Informative Health Articles And News: Britain

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10 Nisan 2017 Pazartesi

Revealed: girl of 13 is first child in Britain to receive artificial heart

A 13-year-old girl from Worcester is the first child in Britain to have received an artificial heart, the Guardian can reveal, after doctors decided it was the only way to save her life.

Chloe Narbonne had the device installed in a complex nine-hour operation that involved 30 NHS staff at the Royal Brompton, a specialist heart and lung hospital in London. The artificial heart kept the then 12-year-old girl alive until a human heart became available a few weeks later.

While others have had a device known as a “Berlin heart”, which replicates its functions outside of the body, Chloe is the youngest person in Europe to have had an artificial heart implanted. With her fourth heart now beating in her chest almost a year on, she told the Guardian: “I feel well, like my normal self, but not quite my normal self, not after what I’ve been through. I guess the artificial heart was my lifesaver; it’s what kept me alive until I got another heart. What I’ve been through is life-changing.”

Chloe and her mum, Fabienne. Photograph: David Levene for the Guardian

Heart surgeon André Simon. — Chloe and her mum, Fabienne. Photograph: David Levene for the Guardian

6 Nisan 2017 Perşembe

Air pollution made Beijing unbearable. Britain should watch and learn | Tania Branigan

On a good morning, from my Beijing tower block, I could gaze across the city to the hills far to the west. On the worst days, when pollution levels soared off the scale, I could barely make out the buildings across the road. The air purifiers in each room were turned up to 11. The filters inside were supposed to last for six months – but after just a couple of months, the pristine white folds had usually turned charcoal grey.

Even with a mask, 20 minutes outside could leave you feeling nauseous. Friends complained of sore throats and coughs that never went away. It was a running, though unamusing, joke: Airmageddon. The airpocalypse. Beige-jing. But it got inside your head as well as your system. After a spate of especially bad days, my spirits lowered. I longed to see the sky.

And then one spring I returned home for a holiday, and turned the corner at the Peak District’s Surprise View, one of the loveliest I know. Below me lay the Hope Valley, and, to my horror, the smog lay thick in its bottom. It took me a moment to recognise my error. Pollution had become so normal to me that, even at a place I knew so well, and had seen shrouded so often, it had not occurred to me that it was just mist.

In primary school my teacher had described climbing up to the hills as a child, and being unable to see Sheffield thanks to the blanket of smog. So many years after the Clean Air Act, it had been unimaginable to us. Now I took toxic air as the norm, like so many in China. I rolled my eyes when headlines shouted about the UK’s air pollution crisis in April 2014. It was, by Beijing’s standards, a pretty clear day.

Now I live in London again and note each morning how good it feels to breathe clean air. But I’ve noticed, too, how unpleasant it can be to walk along Euston Road. And I’ve started to ask myself why I’ve regarded illegal levels of pollution as acceptable. It is hard to see how our own attitudes – what we notice, what we tolerate – shift and how dependent this is on the views of people around us. To begin with, I took Beijing’s bad days for granted. I lived there for five years before getting purifiers. No one liked the filthy air: but most residents regarded it as inevitable, like bad weather. Masks were seen as at best an eccentricity, at worst an indulgent affectation. The only Chinese people who wore them were warding off infections or trying not to spread them.

It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when things changed. The research was piling up – scary data on the long-term health impacts: early deaths, heart and lung problems, cancer, diabetes, birth defects. So was the anecdotal evidence: toddlers who developed terrible asthma; the previously healthy friend who found himself waking in the night, struggling to breathe. Soon we were checking an air pollution app each morning, and discussing air purifiers and masks as petrolheads might compare sports cars. Private schools acquired inflatable domes so pupils could exercise without going outside.

We could afford to do this. Whether in Birmingham, Beijing or Delhi, pollution disproportionately affects the poor. They are more likely to live in heavily polluted areas (near factories or main roads, say) and are by definition less able to afford even partial remedies. But no one can escape the problem entirely.

Politburo members also looked out on a wall of grey, and presumably their sisters and sons were complaining, and their grandchildren too were racked by coughs. In 2015, hundreds of millions of people watched the documentary Under the Dome, which laid out the impact of pollution on China in frightening detail. It was a turning point in public awareness – and strikingly, while it was eventually censored, it had received at least partial official backing. Some within the leadership had realised that it had to take action, even if there is still a very long way to go.

