The Glass Box.
Be your own radio critic! Tell us here, frankly, what you thought of tonight's programme. In the PM office we meet every night at 1800 in the Glass Box you see above. Add your comment here.
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The blog for the afternoon news and current affairs programme presented by Eddie Mair.
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Thank all that is good for the sanity of the decision in the Michael Stone trial in Belfast. As a very interested observer from afar of NI, I am well-pleased that this scam of the "performance art" defence has been refuted.
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Pesticides: It depends on the farmer. Some care for their neighbours.
As for people, they live in the country. They should take the time to understand the farming activities also. It is hard to ignore a 150hp tractor in the next field. They do not creep up on you.
Having said that there is a lot worse going on, on our farms. In the recent years EU has limited land fill. This means that a lot of waste is being spread on farm land.
One of the worst is the waste from paper recycling. This is all the short fibres and the inks etc. The material is blue grey and is definitely not good to breath. You can not even get analysis of the waste under freedom of information. They dump it in huge mounds and let the wind blow it around.
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I feel really furious to hear you, once more, talking about 'diabetes' as if types 1 & 2 are the same. I have had type 1 since the age of 14 when, skinny as a rake, I got it. Your report tonight was discussing type 2 which you get if you are overweight, or older or eat lots of sweet things or if you are a member of some racial groups. Types 1 & 2 are very different and I have rung the BBC about this before when you have spoken about them indescriminately.
I find it hurtful both on my own behalf and for other young friends (who are not overweight. How can you be so uncharacteristically unprofessional) How dare you talk about us all in one group, I feel really let down by one of my favourite programmes.
YOU SHOULD BE MORE ACCURATE IN YOUR REPORTING
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jf @2
The French dumped the waste from Paris on the vines in the Champaign region for 100 years which is probably why it smells of pooh.
Our farmers have been told of the benfits of high fibre bread and this is their solution.
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(3) - AngeyinNeston - They do not care it is just part of the ongoing obesity hate campaign.
The BBC as a report nearly every day on some aspect of the evils of obesity. Your condition is just another excuse to bang the drum. Also saying that all type 2 are preventable is just plain wrong.
Since diabetes causes weight loss the whole argument is nuts. They seem to think that fat levels are causing the problem when in fact it is a natural and regulatory process in the body. Otherwise we would all be round balls of blubber. The fat percentage controls the up take of glucose.
The issue is eating unnaturally high levels of sugar. By training the body to eat constantly without the normal signals of hunger there is no regulation to the intake of glucose. It is not the fat that is the cause, that is just another symptom of the real causes.
Then again the poor man dying in a local hospital would not like what they said either. He sufferers from type 2. However he has spent all his life outdoors working a small farm alone. To make ends meet he had a "morning job" as well. 4am to 9 am. He was as fit as they come. However, diabetes got him.
The doctors ignored him. To make him self feel better he would drink more alcohol. Which turns out to have the desired short term effect of lowering blood glucose levels. (Hence why alcohol causes hypos).
HOWEVER, alcohol destroys the pancreas (and liver). Which just made it worse in the long run.
He was feeling bad and tired so did less on the farm. Expended less energy and fell asleep in his chair each night.
By the time the doctors realised that he was not just overdoing it, his life was in ruins and he had become overweight.
A symptom not the cause.
The real cause was genetics and alcohol.
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I've lived in eternal hope and here it is...
Well, this "Old-Dog's" rearing to go!
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/scienceandtechnology/science/sciencenews/3463897/Elderly-dogs-to-be-offered-genetic-enhancement-to-make-them-young-again.html
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jf @ 2, if someone in a town decided to use a spray that was going to pollute say fifteen streets all round his back yard, such that it wasn't safe to stay outside any house in those streets for more than twenty minutes at a time, it wouldn't be thought an intolerable intrusion on his liberty to ask him to let the householders around him know in advance about his plans to render the area in which they lived intolerable.
Why are farmers any different from any other citizen would be?
It's not as if he were being asked to plough his sloping fields so that the run-off from them didn't block roads with silt off the land, or control the run-off of pesticides so that they didn't kill all the fish in the river that runs past his fields, or something unreasonable like that, is it...
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I'm with you on the pesticides issue, Chris. Living, as I do, in a rural area, I've learned to be wary of spraying. Some years ago, when I lived a few miles from where I now am, a farmer regularly sprayed a field which had a footpath running through the middle. It was the route of my daily dog walk. One day I inadvertently walked across the field very soon after it had been sprayed (we did not live near enough to the field to hear a tractor!), noticed the evidence, but too late to stop my dog from having got it on his skin and paws (and possibly up, and on, his nose and face). I didn't know at the time what type of spray it was - whether pesticide, herbicide or fertiliser. Later I discovered it was a pesticide.
Within two or three months, my dog had developed a rare and aggressive type of leukaemia. Within another four months he was dead.
Now, I perfectly realise that this *may* have been a coincidence, but given that my dog had been apparently in rude health at the time of the walk, I shall always have a strong suspicion that his death and that walk were linked.
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Chris@07, Big Sister@08
I couldn't agree with you more and for many years, this matter's been "avoided".
In one of Dirk Bogarde's autobiographical books, he relates how his manager Tony Forward developed Parkinson's disease. Apparently the area of France they lived in was infested with ants which Forward despised and so, spent a great deal of time over the years, spraying with a particular agricultural pesticide. He didn't use a face mask when spraying and Bogarde relates how Forward's Doctor said, after the disease was diagnosed that the relationship between Parkinson's and the pesticide concerned, was well known; within farming communities...
On a similar note, a young very fit, non-smoking friend of ours on holiday, a couple of years ago in Spain, was cycling on public roads through orange groves when a crop-sprayer flew over and our friend was covered in whatever the chemical was and couldn't avoid inhalation. The next day, travelling back to the UK breathing difficulties developed and our friend found himself in hospital overnight and on a (I think) steroid-inhalation drug for a few weeks since when he's been diagnosed with a severish form of asthma. No family history etc. Co-incidence..?
I wonder. And so does he...
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Charlie @ 9, I do sometimes wonder whether the enormous increase in the incidence of asthma during the past forty years may have some relation to the increase in the amount of chemicals we've pumped out into the air since the 1960s. When I was at primary school not one person in that school had an asthma inhaler, and the condition was rare enough for Piggy in *Lord of the Flies* to be strange for having it; by the time my children were at primary school in the 1980s and 90s asthma inhalers were quite normal among their classmates.
Mind you, enthusiastic prescription by the medical profession probably didn't help: in 1989 I took a child who'd had a bad cold to the doctor because I wanted to get her some cough-linctus for the lingering cough, and without even listening to me at all he started trying to prescribe her an inhaler 'for her asthma'. When he really wouldn't listen I took this four-year-old away and gave her a blackberry syrup made for her by a friend of mine, which cured the cough in a couple of weeks. I only found out rather later that the sort of inhaler he'd tried to give her masks the symptoms but causes the condition, and is also adictive. But that sort of thing doesn't really explain such a very large increase in the number of sufferers.
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When I first read this, I thought someone was taking the P***!
Having re-read it, I know they are...
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7729085.stm
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