far fetched, with the current controversy about firms wishing to insert chips into the arms of their employees.
I cannot understand why it would not be sufficient for employees to wear an armband on the non-wristwatch bearing arm.
These account for 2% of all serious accidents in the home, and 60,000 people a year end up in hospital at a cost of £12 million to the Health Service.
The main culprits are tins and glass containers, but even plastic ones can be involved. We are advised never to use sharp knifes to open containers, scissors are safer. At least we no longer have to use knives or scissors for many of the fruit juice cartons, though too often the tabs of the pull-off seals break off before the packet is opened and no-one has yet invented a foolproof non spill container.
A Department of Trade & Industry seminar looked at a number of aspects including the development of warning symbols for packaging.
Do patient groups exert undue pressure for the use of unproved drugs? Most of the evidence required to get a drug licensed depends on tests of efficacy and safety, not whether a new expensive drug works better than those it seeks to replace.
Drug firms do not sponsor and help patient groups purely out of charity. "Such patient groups often see dissemination of information about new treatments as one of their primary functions and may pass on industry promotion about new drug treatments without assessing it", reports Hainews (the Journal of Health Action International).
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