That British problems are less severe does not mean we can afford to ignore them. The impact of nitrogen dioxide levels on our health, and especially that of our children, whose developing lungs are so much more vulnerable, is undeniable. The high court has twice judged the government’s response to air pollution as being illegally poor.

Measures such as masks and purifiers may help individuals and even save lives. But they are not enough. The true significance of their adoption in China was that they showed people were recognising the problem. Their popularity helped to reinforce the sense that such concerns were sensible and pressing rather than peculiar or trivial. The real solutions are social – taken by city leaders, national governments and international bodies. But they will act only when the rest of us decide we have had enough.

Air pollution made Beijing unbearable. Britain should watch and learn | Tania Branigan

3 Nisan 2017 Pazartesi

Is Britain a nation hooked on antidepressants?

According to reports last week, hundreds of thousands of people are hooked on prescription drugs for not only depression but also pain and anxiety. The Daily Mail quoted a recent report from the all party parliamentary group for prescribed drug dependence, saying that in 2013 about 11% of women and 6% of men were on antidepressants – 5.4 million people nationally.

But are they really hooked? The Royal College of Psychiatry says that antidepressants are not addictive, on the grounds that you do not have to increase your dose to get the same effect or get cravings when you stop the drug. But the college’s own survey of 817 people found that 63% had withdrawal symptoms after stopping antidepressants – mostly they were on SSRIs (the most commonly prescribed antidepressants).

The solution

The symptoms of withdrawal – stomach upsets, flu-like symptoms anxiety, dizziness, nightmares and electric shocks to the head – can last for two months. Dr James Davies, an academic in social and medical anthropology at the University of Roehampton and member of the all parliamentary group says that people on antidepressants can certainly feel dependent on their drug. “Dependence can be physical or psychological,” he says. “People may feel they are only better because they take the drug.”

In a letter to the BMJ last year, Prof Peter C Gøtzsche of the Nordic Cochrane Centre in Denmark, said that half of people on antidepressants become addicted. Out of 260,322 people in Finland who were taking an antidepressant in 2008, 45% were still on them five years later.

When you stop antidepressants should be the result of a discussion between you and your doctor – it is an individual decision and depends on how long and how severely you have been depressed. A precipitating cause may have gone, or talking therapy may have helped. But you should never stop taking them suddenly because the side-effects can be horrible. Instead, it is recommended that you taper your dose by a quarter every four to six weeks.

Psychiatrists suggest staying on the drug for six months to a year after you feel better. Your response should be checked regularly – at three weeks and then again at three to six monthly intervals. Doctors can sometimes confuse withdrawal symptoms with a return of depression, and restart the drug. Gøtzsche warns that this can keep people trapped on antidepressants for life. If the symptoms occur rapidly after stopping the drug, and stop very shortly after restarting it, then it is likely to be because of drug withdrawal. GPs often advise coming off antidepressants at the start of summer, as it feels a more optimistic time than the middle of winter.

Is Britain a nation hooked on antidepressants?

27 Mart 2017 Pazartesi

EU nurses no longer want to work in Britain. Brexit is poisoning the NHS | Suzanne Moore

How will Brexit impact the NHS? It already has. Nurses from the EU are much less keen to come and work here. Today the Times reported that in the last four months of 2015, an average of 797 EU nurses per month signed up to work in the UK; over the same period last year, that number fell to 194 a month. We currently have a huge shortage of nurses, with 24,000 jobs unfilled in England alone.

You can see this shortfall any time you go into a hospital. There is pressure on beds, on doctors and on nurses. Often there just aren’t enough of them, and they are overstretched. Some A&E departments that used to have 20 nurses are now down to half that number, and staff feel at breaking point. The five Cs that nurses are taught in their training – commitment, conscience, competence, compassion and confidence – are impossible to practise properly in the circumstances many are working in.

There have long been warnings of these shortages but a complete lack of long-term planning, now combined with Brexit, is bringing the situation to a head. We have an ageing population with complex needs. One in three nurses is set to retire in the next decade. The introduction of loans instead of bursaries for training means a 23% drop in applications for nursing and midwifery. Anyone could have predicted that taking away bursaries would prompt this result. No one goes into nursing for the money, so why did George Osborne decide to make it even harder? Why, when we need more nurses, are we not reinvesting in training?

