News

In brief

Many well-known brand name vitamin pills may be completely worthless, because they fail to dissolve in the stomach, says a recent report in The Food Magazine. Laboratory tests for the Food Commission showed that 9 of 18 brands of vitamin pill failed to disintegrate within 20 minutes, and would probably be excreted without any vitamin being absorbed.

The AIDS pandemic threatens the development prospects of many Third World countries, according to a new report from the Panos Institute. The report estimates that the direct healthcare costs of AIDS worldwide amount to some $2.6 - $3.5bn per year, but that the indirect costs will be far higher, with many countries already suffering loss of productivity due to premature death, disability, and time away from work caring for others. In 1990, only 2 percent of expenditure for AIDS treatments was spent in Africa, which had 50 percent of all patients with AIDS.

President Clinton has lifted the so-called ‘gag rule’ introduced by the Bush administration, which prevented doctors in federally-funded clinics from giving advice on abortion.

Graham Pink, the Stockport nurse sacked from his job after speaking out about standards of care, has been elected to the UK Central Council for Nursing, Midwifery and Health Visiting. Mr Pink is contesting his dismissal, which comes before an industrial tribunal in March.

A survey of fundholding practices by the Labour Party suggests that each practice spent an average £12,500 of NHS money in the private sector in the first year of fundholding. The survey also shows that practices underspent their budgets in 1991/2 by an average £43,603. There is no restriction on how practices may spend their ‘surplus’.

Government claims that more patients than ever were treated in the first year of the NHS internal market have been thrown into doubt by research reported in the Health Service Journal. A study at an unnamed London hospital showed that figures are being inflated by counting ‘completed consultant episodes’ (CCEs). The researchers found that a proportion of cases are clocking up two or more CCEs despite being only a single episode of care. In some cases CCEs were counted even when a consultant merely gave advice.