Useless political puppets at the WHO and Public Health England

The problem with having a 'woke' UN is that it ensures the top jobs are not distributed according to ability but under a rationing system in which every country gets to have a top official, a system not unlike the EU's for appointing its unelected commissioners. So at a time of crisis we have, heading the WHO, Tedros Adhanom. Tedros has a PhD from Nottingham University and he is a Malaria researcher; not a distinguished achievement perhaps in the UK but enough in his native Ethiopia to make him Health Minister, and from there to the UN. His abject failure in his post, his inaction and lack of leadership and above all his subservience to the Chinese government have all been well documented, as has the 'Change' org petition calling for his dismissal, which now has 680,000 signatures. The way in which the WHO and the UN work must now either be overhauled to appoint internationally distinguished candidates or we must re-consider our membership.

At home, the failures of Public Health England are also being widely documented. Having missed the bus on testing, and exhibiting an attitude of dismissal towards more distinguished and qualified advice, they continue to offer a mediocre and lackadaisical response to the crisis. The organisation, under the management of Duncan Selbie, has hitherto concentrated on campaigns against tobacco and the evils of sugary drinks. Selbie, an unknown bureaucrat, earns more than the PM. He was due to answer some very pertinent questions from the Commons' Health & Social Care select committee on the 28th March, but reported he was exhibiting some of the early symptoms of C-19 and so was unable to attend. He is now self-isolating and working from home.

We deserve better than Selbie and Adhanom. This sort of woke stupidity costs lives and ruins others. I leave you with one chart - levels of TB, often multi drug resistant, in London that are actually higher than those in Ethiopia, Iraq and Afghanistan. Selbie has been in his job since 2013. This should have been his bloody priority, not his campaign to ban smoking in all hospital grounds. He has failed at every aspect of public health. The man must go.

Woman achievers, stress and cancer

I'm just throwing a thought, a question, out this morning. Along with the headline sudden death of this Christmas, I received in an email exchange with an old workmate news that a woman ex-colleague died of cancer last month. Nothing unusual about that, you may think, but she's either either the fourth or fifth that I know about - albeit over about twenty years. 

They all had certain things in common. They were ambitious achievers, in reasonably senior positions and all worked under greater than usual stress and all have died of cancer in their 40s and 50s. The blokes all seem to be buggering on, with various ailments coming with age but not the attrition rate of the big C. And that's anecdotal, not empirical, so not science.

The science I can find tends to say there's no link between stress and female cancer but the many answers seem to indicate that I'm not the only one seeing a correlation and asking the question. Which is, does busting the glass ceiling, competing with men in a male-normative environment, and coping with above normal stress, increase the cancer risk for women?

H, who died most recently, had actually left her high-stress job more than a year ago to do something far more relaxed, that she enjoyed, in a county city that she loved. So poignant.