Eloise Kay

Jenny of Oldstones - cover of Games of Thrones Season 8 Episode 2 song youtu.be/C0xxBGlOqLA via @YouTube

A thirteen year old girl died of sepsis after her mother, Louise Longster, said she repeatedly asked medics for help but was treated like a 'mum who had been on Google' while her daughter was brushed off as a 'diva teen'. She said her daughter had been in so much pain she asked her whether she was going to die and said: 'It's haunting that the 13-year-old was the one who was right.' But a coroner ruled Chloe's death was contributed to by neglect, and the Care Quality Commission (CQC) fined the NHS Trust £1,250 for failing its 'duty of candour' It’s disgraceful that teen girls are being repeatedly failed due to bias and #misogyny in health care. Chloe joins a long list of teen girls failed due to hospital neglect Martha - bbc.co.uk/news/articles/… Melody - bbc.co.uk/news/uk-englan… Amy - theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/j… Ruth - inquest.org.uk/ruth-szymankie… How many more 11- 16 girls with be failed before @CQCProf and @wesstreeting get to grips with this crisis ? Added that treating someone’s life as worth £1250 is an absolute insult @CQCProf and is not a deterrent for any trust @KenZeroHarm @LabourKeriHowe @PHSO_theFACTS @PHSOmbudsman @c22cuk @ElissaNoves @cjayanetti @martinimarie @JuliaCa20602661 @Beth_Tastic @NicklessColin @redpepper1011 @hopestardust20 @SarahSpoorUK

I've seen this Lancet article going around recently, and to be honest, I find it horrifying. Imagine a researcher in 1965 looking at the rising tide of lung cancer and declaring: "People are just going to smoke. It’s human nature. Let’s stop talking about prevention and just focus on curing cancer." If we had adopted that strategy ("The situation is hopeless, focus on treatment") it would have led to the deaths of literally tens of millions of people over the last 50 years. Why? Because medicine still cannot fix the damage smoking causes. We didn't beat lung cancer with chemotherapy; we beat it by taxing tobacco and banning smoking in restaurants. Yet, this is exactly the strategy we are currently adopting for Long COVID. We are told that mass infection is inevitable, masks are "too hard," and our only hope lies in finding a cure for a complex neuro-immune disease that we have virtually no understanding of whatsoever. Never in the history of medicine have we successfully dealt with a public health issue by abandoning prevention. A few examples: 1. In the 1950s, highways were slaughterhouses. We didn't solve this by training better trauma surgeons to stitch people back together. We solved it with airbags and seatbelts. If we had relied solely on "better treatments" for car crash victims, the death toll would still be astronomical. 2. When people got sick of condoms, we didn't say, "Oh well, let everyone get AIDS." We continued to encourage them, and also developed PrEP. We didn't abandon the goal of stopping HIV transmission; we just built better tools. 3. We didn't stop Cholera by inventing better rehydration fluids. We cleaned the water. We built sewers. They didn't ask every citizen to "boil their water responsibly"; they engineered the risk out of the system. Currently, we are accepting the mass disablement of children and adults based on the arrogant assumption that future medicine will be able to "fix" their broken immune systems. But ask anyone with any chronic illness: medicine is terrible at treating it, let alone fixing it. To bet our children’s futures on a non-existent cure while refusing to implement the one thing that actually works (prevention) is appaling. For those who think COVID is a hoax or a cold, I can sort of understand not caring about prevention - because at least it is internally consistent. But people who understand the risk and still don't emphasize prevention are either immoral or just haven't thought too deeply about the problem.

From today’s Guardian. How depressing is this?

I had the following horrific experience today during a faculty meeting. I'd had a zoom call a few days ago with someone who was using an AI secretary - it recorded the call and emailed both of us a summary, complete with action items, etc. Oh that could be useful, I thought. So I clicked the link in the email to see the summary. It asked me to login with my google account. I thought, what's the harm. (Famous last words!) I glanced at the summary, deleted the email and forgot all about it. Today we had a department meeting about sensitive topics. Then the AI secretary joined the call and announced to everyone via chat that it's there to help *me*, that it will be recording, transcribing, and analyzing the conversation. I panicked and logged off the zoom call, joining the meeting from a colleague's computer. But that didn't kick the AI off, it was still in the meeting! I don't know how it got in the meeting in the first place (perhaps it read the zoom link in my google calendar? I didn't think I gave it access!...). The chair had to manually boot it out of zoom, and even then I wasn't sure that it wasn't still recording us. How mortifying! (After the meeting, I googled how to get rid of it.)

