Private Eye’s current issue is an absolute blinder, I believe Catherine has already blogged on their Roger Alton/Independent story, but I specifically wanted to mention M.D’s column this issue (Eye 1220). It’s very short, but is a follow up to his earlier piece on the cervical cancer vaccine, which I blogged on in July. You can’t read the latest piece on their website, only in the print edition, and as its only a short piece, I thought I would type it in here in its entireity in the hope of avoiding any misunderstandings about the content. If M.D or Private Eye object, I will, of course, remove it and put a summery in instead…

“M.D’s campaign on behalf of parents who want their daughter(s) to be protected from genital warts (very common) as well as cervical cancer (very rare) is not going well. The government has chosen the Ceravix vaccine rather than Gardasil, presumably on grounds of cost although the contract price remains confidential.

Many sexual health experts reccomend Gardasil and have given it to their children. As Peter Greenhouse in Bristol puts it: “You’d be mad not to protect your daughter against warts too if you can afford it.” One solution would be to offer all parents the choice of topping up with the more expensive vaccine while keeping all girls in the same programme.

However, the NHS vaccine programme does not allow this and parents not only have to pay the full cost of the vaccine, but also have to pay for it to be privately administered (£400 is the price I’m paying for my daughter). So parents choosing a vaccine with wider coverage against disease have to pay through the nose, take their daughters out of school and isolate them from their peer group. Once again, Labour’s patient choice mantra doesn’t bear scrutiny.”

No wonder M.D’s cross…

Elsewhere in the same issue, there’s one of those short media pieces about how the moral indignation the Daily Mail has shown concerning the increasingly sexed up ‘Coronation Street’ doesn’t quite match up with the picture of actress Helen Flanagan (Rose Webster) it chose to illustrate it, or its increased leering over pictures of Emma ‘Hermione’ Watson when she’s off duty or posing for shoots in other magazines.

There’s also a fascinating, not to mention depressing, account of the SNP, their councilor Jahangir Hanif, his daughter Noor, and their trip to Durra in the Federally Administered Tribal Area of Pakistan, which I can’t even begin to summarise here…

Over at SCHnews, the writers have been enjoying the credit crunch, whilst being understandably wary of the horrors to come, and the Economist was also moved to be satirical a few weeks back now, also on the horrors to come. There’s also a piece in the same publication on a whole other set of horrors to come in the form of data mining, just to spoil your day and put the fear of… whatever… into you. And in slightly lighter, but critical, vein is a review of Alison Light’s book ‘Mrs Woolf and the Servents: An Intimate History of Domestic Life in Bloomsbury’, which would seem to suggest that the liberated Virginia Woolf and her sister Vanessa Bell didn’t quite manage to pass on women’s liberation to the women below stairs. Does liberation, like charity, start at home? clearly not…

Posted by Barbara Felix on 11 October 2008, at 4:00 PM | Comments (4)