This shortage had been plugged by about 7% of our nurses coming from the EU. If we fail to train nurses that’s how it has to be. This is where so much Brexit rhetoric falls apart. While Theresa May talks tough, refusing to guarantee EU nationals a right to stay, these nurses feel neither wanted nor welcome and will understandably go elsewhere. As Janet Davies, chief executive and general secretary of the Royal College of Nursing, has said: “The government is turning off the supply of qualified nurses from around the world at the very moment the health service is in a staffing crisis like never before.”

When in hospital we are at our most dependent. There may be those who complain about immigration but most people have experience of being cared for by someone who has come here to work. Our NHS could not function otherwise. Is May going to further exacerbate the nursing shortage by making the UK so hostile and unwelcoming to EU nurses they will go elsewhere? Well, this is already happening; people won’t take jobs here in such uncertain times. Yet we continue not to train enough nurses and have made it more financially difficult for them. Where is the joined-up thinking on this? The toxic discourse about “foreigners” stealing jobs may not have been intended for the nurse who washes you after your operation, but that’s how it pans out. We can choose to make people feel welcome or not, but it turns out we need them more than they need us.

EU nurses no longer want to work in Britain. Brexit is poisoning the NHS | Suzanne Moore

9 Şubat 2017 Perşembe

Five ways Britain wrecks young people’s mental health – and how to stop it | Emily Reynolds

A study from the Varkey Foundation has revealed that young people in the UK suffer from some of the “lowest levels of mental wellbeing in the world” – second only to Japan.

This won’t be a shock to anyone familiar with statistics on child and adolescent mental health in Britain. Some 75% of mental illnesses begin before the age of 18, and the charity MQ estimates that on average, there are three children in every classroom with a diagnosable mental illness. This, combined with a continuing crisis in mental healthcare in Britain, means young people are not getting the help they need or deserve. But how exactly are young people being failed?

Slashing NHS budgets

Cuts to the NHS aren’t new – the Conservative government has been slowly dismantling the health service since 2010. And it shows no sign of slowing – a 2016 investigation by the Guardian and 38 Degrees revealed that trusts around England were “drawing up plans for hospital closures and cutbacks” in an attempt to avoid a £20bn shortfall by 2020.

Mental healthcare has suffered disproportionately: unmanageably long waiting lists for secondary care, to take one example. Referrals to therapy or specialist units are hampered by a lack of available staff or by ward closures – which means that diagnosis of more severe conditions are delayed even further.

This is particularly striking when you consider that most young people wait on average 10 years between the onset of illness and an eventual diagnosis – and means that many are slipping through the cracks with neither diagnosis nor adequate care.

Similarly, cuts to community care have meant that more children than ever – 20,000 in 2015 alone – have been seeking emergency mental healthcare in A&E, in wards that are often staffed by stressed, overstretched teams who have no specialist psychiatric support to help them cope.

Treating children miles away from home

Cuts have led to the closure of many child and adolescent mental health wards – which, combined with a severe shortage of beds, has led to children being admitted to adult psychiatric wards and being sent hundreds of miles away in order to receive outpatient care.

A 2014 investigation from Community Care and BBC News found that 350 under-18s were admitted to adult wards in the first nine months of 2013 – a 36% increase from the previous 12 months; 10 out of 18 NHS trusts surveyed had sent children to units more than 150 miles away from their home in 2013-14, making compassionate and consistent care for young people impossible.

Cuts to school budgets

One of the key themes of Theresa May’s speech on mental health was a focus on the prevention of these problems, particularly in young people. Research backs this up – a recent study published in Lancet Psychiatry suggested that early intervention was a significant factor in presentation of depressive symptoms in young people.

What May’s speech didn’t mention, however, was how exactly this would be implemented, beyond a mention of “mental health first aid training”. Unsurprisingly, May also failed to mention the grimly inevitable cuts to school budgets that will make this strategy near to impossible anyway.

Earlier this week, a TES investigation found that a third of secondary schools are planning to “cut back” the mental health support offered to pupils because of what one headteacher described as “budgets at breaking point”. Early intervention is vital, but if teachers are untrained in mental health – because the resources aren’t there – then it simply isn’t going to happen.

