TV ad showing Santa with dementia "not too upsetting for children"

A TV campaign that shows Santa forgetting Christmas after developing dementia has been cleared by the ad watchdog following complaints it was offensive and could distress children.

The festive campaign, called Santa Forgot, was run by the charity Alzheimer’s Research UK to raise awareness of dementia and help boost donations.

The two-minute clip, narrated by Stephen Fry and animated by Aardman, the studio behind Wallace and Gromit, tells the story of a girl called Freya who asks her father about Santa, who no longer delivers presents because he has dementia.

In the ad the girl goes to the North Pole to save Father Christmas, offering support and encouraging his redundant elves to become researchers to find a way to cure the disease.

Three dozen viewers contacted the Advertising Standards Authority to complain that showing Santa having Alzheimer’s disease was offensive, could cause distress to children and questioned whether it should have been allowed to run when young viewers might see it.

Tim Parry, a director at Alzheimer’s Research UK, said the ad targeted adults and carried an “ex-kids” scheduling restriction, meaning it did not air in programmes when young children were likely to be watching.

It was only broadcast once before 7.30pm in an episode of Emmerdale on ITV because it involved a serious dementia storyline involving a main character.

Parry defended the use of such a hard-hitting strategy to get the charity’s message across to viewers.

“Our aim was to raise awareness that the diseases that cause dementia strike indiscriminately,” he said. “If we are to fight the misconceptions about dementia that still persist in society, we have to challenge them head-on.”

In its ruling, the ASA admitted that the ad might upset some viewers, with the depiction of Santa potentially likely to “cause discomfort to some younger children”.

However, the ad watchdog said the issue of dementia had been handled “sensitively” and the sad story of Santa was told in a “gentle, non-graphic way with a generally positive ending”.

The ASA’s investigation found the campaign did not breach the UK advertising code relating to harm and offence, children and scheduling.

The use of shock advertising is a common tactic used by charities to promote their cause and galvanise an often apathetic public into donating money.

A spokesman for the ASA said that the watchdog had traditionally granted more leeway to public service and charity ads in relation to UK ad code rules because of the importance of the issues about which they are trying to raise awareness.

In 2015, the ASA received 1,752 complaints about 799 ads from what it terms the “non-commercial” sector, which includes charity advertising. This is from a total of 30,000 complaints about 20,000 ads in 2015.

The ASA has previously investigated whether it was too lenient in letting charity and public service advertisers get away with shock tactics.

It moved to examine its policy after participants in a survey it conducted complained that some ads went too far with deliberately distressing content to make people feel upset or guilty, particularly those targeting children’s TV channels.

The ad watchdog’s investigation into its policy concluded that it was not being overly lenient, but it did introduce more thorough checks of charity and public service ads that receive complaints.

TV ad showing Santa with dementia "not too upsetting for children"

Indonesia dismisses study showing forest fire haze killed more than 100,000 people

Indonesian, Malaysian and Singaporean authorities have dismissed research that suggested smoky haze from catastrophic forest fires in Indonesia last year caused 100,000 deaths. Some even contend the haze caused no serious health problems, but experts say those assertions contradict well-established science.

Last year’s fires in Sumatra and the Indonesian part of Borneo were the worst since 1997, burning about 261,000 hectares of forests and peatland and sending haze across the region for weeks. Many were deliberately set by companies to clear land for palm oil and pulpwood plantations.

The study in the journal Environmental Research Letters by Harvard and Columbia researchers estimated the amount of health-threatening fine particles, often referred to as PM2.5, released by the fires that burned from July to October and tracked their spread across south-east Asia using satellite observations.

In Indonesia, a spokesman for the country’s disaster mitigation agency said the research “could be baseless or they have the wrong information”. Indonesia officially counted 24 deaths from the haze including people killed fighting the fires.

Singapore’s Ministry of Health said short-term exposure to haze will generally not cause serious health problems. The study was “not reflective of the actual situation”, it said, and the overall death rate hadn’t changed last year.

In Malaysia, health minister Subramaniam Sathasivam said officials are still studying the research, which is “computer-generated, not based on hard data”. “People have died but to what extent the haze contributed to it, it’s hard to say,” he said. “If an 80-year-old fellow with high blood pressure, diabetes, heart problem and exposure to haze died, what did he die of? This is a hell of a difficult question to answer.”

