Stick your advice
Friday, June 25, 2010 
Parents reject 'bossy' lunch box advice reports the BBC this morning.
Many parents see schools as "bossy" or "interfering" when they tell them what they can and cannot put in their children's lunch box, Ofsted warns.
This encouraging news follows a less than effusive response by the Royal College of Midwives to the suggestion, by the National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE), that pregnant women should be subjected to a smoking test.
According to RCM spokesman Sue MacDonald.
“Use of the monitor has the potential to make women feel guilty and not engaged. It is crucial that health practitioners, including midwives, focus on being supportive rather than making women feeling guilty.”
In other words, stick your breath test.
Clearly I'm not alone in thinking that NICE should "butt out". (The Daily Mail published my polite response in their lead story yesterday.)
Simon Clark
"The health watchdog tells midwives to challenge all pregnant women by giving them smoking breath tests. Simon Clark from Forest tells Gaunty why he is furious with this news." See HERE.
Simon Clark
Health watchdog's proposals slammed (Press Association).
The public health watchdog is in danger of becoming a "nanny state monster" as it increasingly makes pronouncements that encroach on other areas of public policy, an MP has claimed.
Tory Philip Davies said the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (Nice) should concentrate on assessing the cost effectiveness of new drugs and stay away from proposing "ridiculous measures".
During questions in Parliament on future Commons business, Mr Davies asked: "Can we have a topical debate on the remit and membership of Nice? It is rapidly in danger of becoming a nanny state monster.
"Most people thought that its job was to access the clinical and cost-effectiveness of drugs.
"Yet not a day goes by without it proposing ridiculous measures such as compulsory sex education for five-year-olds, state handouts to food companies to produce healthier food, smoking breath tests for pregnant women and minimum pricing for alcohol.
"Can we have a debate so we can get them back to what they should be doing rather than a load of garbage that they shouldn't be doing?"
Note: Philip Davies spoke at our Voices of Freedom debate on June 10. He is also one of the guest speakers at our Smoke On The Water party on July 14.
Reader Comments (11)
Am I being unduely optimistic when it does seem that the nanny staters are in decline? All these things are cyclical and it is only time when the 'zeitgeist' changes back to personal choice and freedom - is this the start i ask myself?
"the nanny staters are in decline? "
Oh, P-L-E-A-S-E !!!!
In the meantime, however, expect just a little more foot-stamping, hissy-fitting, and general Violet Elizabeth Bott-ism from the Prefects and their little Milk Monitor chums.....................
Deborah Arnott, together with a very articulate mid-wife, was a guest on the Tony Livesey show on R5L last night. The mid-wife generally got the better of her and twards the end Arnott kept repeating that one of the purposes of the test was to show the effect of other people smoking in the house. It seemed that the idea is to tell pregnant women who aren't smoking during pregnancy, that their partners are harming the unborn child. No doubt standing outside won't help. In fact, It appears that passive smoking doesn't register on the CO test, except possibly in very high concentrations. Also, CO in the blood has a half life of 5 to 6 hours, so not smoking for 12 hours (11 at night until the test the next day) puts the level too down to that of a non-smoker, a very occasional smoker or someone suffering from high levels of stress (apparently raises CO levels. That passive smoking doesn't raise CO levels, unless very extreme, causes a problem to the authors of the paper below, who wander of into sidestream/mainstream smoke speculation, rather than admit that passive smoking is similar to smoking 10 cigarettes a year. It would be interesting to run a test to measure CO levels of non-smokers sitting with smokers in a room with a good extraction system.
See paper below
http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:SG3hZ3FHivUJ:www.sma.org.sg/smj/4512/4512a2.pdf+low+carbon+monoxide+military&hl=en&gl=uk&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEESjA4fQrlfyOL7qzk__E4dcCHwefyvYzICuuyfsklMo8FcZ14H50lai2fGMwXc6kJNdqIK1rF7AtSE0h1SpnoSxpz5SmODJi_RhnsI0piJfH0lP-eR1eMG3bHftsWNtBLqUsI866&sig=AHIEtbQpQ2duZeI3hmAfYi8QNOxHxppPxg
I don't think that link is going to work. Google this:
Breath carbon monoxide as an indication of smoking habit in the military setting. E C T Low, M C C Ong, M Tan. Naval Medicine and. Hyperbaric Centre
I have been wondering whether the zealots, sensing a weakening of their influence since the election, are consciously regrouping under the banner of Nice, the credibility of which may as yet be comparatively unimpaired.
Well, said Mr Philip Davies.
I thought NICE was supposed to deliver clinical excellence. Does, anyone know when and how this mission creep at NICE started? Or was this always in it's remit and I just missed the point?
Norman, and Fredrik, NICE are in the process of being dismantled by the Tory Party. It is very difficult for them to do this in one fell swoop, but believe me, I have this on very good authority, their days are most definitely numbered.
Norman, that's what I was thinking this morning.
NICE was a quango to get the Labour Party off the hook for denying cancer patients drugs. Rather than Labour "killing" people they set NICE up to carry the can. The rank and file Tories and associated pressure groups will not stand for taxpayer funded nannies. I have spent a lot of time briefing them on smoking, passive smoking, alcohol consumption, the WHO et al. I hope that NICE will be disbanded and the idiots made redundant.
I hope Dave & Co keeps up the pressure on the likes of NICE and their fellow quangos and dispatches the lot of them to the recycle bin forthwith, as promised.
All these unaccountable quangos have bled the country dry for the past 10 years acting as a beard, and doing the dirty work for the Labour govt, who then mislead the people under the guise of looking after and caring for the working man.
The election has proved that their scam was rumbled.
I hope 'lessons have been learned' this time round and that Dave & Co will keep their word and face the people themselves, if they have any dirty work to do.
Because we've seen and heard it all before mate.
I think the recent zealots' warnings would have seemed (and been) more oppressive - sinister even, if Labour had been re-elected. But the price of freedom is eternal vigilance.