There’s a research budget of just £8 per person affected by mental illness – compared with £178 for cancer

Lack of adequate research

Mental health research is, in general, an underfunded area. In 2014, the UK Clinical Research Collaboration found that mental health was only allocated £112m a year – which sounds like a lot, until you consider the nearly 15 million people in the country affected by mental illness. In context, this means a research budget of just £8 per person affected by mental illness – a startlingly low sum, especially when compared to less common conditions like cancer (£178 per person) or dementia (£110 per person).

Less than 30% of this research is focused on young people – meaning we haven’t even started to understand how to tackle mental illness in young people.

Failing to take adolescent mental health seriously

Young people are now pretty used to being the punchline of unfunny jokes made by Telegraph readers and the over-45s. Millennials, eh? We’re stupid! We’re narcissistic! We look at our phones all the time! We’re mollycoddled snowflakes! We expect to be given the moon on a stick! These might be hilarious ideas to people without crushing student debts and who have the means to own property – sure, but it’s all fairly tiring for young people.

It might sound facile – typical millennials, complaining about nothing – but it is an undeniable fact that young people are not being taken seriously and that this, in some cases, is severely impacting on their mental health. While researching my book, I spoke to young people up and down the country who told me they felt consistently let down by parents, teachers and healthcare professionals who wrote off their symptoms or failed to take action to prevent distress.

There was an understandable sense of reticence, caution and disappointment about the behaviour of supposed adults. This conversation has continued to follow me – only last week, a teenager messaged me on Twitter to eloquently and despairingly talk about how they and their friends had been consistently and systematically let down by their school.

It’s a familiar story to me – even as a confident young adult with a medical history full of psychiatric wards and prescriptions for antipsychotics, I’m often questioned by GPs and support workers on the veracity of my own experiences. The difference is that I’m used to overcoming barriers to care – younger people are not, and often fall at these completely unnecessary hurdles.

This isn’t just a social problem, either – failure to acknowledge symptoms is a structural problem too. In 2015, the NSPCC suggested that nearly 40,000 young people were unable to meet the “too strict” criteria for receiving help – so even if teenagers pluck up the courage to ask for help, they still aren’t getting any.

Interactive

Young people are telling us that they’re unhappy. They are asking for help. What they want is simple too. For a start, don’t send them hundreds of miles away from home for treatment. And they don’t want GPs to tell them that their clinical depression is just “being a teenager”. They certainly don’t want to sit down with their neighbour and have a cup of tea, as Theresa May ridiculously suggested on Time to Talk – their focus, on the whole, is not on stigma at all.

What young people really want is actual, actionable, well-funded support. They want to be taken seriously; they want to receive the help that they need in a timely, compassionate, efficient and effective manner. They’re asking for it already – when are we going to start listening?

• Emily Reynolds’ A Beginner’s Guide to Losing Your Mind is out on 23 February

Five ways Britain wrecks young people’s mental health – and how to stop it | Emily Reynolds

30 Aralık 2016 Cuma

I have seen Britain shrouded in darkness before. Better times will come | Harry Leslie Smith

Hope is hard to find in the grey teatime light of this December, because despite all of the holiday cheer around us, darkness gathers. It has been the hardest, saddest and cruellest of years – a sour vintage which has brought to everyone’s doorstep heartache, financial worries and political unease.

Austerity seems eternal, and for many it is as if they are living within a new circle added to Dante’s inferno for the 21st century. Callous and barbarous wars in Yemen and Syria test our faith in humanity, while the unstoppable refugee crisis it produced makes us want to weep in despair for the decrepitude of our civilisation.

Hope is as absent from society today as cash is to a pauper’s wallet because a noxious populism fuelled by hate now smoulders. Everywhere we turn it feels like optimism has been eclipsed by a world we don’t want to recognise as our own. Despair is in the breath of our words because we are frightened.

But as my life has been long, I have seen Britain up against the setting sun of history before. I witnessed our country on its knees from the Great Depression; with its back to the wall and under threat of invasion by the Nazis. Over my nine decades of life, I’ve known despair but never hopelessness.

My hope for a better tomorrow for everyone in our country doesn’t come from our military victories against fascism. It doesn’t come from Churchill’s defiance or the words of present-day politicians. No: the source of hope that has carried me through decades of existence comes from the collective will of my generation in 1945 to beat our swords into ploughshares and harvest a just society through the erection of the welfare state.