The dry season fires are an annual irritant in Indonesia’s relations with its neighbours Singapore and Malaysia and the finding of a huge public health burden has the potential to worsen those strains. The 2015 burning season, which was worsened by El Niño’s dry conditions, also tainted Indonesia’s reputation globally by releasing a vast amount of atmosphere-warming carbon.

The Indonesian government has stepped up efforts to prosecute companies and individuals who set fires and also strengthened its fire-fighting response. This year’s fires have affected a smaller area in large part due to unseasonal rains.

Jamal Hisham Hashim, research fellow with the International Institute for Global Health in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, said governments should not dismiss the study even if the estimated deaths are arguable.

He said decades of air pollution research that followed London’s killer smog in 1952 has established the relationship between fine particulate matter and premature deaths, particularly in people with existing respiratory and cardiovascular diseases.

“The pollution level that occurred during the haze is severe enough to cause premature deaths. That is indisputable,” he said. “The study is a wake-up call. We need to be shaken; we have become too complacent with the haze.”

Joel Schwartz, an author of the study who is regarded by his peers as one of the world’s top experts on the health effects of air pollution, said authorities in the affected countries have not offered any details of how they reached conclusions critical of the study.

During the haze, Malaysia suffered air pollution at 10 times the level that the World Health Organization says causes premature deaths, he said, while Singapore’s claim that short-term exposure does not have serious effects is factually incorrect.
The Singaporean statement that its death rate was unchanged from 2014 did not demonstrate anything, Schwartz said, due to a worldwide trend for declining mortality. The study’s premise is that deaths are higher than what they would be without the haze rather than a comparison to a particular year, he said.

Separately, Singapore’s health ministry did not respond to a question on why heart disease and pneumonia, both of which can be brought to fatal conclusion by fine particle exposure, had increased as a percentage of deaths in 2015.

Malaysia, meanwhile, does not measure PM2.5 in its air pollution index but has been planning to from next year.

Half a dozen scientists with expertise in air pollution who reviewed the study for the Associated Press said its methodology was sound and its conclusions reasonable. Some cautioned that the estimates of 91,600 deaths in Indonesia, another 6,500 in Malaysia and 2,200 in Singapore are invariably uncertain because aspects of the modelling rely on assumptions and the actual figures could be higher or lower.

The study considered only the health impact on adults and restricts itself to the effects of fine particles rather than all toxins that would be in the smoke.

Philip Hopke, director of the Center for Air Resources Engineering and Science at New York state’s Clarkson University, said air pollution studies have to overcome several challenges because “no one who gets sick or dies comes to the doctor or hospital with a clear label that says airborne particles or ozone did this.” Another problem is the studies typically assume that fine particles are the sole cause of illness or death but smoke from fires contains ozone and a variety of volatile compounds that would also affect health.

“A major event like occurred here is extremely likely to have caused adverse health outcomes in terms of both sickness and deaths,” he said.

Indonesia dismisses study showing forest fire haze killed more than 100,000 people

Study showing decline in dog fertility may have human implications

Britain’s dogs are becoming less fertile. Researchers who have systematically examined canine sperm over a span of 26 years say that overall sperm quality has been in decline.

Environmental chemicals are implicated. And the study may throw light on the fertility changes in male humans.

Richard Lea, of Nottingham University’s school of veterinary medicine and science, and colleagues collected samples of semen from a carefully monitored population of labradors, border collies, German shepherds and golden retrievers used as stud to breed dogs intended to help the disabled. They tested 1,925 samples of ejaculate from a total of 232 different dogs at the rate of between 42 and 97 dogs every year.

And they found a drop in sperm motility – the ability to swim in a straight line – of 2.4% per year from 1988 to 1998. Even once some dogs were excluded from the study because their fertility was in some way in question, from 2002 to 2014 the scientists still measured a decline of 1.2% per year.

They also confirmed the presence of environmental chemicals known as PCBs and phthalates in the canine semen, and in testicles of dogs castrated by veterinary surgeons in the course of routine neutering treatment. These chemicals are ubiquitous, and have been linked to both fertility issues and birth defects.

At the heart of the research is not the dog, but the question of male human fertility. Repeated tests over more than 70 years have shown a downward trend in male fertility, but there has always been argument about the consistency and accuracy of the findings.

“Why the dog?” said Dr Lea. “Apart from the fact that it is a great population of animals to work with, dogs live in our homes, they sometimes eat the same food, they are exposed to the same environmental contaminants that we are, so the underlying hypothesis is that the dog is really a type of sentinel for human exposure.”

