Speed camera debate suggests public know where to draw the line

Saying you'll 'end the war on the motorist' ticks so many boxes for the new government, it's like the Cones Hotline never happened. Cynics say it's the only war they can end but I won't be going there. My concern is road safety. Fast cars kill kids. It's not a fact we're keen to accept but fact it is.

In theory stopping people driving too fast by fining them when they do it is an idea we can all sign up to. The debate has been distorted by the perception that speed camera partnerships are a licence to private companies and the individuals that run them to extort money from the motorist. The cameras are placed not in the dangerous places where accidents have occurred but nearby where they can catch the maximum number. I have no idea if this is true but suddenly the debate is not about the real issue: safety. This is what happens when you blur the line between public and private. The speed cameras debate suggests the public instinctively understands what the state should be doing and what it shouldn't.

That being so, motorists who don't like private companies profiting from their occasional zeal on the gas pedal should ask themselves how they feel about private companies profiting from their next doctor's visit or their child's education as health and education services are contracted out. If you don't like speed camera partnerships will you like 'free' schools (when the private sector steps in for the local authority) or a GP-run NHS (when the private sector steps in for the primary care trusts and strategic health authorities)? Governments who want to be reelected should think about it too.

Ian Banks: Cuban Heals

A guest post today from the Men's Health Forum's president, the wonderful Dr Ian Banks. He's just back from a well-earned holiday in Cuba. Like me, he's blogging in a personal capacity here not on behalf of the MHF:

There is an old saying in Cuba. In fact just about everything in Cuba is old especially the cars. I sat behind the wheel of a pre war Pontiac. This was just about as far as I got as there was no engine and the horse power was too busy eating grass. Forget the Tardis, travelling back in time you need no more than a Virgin Atlantic ticket to Havana, mind you Dr Who probably enjoys a tad more leg room. Immigration was swift until I was mistaken for a Cuban, beards are common not least because you can’t get hold of a half decent rusty razor blade. I wondered why they were so keen to make sure I was not ‘native’, all would come clear later in this most amazing journey into the past but also paradoxically the future.

Cuba is economically blockaded by the USA. So OK, common knowledge but the impact of this misguided and vicious action extends to far more than beards, women cannot get sanitary towels until the age of 14 and then they are rationed to 10 packets per year, the moon seems to skip a beat.

Everything is recycled, and I do mean everything, horses are a major form of local intra city transport yet streets are completely free of any dung. This is collected and resurfaces as courgettes. Although the economy revolves around sugar they actually import it along with oil. A favourite sport is to stand in the clear blue sea with a bottle of Havana Gold while getting jelly fish stung and eaten alive by mosquitoes. Please do note that you cannot get mosquito repellent or fly spray even from ‘international health’ (the private sector for tourists). I followed the Cuban custom and most mosquitoes in my vicinity lived on Bloody Marys.

So why was it so exhilarating? Well for starters they were the most literate people (even in English) I have met despite such an externally imposed poverty but ironically their average life expectancy exceeds that of the country denying them access to modern medicines. Unlike the UK or the USA which import fully trained doctors and nurses they actually export doctors and import medical students sending them back home fully trained. Doctors pay is the same as for plumbers but at least you can get one out at night.

There is no shortage of people wanting to train for medicine and women have equal status. The reasons are complex, being a doctor provides respect but also the potential to travel internationally denied to almost all other Cubans. Even so there is a very real pride in simply being a doctor in Cuba, perhaps something eroding in the UK under past and especially present administrations.

Back to the 1980s

When David Cameron packaged himself as the heir to Blair and dragged his party kicking and screaming into the modern world, many assumed it was for political expediency. Then he went into coalition with the Lib Dems and even the most hardened cynic softened.

So what should we make of a leaked letter in which public health minister Anne Milton suggests she'll be abolishing free school milk? Milton could not have evoked the spectre of Margaret Thatcher more directly if she had waved her handbag around her head like a mace and despatched a task-force. The press coverage resonates with the screeching and hissing of a thousand cats coming out of the bag. Former Tory health minister Stephen Dorrell tried to put former nurse Milton in her place this morning on the Today programme by asserting that the proposal had only been discussed at a 'junior level'. Hmmm.