My hope has always come from the humanity, kindness and intelligence that inhabits the majority of people who reside on our shores. It may seem dormant now, but it will rise again because those sparks of decency that built the NHS, gave affordable housing to each and every one of us, and provided free education to all, are in each Briton alive today – because you are the children and the grandchildren of my generation. If we did it before, then we can do it again.

The 1945 general election was called after our long and brutal war with Germany. It would decide whether our country would cling to its feudal past or accept a bold egalitarian future. I was 22, a member of the allied occupation force and stationed in Hamburg. And it was there that I cast my ballot for the first time – and it’s been a love affair with democracy ever since.

On the day I voted in that occupied city, which looked more worse for wear than Aleppo does now, sorrow could be found on every street corner because of a dead tyrant’s madness. While I queued to vote, I remember how conscious I was of both what I had endured as a boy and teenager during the Great Depression and what I’d witnessed during the war. I felt by making my mark and voting for a welfare state, I was declaring to my country, my peers and those that did not live to see that election day, that my destiny mattered regardless of my humble station in life. The hope that has kept me going all these years came from that election, when ordinary people said their lives mattered just as much as any elite class.

I have seen Britain shrouded in darkness before. Better times will come | Harry Leslie Smith

18 Aralık 2016 Pazar

How Britain plans to lead the global science race to treat dementia

Early next year, Professor Bart De Strooper will sit down in an empty office in University College London and start to plan a project that aims to revolutionise our understanding and treatment of dementia. Dozens of leading researchers will be appointed to his £250m project which has been set up to create a national network of dementia research centres – with UCL at its hub.

The establishment of the UK Dementia Research Institute – which was announced last week – follows the pledge, made in 2012 by former prime minister David Cameron, to tackle the disease at a national level and comes as evidence points to its increasing impact on the nation. Earlier this year, it was disclosed that dementia is now the leading cause of death in England and Wales. At the same time, pharmaceutical companies have reported poor results from trials of drugs designed to slow down the progress of Alzheimer’s disease, the most common form of dementia.

“Humans have truly wonderful brains that can cope with terrible diseases like Alzheimer’s for decades and can find all sorts of ways to get around defects that are growing inside,” said De Strooper, who is currently based at the University of Leuven in Belgium. “Eventually individuals succumb to the condition and start to display memory loss and other symptoms – but usually only after decades have passed and their brains have gone through considerable changes. This makes it very difficult to treat the disease. That is the challenge that we need to tackle.”

Current understanding of Alzheimer’s suggests the disease is triggered when beta amyloid, a protein in nerve cell membranes, starts to clump together. Slowly the brain undergoes metabolic changes as amyloid clumping continues. In particular, a protein known as tau, which is involved in memory storage, is affected. It starts to form tangles inside the brain’s neurons and these die off. Eventually, symptoms – such as severe memory loss – manifest themselves.

To date, most attempts at drug interventions have focused on medicines that could prevent beta amyloid from forming clumps, the most recent being Solanezumab, developed by the pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly. However, results of clinical trials of the drug – revealed last month – indicated that it had no significant effect on the thinking abilities of people with mild Alzheimer’s. Solanezumab had also failed in people with more advanced versions of the disease in earlier trials.

This double failure has led some scientists to argue that amyloid clumping is not a cause of the disease but is merely a symptom. By targeting it, scientists are wasting time, it is argued. Professor John Hardy, a geneticist based at UCL – who has played a key role in setting up the college’s Dementia Research Institute – does not agree. “All the evidence we have from families affected by early onset dementia indicates that the disease begins with the deposition of amyloid plaques in the brain,” he said. “The trouble is that this buildup starts 15 to 20 years before dementia’s symptoms appear. The drugs we have developed so far offer treatments that are, in effect, too little and too late.”

Hardy drew a parallel between cholesterol buildup in blood vessels that eventually leads to cardiac disease and the buildup of amyloid plaques in the brain and the onset of Alzheimer’s. “Unfortunately, we have no equivalent of a cholesterol test to assess how much amyloid is clumping in a person’s brain,” he added. “However, that could change in the near future.”

Research suggests between 20 and 30 genes are involved in predisposing people to Alzheimer’s. Photograph: Getty

30 Kasım 2016 Çarşamba

Ireland compensates woman forced to travel to Britain for an abortion

Ireland has for the first time in its history compensated a woman for the trauma caused by forcing her to travel to Britain for an abortion.