One analysis of human sperm counts examined 60 separate studies over a 50-year span. But different research teams used different techniques, and in any case the advances in laboratory equipment over many decades meant that it would always be difficult to compare like with like.

There has been much less doubt about measured increases over the decades in rates of testicular cancer, and a condition known to affect a proportion of boy babies at birth: cryptorchidism, in which the testicles do not descend normally to the scrotum.

The Nottingham canine study group resolved a number of problems of consistency. All the dogs were healthy and well cared for. The semen sampling was supervised by Professor Gary England, Nottingham’s foundation dean of veterinary science, who launched the project, and all the samples were handled by just three technicians in the 26-year study. The researchers also looked at the dog’s food, and the chemicals in the food.

The decline in canine sperm quality does not, for the moment, augur the end of the dog as a species. “It’s very unlikely” Dr Lea said. “It’s very difficult to say at what point this becomes a problem.”

The researchers saw increases in cryptorchidism in the study dogs’ pups over the years. They also saw a clear connection between environmental chemicals and declining fertility. How this might work, however, is not so clear.

“If you think about it, we are exposed to a cocktail. Who knows how many chemicals are out there and what they are doing? It gets even more complicated when you start to look at the effects of mixtures of chemicals,” Dr Lea said.

“What we have been able to do here is just to pull out ones that we know are present, and we have tested those in terms of their effects and it does suggest there is an impact. The next stage – and it is a big next stage – is trying to tease out what else is there and how those chemicals are interacting.”

Study showing decline in dog fertility may have human implications

Ministers accused of showing contempt with fresh squeeze on public sector spend

Unison says it is a disgrace that 70% of nurses will get no spend rise this 12 months. Photograph: Christopher Furlong/Getty Photos

All around 600,000 NHS staff will acquire a reduce-than-anticipated pay rise soon after the government rejected a get in touch with for them to be awarded a 1% rise on prime of automated “progression spend” that averages around three%.

The government has also determined that 400 “very senior managers” in the NHS, who are no longer on progression pay will acquire no pay rise at all.

Danny Alexander, the chief secretary to the Treasury, explained the government necessary to press ahead with “public sector pay restraint” as he stated that the selections would conserve a complete of £200m in the NHS budget in 2014-15 and £400m in 2015-sixteen.

Christina McAnea, head of well being at Unison, mentioned: “This coalition government has taken a scalpel to the pay body’s report and will not escape the anger of NHS personnel. It’s a disgrace that 70% of nurses will not even get a shell out rise this yr – what sort of message does this give to the value this government spots on focused NHS workers?”

Unison criticised the government right after it set out how it would implement pay out rises for 2014-15 following it asked the pay assessment bodies to examine how a one% enhance could be applied to the pertinent public sector workforces.

In addition to the NHS selection the government announced a 1% boost for members of the armed forces, contractor medical doctors and nurses and members of the judiciary. Departments will award a 1% boost to senior civil servants on a discretionary basis and a one% rise will be awarded to the bulk of prison officers. Police and crime commissioners will acquire no enhance.

Alexander also announced that £1bn in employer public pension contributions will have to be paid by person government departments rather than from the treasury’s central “annually managed expenditure” pot. This will give Osborne an extra £1bn in up coming week’s spending budget, which he could invest in infrastructure. But it means that personal departments will have to make a higher contribution to pensions.

The training division will have to pay out an further 2.3%, working out at £330m in 2015-sixteen and £560m in 2016-17. For the civil services it will mean an additional two.2%, doing work out £275m a yr from 2015-16 and onwards. For the NHS it will be a .3% improve, functioning out at £125m a 12 months from 2015-sixteen.

The Treasury chief secretary mentioned of the 1% spend rises: “Public sector workers make a crucial contribution to the effective delivery of public services. We need to have to continue with public sector pay out restraint in order to place the nation’s finances back on a sustainable footing. We are delivering on our commitment to a one particular percent shell out rise for all except some of the most senior public sector employees.”

The determination on the NHS marks a rejection of the recommendation by the NHS Spend Assessment Entire body for all around 600,000 workers – around fifty five% of the complete.

Christina McAnea extra: “The government has proven complete contempt for the NHS, contempt for workers and contempt for individuals and will pay the cost at the ballot box. Even a straight 1% improve would be nowhere near adequate to meet the massive price-of-living increases that NHS workers have had to cope with given that 2010. Employees are on average 10% worse off than when the coalition came to power.”

Ministers accused of showing contempt with fresh squeeze on public sector spend