Author Archives: Natalie

I don’t have any special knowledge of medical matters myself, but would like to pass on these comments from a reader writes:

I am an medical equipment engineer and installer, my wife is a mid-wife, so we both for different reasons take a keen interest in medical stories, ESPECIALLY at teatime, when we eat and watch the evening news.

So tonight 28/5 we were both intestested in in a news

item on the 6 o’clock news, “Iraqis take charge of their

own health service” report (proberbly repeated at 10pm

if you are interested)

Before I explain this, approx 3 years ago we were both

watching Channel 4 news and an item about the UN

sanctions agianst Saddam. We both noted the state of

the hospital and the 1970s Soviet incubators being

used, we were both horrified. This hospital as I

recall was stated as being the Baghdad main hospital.

So cue tonights report on the six o’clock news. To

most certainly the same hospital.The reporter in her

report walked past some brand new incubators and

remarked, “there are no spare parts for these incubators” not “infant mortality is obviously going to improve now

that modern western incubators are availible” NO that

just would not fit into THE PICTURE would it?

I was mortified at the offhand, crass and misleading

reporting, I counted at least 6 brand new incubators

and all she can say “there are no spare parts”

As for the spare parts issue, I found out from a

blogger site yesterday (no one else had cared to

mention it) that commercial flights were once agian

going to Baghdad, this is important as it is well

known in the medical equipment industry, that service

and maintainence are the key standards that companies

compete against each other at. I was in Cairo a few

weeks ago working and got parts delivered from

Chicago in 14 hours, so I am pretty certain Fedex

will be delivering into Iraq, especially as 120k of

American soldiers are there.

I enjoyed my meal, but saying that I still feel sick,

how could the reporting standards of the BBC, who are

supposed to be the benchmark of world TV be so low?

the last couple of weeks I have had much less time for the internet and blogging. Belatedly, from Jim Miller, here is an example of BBC bias from a couple of weeks back. I missed it then, but the issue is still current.

I think the B-BBC posters have between them the full range of possible opinions about gay marriage (my own view is the standard libertarian one, and Jim Miller mentions his own mixed feelings), but it is undeniable that the assumption that marriage can only lawfully be between a man and a woman was, as Jim says, nearly universal in all Western societies until only a generation ago and is still the majority opinion in the US. It is not by any stretch “radical” or unique to Republicans, or unique to Americans for that matter.

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