If you missed this when I linked to The Guardian, do check it out....funny as!
Chris Morris's terrorist comedy premieres at Sundance
Chris Morris's terrorist comedy premieres at Sundance
Tuesday, 26 January 2010
Heroin contaminated with anthrax now linked to a German death
Authorities said they believed a batch of heroin is circulating in Europe that is contaminated with anthrax, a fairly common bacteria whose spores can be used as a biological weapon.
"I would urge all drug users to stop using heroin immediately and contact local drug services for support," Colin Ramsay, a consultant epidemiologist in Scotland, said in a statement.
A total of 15 heroin users in Scotland have been found to have anthrax infection since December. Seven of them have died.
The eighth victim was a 42-year-old man in Germany who died of anthrax infection in mid-December after injecting drugs, authorities said.
"It is now suspected that heroin with infectious anthrax spores (and possibly other psychoactive substances that can be injected) is in circulation in Europe," the health ministry in Berlin said in a statement.
Anthrax infection occurs most often in wild and domestic animals in Asia, Africa and parts of Europe.
Humans are rarely infected but touching contaminated hides or hair can cause skin lesions. If the bacillus is inhaled, it can take hold quickly and by the time symptoms show up, it usually is too late for successful treatment with antibiotics.
The European Center for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC), which monitors health in the European Union, said on its website that further anthrax cases were possible.
"The occurrence of 15 confirmed cases, including 8 deaths in a 5-week period is unusual and unexpected," it said.
"Considering the complex international distribution chain of heroin, and the clustering in time of cases in Scotland and Germany, the exposure to a contaminated batch of heroin distributed in several EU Member States is possible."
England's chief medical officer Liam Donaldson issued an alert last week to doctors and hospital emergency rooms to be on the look out for anthrax poisoning.
The ECDC said investigations so far "strongly" suggested that all the cases had been infected by a common source, but said the heroin was unlikely to have been deliberately contaminated.
"Accidental contamination seems the most plausible explanation to these incidents," it said.
@'Reuters'
"I would urge all drug users to stop using heroin immediately and contact local drug services for support," Colin Ramsay, a consultant epidemiologist in Scotland, said in a statement.
A total of 15 heroin users in Scotland have been found to have anthrax infection since December. Seven of them have died.
The eighth victim was a 42-year-old man in Germany who died of anthrax infection in mid-December after injecting drugs, authorities said.
"It is now suspected that heroin with infectious anthrax spores (and possibly other psychoactive substances that can be injected) is in circulation in Europe," the health ministry in Berlin said in a statement.
Anthrax infection occurs most often in wild and domestic animals in Asia, Africa and parts of Europe.
Humans are rarely infected but touching contaminated hides or hair can cause skin lesions. If the bacillus is inhaled, it can take hold quickly and by the time symptoms show up, it usually is too late for successful treatment with antibiotics.
The European Center for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC), which monitors health in the European Union, said on its website that further anthrax cases were possible.
"The occurrence of 15 confirmed cases, including 8 deaths in a 5-week period is unusual and unexpected," it said.
"Considering the complex international distribution chain of heroin, and the clustering in time of cases in Scotland and Germany, the exposure to a contaminated batch of heroin distributed in several EU Member States is possible."
England's chief medical officer Liam Donaldson issued an alert last week to doctors and hospital emergency rooms to be on the look out for anthrax poisoning.
The ECDC said investigations so far "strongly" suggested that all the cases had been infected by a common source, but said the heroin was unlikely to have been deliberately contaminated.
"Accidental contamination seems the most plausible explanation to these incidents," it said.
@'Reuters'
Still nice to see Reuters finally picking up on the story!
(Thanx Chris!)
Monday, 25 January 2010
DJ Rolando on Los Hermanos
Features an interview with Rolando, vinyl cutting with Ron Murphy and DJ Dex spinning at Electric Avenue
Natasha Walter: 'I believed sexism in our culture would wither away. I was entirely wrong'
I'm trying to establish just how often the feminist writer Natasha Walter gets angry. Is she ever in a rage before breakfast? "Rarely," she says. Does she ever rant at sexist comments on TV? "From time to time." Would she describe herself as an angry person? "Sometimes I think I'm not the raging sort."
I'm on a mission to discover what fires Walter up. She has been one of Britain's foremost feminist voices for more than a decade, a period in which she has written rationally, often compellingly, on everything from prostitution to parental leave and pornography to equal pay. They are subjects that can provoke real fury, and yet Walter's approach to them tends to be calm, sane, straightforward.
Which is great, of course, but her sensibility has always intrigued me. It's a hoary old cliche that feminists are intrinsically angry – a cliche that has been used to undermine feminists, to paint us as marauding harpies, steam belching from our ears – but like all cliches it holds a grain of truth. Most strong political arguments do, necessarily, arise from a wellspring of anger. So what makes Walter furious? What drives her?
We have arranged to meet to talk about her new book, Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism. It is organised in two distinct parts, and the first finds Walter taking a journey through the seedy underbelly of modern culture, an excursion that starts, in faintly surreal fashion, at a "Babes on the Bed" competition in a Southend nightclub, a contest to find a glamour model for Nuts magazine. It's difficult to imagine anyone more incongruous here than the intellectual, refined Walter; especially when the DJ starts shouting, "This is Cara Brett! She's on the cover of Nuts this week! So buy her, take her home and have a wank." The uncomfortable scene grows uglier as a series of young women take to a bed and strip off their bras to "joggle" their breasts before a throng of men.
The journey continues through interviews with a former lap dancer called Ellie, who helps illustrate just how sexist the culture has become: "Now," says Ellie, "women get told they are prudes if they say they don't want their boyfriend to go to a club where he gets to stick his fingers in someone else's vagina." She interviews a woman she calls Angela, who, in describing her work as a prostitute, says that "basically you've consented to being raped sometimes for money". And then there's pornography addict Jim, who says that "porn is way more brutalising than it used to be. There is this unbelievable obsession with [extreme] anal sex . . . It's far more demeaning to women than in the past."
It's all enraging material, and Walter marshals it well, but there still seems to be an edge of fury amiss. I ask what prompted her to write this first part of the book, and she says that it came about after a short newspaper column that she had dashed off. "It was just a little squib about lads' magazines. I didn't invest much in it, and it was one of those situations where you start getting more responses than you expected..."
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