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5 Ekim 2016 Çarşamba

Poland signals U-turn on total abortion ban after protests – video report

A proposed total abortion ban in Poland will not be implemented, a member of the government has said on Wednesday, describing mass protests against the ban on Monday as a lesson in humility for the country’s leadership. The proposed total abortion ban would have outlawed the practice even in cases of rape, incest or when the mother’s life is at risk



Poland signals U-turn on total abortion ban after protests – video report

9 Eylül 2016 Cuma

Miami Beach protests against use of Naled to fight Zika-carrying mosquitos

Aerial spraying to kill Zika-carrying mosquitoes in Miami Beach is set to begin on Friday despite growing protests over the use of the controversial insecticide Naled, which is banned across Europe because of concerns over its safety.


Health officials in Florida ordered the spraying as the number of locally acquired cases of the disease continued to rise, with new figures from the state’s department of health on Wednesday recording 56 non-travel-related infections, mostly in Miami Beach and the nearby Wynwood neighbourhood.


But the decision to use Naled, a potent neurotoxin that kills mosquitoes on contact, which opponents claim can cause birth defects and which was blamed for the deaths of millions of honeybees earlier this month following aerial spraying in South Carolina, has prompted fiery protests in Miami Beach. The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) says that Naled is safe.


Several hundred demonstrators, some wearing gas masks and carrying placards denouncing the use of Naled as “lunacy”, attended a lively public debate at Miami Beach city hall on Wednesday. At the meeting, county officials agreed to postpone spraying for 24 hours until Friday, but said it would be followed by another early-morning round on Sunday and others in each of the two following weekends.


“I don’t particularly want to do this, we tried everything not to get to this point,” said Carlos Giménez, the mayor of Miami-Dade County, to jeers from many in the audience.


Testing earlier this month showed that adult mosquitoes collected in Miami Beach were found to be carrying the Zika virus. The county, which has jurisdiction over Zika-fighting efforts, has until now sprayed at street level using the organic larvicide bacillus thuringiensis israelensis (BTi), which does not kill adult mosquitoes.


“We need to do this to knock down this population of mosquitoes and knock down the occurrence of Zika in Miami Beach, and stop this problem here right now,” Giménez said.


He repeated earlier assurances from Dr Celeste Philip, the Florida surgeon general, and from officials of the CDC that Naled was safe.


A CDC information sheet about aerial spraying says the insecticide has been used “extensively” in the US since the 1950s, and has already been effective in countering Zika in Miami’s Wynwood district.


But Naled opponents, including elected officials in Miami Beach, are outraged at the use of an organophosphate banned by the European commission in 2012 and sent back to the mainland by Alejandro García Padilla, the governor of Puerto Rico, in July when the CDC sent a shipment to the Caribbean island to combat the escalating Zika outbreak in the US commonwealth.


“It’s a powerful neurotoxin and the risks associated with it are unknown,” Miami Beach commissioner Michael Grieco, who hosted the public forum on Wednesday, told the Guardian.


“I don’t care if it’s been used for one week, one decade or 50 years, it means nothing when there are studies out there and the jury’s still out on whether even a low dose of Naled can be harmful to animals, children or adults. People just don’t want it.


“A lot of people are pulling their kids from school on Friday and going away for the weekend; a lot have left town and don’t plan on coming back until October. It’s a shame that people have to flee from their own homes.”


The meeting also heard from Wynwood residents, who said they had been affected by aerial spraying in Miami’s arts and design district, which is also a designated “Zika zone”.


“I’m not a scientist and I’m not a doctor, but I know that when I go in my backyard and my tongue is shaking for four hours and I am ready to rush myself to the emergency room, something in that chemical is not right,” said Evo Love, an artist with a Wynwood studio.


Further protests took place at city hall on Thursday as demonstrators stepped up their opposition to the spraying.


“If I was the county mayor, I would listen to the residents that are most directly affected,” Grieco said. “If I was using the cover, as Giménez is, that the Florida governor is going to do it anyway, I would call the governor and stand up for my people.


“I’m speaking for a lot of people and they are very unhappy. What happens if these four doses are ineffective and they want to turn this into a long-term project? I can tell you right now that this will be publicly and repeatedly readdressed if there is any inclination to go beyond the four rounds they are claiming they are going to do. The residents and myself are not going to take this lying down.”