Pro-choice campaigners in the Republic said the Fine Gael-led minority government’s agreement on Wednesday to pay compensation to Amanda Mellet was highly significant.

Mellet and her husband James took their case all the way to the UN’s Human Rights Committee after the couple were forced to obtain a termination of her pregnancy in England.

In 2013 Amanda Mellet became the first of three Irish women to formally ask the UN to denounce the prohibition on abortions in cases of fatal foetal abnormalities as “cruel and inhumane”.

Under Ireland’s strict anti-abortion laws, if Mellet and the other two women had remained in the Republic they would have been forced to give birth to babies who would be born dead.

Campaigners arguing for a referendum to repeal an amendment to the Irish Constitution that gives full citizenship rights to the embryo after conception welcomed today’s decision by the Dublin government.

Ailbhe Smyth, convenor of the Coalition to Repeal the Eighth Amendment and a long-time campaigner on reproductive rights, said: “To the best of my knowledge, this is the first time ever that the Irish government has compensated a woman for having to leave the country for an abortion. This is long overdue acknowledgement of the profound denial of women’s right to autonomy in this country.”

“The government must immediately ensure no other woman suffers similar human rights violations. The eighth amendment is a profound source of discrimination and national shame for Ireland. It is simply not good enough to pass the book to the Citizen’s Assembly and not make any commitment to undertake the necessary constitutional and legislative reforms to end, once and for all, Ireland’s violation of international human rights law and obligations under human rights conventions and treaties.

“We cannot, as a country, continue to oversee the violation of women’s human rights. We’re saying that women deserve better and Ireland can do much better.”

In June the UNHCR ruled that by forcing Amanda Mellet to leave Ireland for an abortion in Britain, the Irish state had inflicted trauma and distress on her.

Irish Labour party senator and long term campaigner for abortion reform in Ireland Ivana Bacik said the government’s decision to accept the UNHCR ruling was a crucial step towards changing Ireland’s abortion regime.

The Trinity College Dublin law lecturer said: “The UN Human Rights Committee’s ruling in June of this year constituted an important acknowledgement that the highly restrictive Irish law on abortion violates the human rights of women. The government’s acceptance of the ruling through the announcement of the compensation award, and Minister Harris’s sincerity in apologising to Ms Mellet, are both welcome.

“But we need now to see official recognition that thousands of other women are being denied their basic human rights through being denied access to legal abortion in Ireland, due to the eighth amendment to the constitution. The UNHCR ruling in favour of Ms Mellet made clear the need for us to hold a referendum to repeal the eighth amendment.”

Ireland compensates woman forced to travel to Britain for an abortion

27 Kasım 2016 Pazar

Welcome to skyr, the Viking ‘superfood’ waking up Britain

One of Iceland’s top dairy experts will arrive in Britain this week to help an adventurous Yorkshire farmer increase production of skyr, a Viking food that was barely known beyond the north Atlantic for a thousand years but is now being marketed as a “superfood”.

Ten years ago skyr – prounced skeer with a trill on the r – barely registered in the world’s yoghurt market. Now, according to global business consultants Future Market Insights, the market for skyr is worth nearly $ 8bn (£6.4bn) a year and growing fast.

The skyr boom first took off in the US and Scandinavia and could sweep into Asia after a recent visit to Japan and China by Icelandic dairy farmers. Skyr first went on sale in British supermarkets in 2015 and is still relatively unknown here – but that could be about to change.

Yorkshireman Sam Moorhouse, 23, the only British farmer making skyr, already has a deal with Booths supermarket, known as “the Waitrose of the north”. He will welcome Icelandic dairy expert Thorarinn Egill Sveinsson to Hesper Farm, near Skipton, on Thursday to help him install new equipment.

“I need to scale up to meet demand,” said Moorhouse, who started production in 2015. “The bank was sceptical about funding at first and nobody had heard of skyr, but it has been very popular. I was looking at diversification two and a half years ago and I read an article about skyr. I flew to Iceland to try it, worked at a skyr producer, met Thorarinn and he has helped me since I started.”

Skyr’s popularity in the UK could also be about to be boosted by Arla, one of the world’s biggest dairy companies, which will advertise skyr on TV in January, the month when yoghurt sales are highest.

The biggest producer of “authentic” skyr, MS Dairies, has also identified the UK as its largest growth market. It is owned by 700 Icelandic farmers and has tried for two years to have the skyr trademark protected, like Parma ham or Stilton cheese. It failed and this has allowed big dairy companies such as Arla and other smaller entrepreneurs to cash in on the boom.

