Food Safety, Asthma, Children of Donor Insemination, Tuberculosis, When Nine Months of Pregnancy Are Not Enough

CAN YOU EAT FRUIT WITHOUT WASHING IT?

The Food Standards Agency was in the papers this week saying that it is safe to eat fruit and vegetables without washing them. However if you read their advice carefully they still recommend washing and peeling if you can do it but they don’t want people not to eat fruit and vegetables just because they cant wash them first – they are worried that a lot of people are not eating fruit as a snack during the day because they are worried about pesticide residues on the skin. Their view is that pesticide residues should become so low that we shouldn’t have to rely on washing – this sounds like an ideal world where foods are not intensively grown or imported from countries with dubious records for food safety!

If you are interested read the Food Standards Agency links below – but I would have thought that for children we should all still be washing fruit. Did you know that grapes are particularly likely to have high levels of pesticides on their surface as they are sprayed frequently during growth so always need a good wash? Fruit that you can peel on the run is always safe – satsumas and bananas for example.

Read “Food Standards Agency advice on washing or peeling fruit and vegetables”.

Also read “Fruit safe to eat without washing, say scientists” from the Independent.

ALLERGIES AND VIRAL INFECTIONS CAUSE HOSPITAL ADMISSIONS FOR ASTHMA

A report in this week’s British Medical Journal found that people admitted to hospital with asthma were twice as likely to have antibodies in their blood to common allergens such as cats and dogs and house dust mites as people at home with stable asthma. This suggests that in a very allergic population a simple viral infection is more likely to trigger a severe acute attack - maybe concentrating on treating the underlying allergies could reduce the acute attacks of asthma in these children. You can read the report on the BMJ site.

BREATH TESTS FOR ALCOHOL AFFECTED BY ASTHMA INHALERS

A Spanish report has found that asthma inhalers can give a false positive result in police breath tests. Some inhalers use a form of alcohol as a propellant but even those without the ethanol had the same effect. The level is too low to affect or intoxicate people but obviously stays on the breath. Let’s wait for a string of legal cases in the papers - ‘I wasn’t drunk it was my inhaler’. Read the research at the BMJ site.

CHILDREN OF DONOR INSEMINATION

The British Medical Journal reviews a moving website about coming to terms with being a child of donor insemination – see the resources the BMJ has found. This is a very newsworthy topic as some children have recently been allowed to trace donor parents – currently with the donor’s consent, but when the donations were made the donors were promised anonymity. A lot of people became donors during student life with little thought that several grown-up children may one day come knocking on their door feeling that they are the ‘missing link’ in their life.

Also in the news: the case of a sperm donor who developed a late onset fatal neurological disease known to be passed on genetically. This poses a dilemma for clinics – do they tell the children or not? I for one think they have a right to know – in this era of rapidly improving genetic diagnoses it may affect how and when they have children of their own.

TUBERCULOSIS ON THE RISE

Another article appeared in this week’s press about the increase in TB in the UK. Read “Drive launched to tackle alarming rise in TB cases” in the Independent.

IRISH TWINS ANYONE?

Irish twins are children born to one mother within the same 12 months – I always assumed that they must be the result of an accidental pregnancy, but in this article several mothers talk about their feelings of grief and loss when their baby was born and their desire to become pregnant again immediately. Read about it at “Pregnancy - nine months is never enough”. Have any of you felt this way? Feel free to use our message boards - they are confidential and free.