In yesterday's Observer a gentlemen described by the paper's subs as Britain's leading GP (actually Steve Field, the chair of the Royal College of General Practitioners) lays it on the line to patients: Don't take offence if we lecture you on how to stay alive and healthy. He is arguing for folk to take more responsibility for their health care. That's a fine idea - one men's health campaigners have always championed - for those who can afford it. But in some of Field's hardline populism (let's call obese people fat), there is another chilling echo of the past. Remember when the poor were blamed for being poor? Victorian values they called it.

The MHF often describes its goal as it own redundancy - that a nation of healthy men will render us obsolete. With male life expectancy improving under the last government and the gap with female life expectancy narrowing that day was not impossible to imagine. It is less easy now. Things are changing and some terrible ideas that we thought were dead and buried seem to be back among us.

There are apparently sane men walking around the streets with mullet haircuts. Is it back to the 80s in politics too?

Join the MHF/malehealth advisory panel

The MHF is looking to recruit a men's advisory panel to give men a louder voice when it comes to their health. This sounds like a great idea to me.

The panel will be asking men what they want from the NHS and the MHF. This includes the content on malehealth so the website itself will benefit too. I'd really like the panel to reflect as wide a cross-section of blokes as possible - all ages, classes, backgrounds and opinions. No special requirements whatsoever other than an X chromosome. Why not give it a go?

• Meanwhile thanks for the kind comments on the commendation of my book The User's Guide to The Male Body in the Medical Journalist's Association's book awards. The book has now also been highly commended in the British Medical Association's book awards. I went to the journalists' do earlier this year and the BMA one will be in September. It's the perfect opportunity to conduct some serious research: who really provides the best plonk? The hacks or the docs?

Smokers tilting at windmills

There is an army of Don Quixotes out there who, when they aren't nipping out for a quick fag, are hunting through cyberspace for signs of anti-smoking giants. Whenever we write about smoking - or more particularly smoking bans - the comments and the emails arrive. It happened a couple of years ago when they found an article I'd written a few years previously that mentioned, alongside the great Joe Jackson among other things, passive smoking.

It's happened again. This time the offending article is one reporting on a poll conducted by You Gov suggesting that most smokers now support the smoking ban. The poll was commissioned by anti-smoking organisation Ash and our story makes this very clear. I actually nearly didn't publish it all because frankly I don't think it's really new. We know that most smokers want to quit and most smokers I know tell me that the public places ban has reduced their consumption. Where's the story?

I honestly think that this ship has sailed, boys. Tilting at windmills just means the smoke blows in your face. And even big tobacco know that. If you want to read some articles on malehealth, and I'm delighted you do, there are far more interesting ones than this tired old tale. Start with this one: it answers the question we all want to know the answer to: how many more years will I live if I make healthier choices?

Malehealth now on facebook

John Pritchard, our great volunteer, has taken malehealth into the exciting world of social networks. We now have a page on facebook. Apparently people have friends but pages have people who like them so please visit the page and say you like it. Even if you love it.

EU investigating till receipts scandal

Well, not quite. But further to yesterday's post about the men's health risks associated with till receipts - MHF president Ian Banks reckons they're fine so long as you eat them with low-fat dressing - there is activity at European level to reduce our exposure to BPA.

Following an 'urgent request' from the European Commission, the European Food Safety Authority is reviewing the compound, which is used in plastics and appears to interfere with hormones, and will provide an 'up-to-date overview of the safety of BPA'.

An open letter from various scientists and international health organisations and NGOs including the Health and Environment Alliance is calling for a reduction in the EU's Tolerable Daily Intake (TDI). The letter says that 'only a tiny minority of studies have articulated that BPA exposure is safe… but it is these few flawed studies that EFSA previously relied on to declare BPA safe.'

A reduced TDI could lead to a reduction in or elimination of the amount of BPA in food contact materials, such as baby bottles, drinking water bottles and the lining of tins containing food and drink. No mention, yet, of till receipts.