So why has something that has been around for a thousand years taken off at the breakfast table?

Iceland’s tourism boom has helped to spread the word, so has a big push from Starbucks and the fact that skyr is thick enough to be eaten “on the go”. But the main reason is what Arla calls skyr’s “three credentials” – low sugar, no fat, and high protein content.

Although it is marketed as a yoghurt, skyr is technically a soft cheese made from skimmed milk. After the whey has been removed by ultra-filtration it is so thick that a spoon will stand up in it. A culture of lactic acid bacteria is added, and the process from cow to supermarket shelf takes three to four days.

The “skyr is good for you” message is broadcast in Scandinavia by Eidur Gudjohnsen, the footballer who scored more than 70 Premier League goals for Chelsea and Bolton, and won the Champions League with Barcelona. He and his father both played for Iceland, and both have eaten skyr all their life.

Arla started selling skyr in Asda last year, and when it launched last year with an advert filmed in Iceland it irked MS Dairies. Like the skyr sold in the US, Arla’s product was not made in Iceland, and the media in Reykjavik wrote of “skyr wars”.

“We own the recipe, they don’t have our culture, so it’s real skyr v copycats,” said Jon Axel Petersson, head of marketing at MS. “Arla is a Danish-Swedish company that makes its skyr in Germany, and they said that they were located in Iceland.”

Viking cows are smaller than European cows, and produce only 60-70% of their milk yield

Jon Axel Petersson, MS Dairies

But Iceland cannot meet demand. It takes 3.5 litres of milk to make one litre of skyr and there are only about 30,000 milk-producing cows in Iceland. “Viking cows are smaller than European cows, and produce only 60-70% of their milk yield,” said Petersson.“They would not be used in other countries because they cannot compete. But they are protected and have been here for a thousand years.”

There has been talk of importing bigger cows, but it seems unlikely.

MS, which produces under licence in Denmark and Norway with local milk and will have to do the same in Britain, started selling its skyr.is brand in Waitrose earlier this year and has just shifted its two millionth pot. Arla has had a good year in Asda, Tesco and Sainsbury’s. Lidl recently joined in with its own brand which, at 49p, is far cheaper than the “authentic” skyr, which sells for £1.25 in Britain and £2.50 in Norway.

UK sales are dwarfed by those in Scandinavia and the US. In Norway and Finland, where the courts allowed MS to protect its skyr by trademark. In Iceland annual consumption is measured in kilos per person.

Iceland’s farmers are making good money – from zero to €70m (£60m) in exports in five years and a 23-fold increase in production. And so are the dairy giants. But not as much as Siggi Hilmarsson, an Icelandic entrepreneur who gave up his job at Deloitte in New York after he started making skyr in his own kitchen.

His mother sent him a recipe from a 1960 women’s magazine she had found at the national library in Reykjavik, and Siggi’s is now the fastest-growing brand in a US yoghurt market worth $ 9bn a year, selling in Starbucks and Whole Foods shops. Hilmarsson had two outlets in 2006 when he started; now he has 25,000.

“After graduating I had a corporate job that I didn’t really like and I started making yogurt as a hobby because I missed eating skyr from home,” said Hilmarsson, who has lived in the US for 14 years. “I asked my mum to find me some recipes.

“I realised there was a market for healthy food with lower sugar content, and especially lower sugar yoghurt. Greek yoghurt is similar in texture but has much more sugar. We have no additives, low sugar, high protein. It’s all clean ingredients.

“When I started I hoped there was a future selling a high-end product that could sustain me and maybe a couple of employees. I thought I could make a living but didn’t foresee this.”

Moorhouse sees Hilmarsson as a role model. “How big will it become? It’s hard to say, but I hope to use all the milk we produce in skyr.”

Welcome to skyr, the Viking ‘superfood’ waking up Britain

30 Ağustos 2016 Salı

‘We still come if the rain’s sideways’ – how Britain fell in love with outdoor fitness

Parkrun, Devon

Sometimes the hardest thing about running is getting out the door, especially in the mornings. It’s so much easier to roll over and go back to sleep, or stick on some toast and promise yourself you’ll go another time. Knowing there are hundreds of other people waiting to run with you in your local park can be a big help.