Vox Political: Hunt Should Go Because of Advice on Children’s Rashes

I’m reblogging this piece of Mike’s because I share his disgust and the entirely reasonable fears of the doctors over Jeremy Hunt’s advice to parents, who are worried about their children’s skin rashes. The Health Secretary has advised them to go online and Google the symptoms instead. This has appalled doctors, who are concerned that it could lead to parents missing the signs that their child has a serious disease, such as meningitis. http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2016/02/01/jeremy-hunt-health-secretary-or-horseman-of-the-apocalypse/

Mike’s comment begins

We should be hammering on the doors of Parliament, demanding the resignation – if not the head – of hapless health bungler Jeremy Hunt.

His latest calamity is a claim that parents in need of urgent medical help could look online for help with their child’s rash.

This advice – potentially fatal if a child has meningitis and it isn’t diagnosed properly and quickly – prompted the #GPnotGoogle campaign on Twitter amid an outpouring of scorn and demands, by qualified doctors, for a retraction.

Hunt’s concern is to save money while privatising the NHS by stealth. He does not want people using it if he can avoid it. He has stated previously that he wants it privatised, and so should not be let anywhere near this most treasured of British institutions.

And this is one of the most monumentally stupid and dangerous pieces of advice I’ve heard in a little while. Meningitis is an horrific disease, which can kill, mutilate and incapacitate in a very short space of time. There were numerous cases on television, both national and local, a few years ago featuring truly terrible stories of tots that the disease had destroyed in the space of a day or so. One of those it didn’t kill, lost their lower arms and legs to the disease. Other children have been left brain damaged. Faced with such an horrific disease, the last thing that anyone should recommend is that they simply look up the symptoms on Google. It needs a proper diagnosis by a qualified doctor.

And very definitely, people need better advice and guidance than that provided by Hunt. It’s time he was struck off and sent packing now.

The Guardian Adds a Few More Details on Jonathan Stanley’s UKIP Resignation

I posted an article yesterday about the resignation from UKIP of Jonathan Stanley, a Scotland-based surgeon. Mr Stanley was their candidate for Westmoreland and Lonsdale. He resigned citing racism and sectarianism in the Scottish party as his reasons for leaving, along with the party’s failure to publish documents he had written about the deaths of eleven babies and a mother in the University Hospitals of the Morecambe Bay NHS Trust.

The Guardian today published an article reporting Mr Stanley’s resignation as one of three blows and scandals to hit the party. The other two were the investigation of Janice Atkinson for fiddling her expenses from the EU, and the suspension of Stephen Howd, a barrister, and their candidate for Scunthorpe, over allegations of harassment at his workplace.

The Guardian’s report says little about this. Most of the article is about Stanley’s resignation and Atkinson’s fraud, adding a few more details about why he resigned. In addition to the sectarianism and culture of bullying, he also strongly objected to the party’s use of ‘the language of English nationalism’. He felt it was damaging and corrosive to the Eurosceptic and Unionist cause.

He also took issue with part of Farage’s plan to exclude migrants from state support for five years after they came here. Along with his other reasons, he stated he could not support the exclusion of migrant children from state education and medical care.

Stanley’s absolutely right. It is totally unacceptable that migrant children, in particular, should be punished and left vulnerable because their parents came here in search of a better life. It’s also a move that is absolutely certain to do immense harm. If you exclude children from state education, and they cannot afford the immense fees of private tuition, then automatically you create an unskilled underclass, who will have no other recourse but crime. Especially if they cannot claim dole or other benefits.

I’ve similarly reblogged material from Vox Political, where Mike has produced the opinions of doctors and social workers that if migrants are excluded from the NHS, then it could lead to more infectious disease going untreated. You think of the chaos and suffering that could arise, if someone contracted Ebola, because they came from or visited West Africa, and were excluded from state medical treatment and couldn’t afford to go privately.

Or more prosaic problems and deaths that could arise from more ordinary problems going untreated, like meningitis or appendicitis. And does anyone really want to see women left to give birth without proper medical care, especially after the rave reviews of the Beeb’s Call The Midwife? That programme showed exactly the problems women faced bearing children in the East End slums in 1950s austerity Britain. No-one should want that privation and poverty to come back.

Except, it seems, Farage, and the rest of the Kipper, Tory and Lib Dem goons, who crave to see the NHS carved up and sold off.

The Guardian’s article is at: http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/mar/20/ukip-faces-crisis-two-parliamentary-candidates-suspended-one-resigns