IT’S A boy! Or is it a girl? Health Service Journal (Sept 16) has a go at unravelling the legal implications of letting parents know the sex of their unborn baby. It’s a complex issue — the mother can ask to know, but clinicians aren’t obliged to tell them or even look for it on scans. Doctors may be worried about litigation if they identify the gender of the child incorrectly, but the law is likely to support them because of the inherent unreliability of scans: “Blaming the hospital in this case would be like blaming the weather forecaster who said there was an 80 per cent chance of rain when it turned out to be dry.”
Too much rain wouldn’t do the ancient chaparral desert shrub any good, although it probably wouldn’t sue. The evergreen plant is making a bit of a name for itself, having previously been spurned by the medical establishment. It was dismissed as worthless and even dangerous, despite being traditionally used by Native Americans to treat injuries and illnesses, including cancer. Synergy News (Sept) reports on studies on the shrub that have found that it may actually do cancer patients some good. More clinical trials will be carried out.
Charity shoppers are getting a bad press. They are accused of driving charity shops towards extinction by trying to make cash from their bric-a-brac online instead of donating it to their local Oxfam. But charities are getting their own back. They are embracing technology and selling their second-hand wares on the internet, according to Third Sector (Sept 15). Charities are increasingly using internet auction sites to sell off some of their quirkier items. Last Christmas, the journal reports, a children’s charity managed to sell a life-size cardboard cutout of Victoria Beckham for £141 on a dedicated charity auction page on eBay. She must be more popular than we thought.
Speaking of inflated egos, England’s capital city has quite a high opinion of itself. “London’s just for bright kids” declares the headline in New Start (Sept 17). The article quotes the Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, speaking at a conference about London schools and children from ethnic minorities. He advised London businesses to give people who fail at school a second chance, especially if they are from an ethnic minority. Almost every new job created in London is professional, managerial or in the media, he said. Dumbos just won’t cut it.
On the subject of the none-too-bright, some of Brighton’s cycle-lane planners are clearly bonkers. But planning for two-wheelers isn’t an easy business, Regeneration & Renewal (Sept 17) says. It’s quite a conundrum — cycle lobbyists want on-road lanes, but novice cyclists understandably see lanes away from roads as safer. The difficulty is that while councils should be investing in on-road cycle lanes with the aim of easing congestion, a short-term outcome of that is increased congestion from the space that the lanes take up. More entertaining, however, is the website set up by a Brighton cyclist with pictures of the city’s wackier street planning (www.weirdcyclelanes.co.uk). The cycle lanes that are shorter than an actual bicycle are well worth a look.