Miami Beach protests against use of Naled to fight Zika-carrying mosquitos

6 Eylül 2016 Salı

BMA calls off September junior doctors" strike after "scores" of protests

A revolt by rank-and-file junior doctors forced the British Medical Association to call off a five-day strike scheduled for next week on Monday, amid worries about the impact it would have on patients and the health service.


BMA insiders say members of the junior doctors committee, who had called the strike last Wednesday, were inundated with “scores, possibly hundreds” of angry protests in the days afterwards, forcing the rethink.


Junior doctors were particularly annoyed and anxious that the BMA had given the NHS just 12 days to prepare for the first of what the doctors’ union later said would be a series of week-long stoppages.


Trainee medics dismayed at the BMA’s decision were worried that the action – which has been due to be the latest protest against health secretary Jeremy Hunt’s new contract for junior doctors – would leave hospitals too little time to arrange to cover gaps in rotas and could compromise patients’ safety, and damage public trust.


Throughout Friday and the weekend, Dr Ellen McCourt, the chair of the junior doctors committee, received a regular stream of emails to her BMA email address from colleagues uneasy at the decision, as did other members of the committee. They demanded an urgent rethink of the union’s position. That played a crucial role in the BMA’s surprise announcement on Monday that it was abandoning its plan to strike next week, even though they had won no fresh concessions from the health secretary.



Ellen McCourt


Dr Ellen McCourt, chair of the BMA’s junior doctors committee. Photograph: Sarah Turton/BMA

McCourt said on Monday that the BMA had called off next week’s strikes to protect patient safety because “for the first time in this dispute, NHS England have told us that a service under such pressure cannot cope with the [12-day] notice period for industrial action given. We have to listen to our colleagues when they tell us that they need more time to keep patients safe.”


The committee’s decision to stage week-long total withdrawals of junior doctor labour across the NHS in England each month until December had prompted such anger that McCourt even received death threats over what some saw as a reckless and indefensible course of action. However, she has not indicated whether those threats came from fellow junior doctors or members of the public.


McCourt revealed in a message she posted on a junior doctors’ Facebook message site on Sunday: “My 64-year-old retired mother has had the press camped outside her house. JDC members’ lives have been splashed across the papers. And I have received threats to my life.” That followed several days of hostile coverage in several newspapers of the planned strikes and of BMA leaders who had endorsed them.


The rolling series of week-long walkouts had been condemned by leading medical bodies such as the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges and the General Medical Council, as well as by some hospital consultants, as disproportionate and risky.


However, Hunt made clear late on Monday that the BMA’s decision to call off next week’s action, while welcome, would not persuade him to lift his threat to impose a new contract on all 54,000 medics working in the NHS in England below the level of consultant from next month. His refusal to accede to the BMA’s plea leaves it unclear as to what the union will now do. Its planned strikes in October, November and December will still go ahead unless he relents, McCourt maintained.



Jeremy Hunt on a bike, leaving his home


While health secretary Jeremy Hunt welcomed the postponement of strike action, he refused to lift his threat to impose a new contract. Photograph: Carl Court/Getty Images

In a statement on Monday in the House of Commons on the long-running dispute, Hunt – whom Theresa May last week praised as “an excellent health secretary” despite unease in the NHS about his handling of the junior doctors row – said: “This afternoon’s news delaying the first strike is of course welcome. But we must not let it obscure the fact that the remaining planned industrial action is unprecedented in length and severity and will be damaging for patients, some of whom will already have had operations cancelled”.


About 100,000 planned operations will be postponed, and around a million outpatient appointments rescheduled as a result of the BMA’s actions, he said. “We cannot give an absolute guarantee that patients will be safe. But hospitals up and down the country will bust a gut to look after their patients in this unprecedented situation and communicate with people whose care is likely to be affected as soon as possible,” he told MPs.


Despite the BMA’s olive branch, relations between it and the Department of Health grew even more strained when the DH circulated a briefing paper contesting many of McCourt’s claims in her statement announcing that next week’s strike was off, six of which it said were categorically untrue. They also sought to embarrass McCourt, an A&E trainee in Hull, by contrasting her opposition to the contract now with her endorsement of it in a BBC Radio 4 interview on 18 May, the day the BMA and DH announced that a deal had been agreed.


For example, the DH denied her claim that the contract is discriminatory on equality grounds. In May, she told the PM programme that “we’ve come away with an offer, with a contract, that emphasises that all doctors are equal, that has put together a really good package of things for equalities so that we are minimising the issues we had with the previous offer with regards to gender and equality.”



BMA calls off September junior doctors" strike after "scores" of protests