I would offer that Alex Pretti putting his body—with his hands up—between a woman and the BP agent who had just violently shoved her into the snow, offer stark competing visions of manhood. Pretti, a nurse caring for veterans, who took a face full of pepper spray to shield that woman, is a much better masculine ideal that the masked coward shoving the woman and executing a man on his knees. MAGA may venerate the latter, but most people in a healthy society want the former.

“I burst into tears during a RECOVER-TLC meeting and quickly turned off my camera when a parent, suggested scheduling the study during summer break so it would not interfere with schoolwork. I sat there listening to my daughter moaning in pain from the simple act of shifting in bed; schoolwork had vanished from her world three years earlier.”

There's some great stuff in here. READ AND SHARE!!

@MaryTHall Where is this from?? It’s so pretty!

The recent academic article defending FGM in the British Medical Journal is shocking. Their labelling of the call to end this practice as "Western sensationalism" speaks to how much further there is to go in the fight to end this form of severe, violent harm to women and girls all over the world. CUSW were honoured to host Nimco Ali OBE, a leading activist and FGM survivor, at our second speaker event earlier this month. Her comments on how and why FGM is wrongly defined and defended as a "cultural practice" were especially insightful and clear. We held this event early on due to a shared view among our members that FGM is not adequately discussed and understood, despite its widespread nature and the serious harm it inflicts. A women-only event consisting almost entirely of an in-depth Q&A presented an opportunity for our members and attendees to share thoughts and learn from an inspiring leading figure about this form of sex-based violence and oppression suffered by women and girls. The Five Foundation, co-founded by Nimco in 2019, does invaluable work campaigning to end FGM as well as organising funding and advocation for grassroots organisations. @NimkoAli @TheFiveFound @bmj_latest

@jan_murray My mum just had this. She had to go to the hospital where the test was done and ask them to resend it to the GP, and then finally got to go through her results. I’d warned her that I’d read about this happening a lot recently.

Another week, another exasperated email to my GP practice. Had a pelvic ultrasound on 14 Nov. The sonographer told me what she could see, said it would likely need follow-up and the full report would be with my GP within 7 days. With a breast cancer diagnosis earlier this year, it’s hard not to worry. I’ve now contacted the practice multiple times - by phone, email and in person (this screenshot is from the email I’ve just sent). But still no sign of the report (which I KNOW is there). Sharing this because, honestly, I’m tired of the excuses. And I feel quite sure I'm not the only patient who has to go through this 'dance' with their GP surgery - over and over again. I understand delays happen - but this just feels like incompetence. The receptionist I spoke to tonight was also rude. And once again I find myself wondering about patients who aren’t confident communicators. Or who don’t have the energy to keep calling and emailing - or have anyone to advocate for them. Because without dogged persistence, it's clear many patients would fall through the cracks.

Today, in a #LongCovid space, a patient told a fierce truth. We can hear it among ourselves, when we talk to each other. Many, a great many, of us are declining. It is brutally obvious to us. Her point was that even two years ago we were sick as hell but still able to make things happen. Big things. Even from our beds or couches. Things that are now completely, utterly out of our reach. We have been begging you for years but once again, please protect yourselves and your family, especially your kids, from SARS-CoV-2. Trust us. You don't want this and you don't want this for your kids. 😭😭😭

New drone surveys show that bird flu has wiped out nearly half of the females in the planet’s biggest elephant seal population. The staggering loss highlights how rapidly the virus is spreading through wildlife and how much remains unknown about its long-term impact on marine ecosystems. See what researchers uncovered: bit.ly/49BmYId 📸 Connor Bamford / British Antarctic Survey

At the entrance to Kyiv's memorial park, a haunting sculpture depicts a very thin girl with a very sad look and a handful of wheat. Behind her stands a giant Candle of Remembrance of the Holodomor, a man-made famine that killed millions of Ukrainians. In the aftermath of World War I, Ukraine was independent. However, in 1919, the Soviet Union forcibly annexed the nation. Ukrainians, yearning for self-determination, were seen as a threat to Moscow's imperial ambitions. In 1932, not wanting to lose control of Europe's main source of grain, Stalin confiscated the grain-producing land from Ukrainian peasants and took all the grain, creating an artificial famine. The goal was to "teach Ukrainians a lesson" so they would no longer oppose Moscow. The people who produced the most grain in Europe were left without a crumb of bread. The height of this horrific event was in the spring of 1933, when millions of Ukrainians perished from hunger. My late grandfather was a child, only 9, during the Holodomor. He recounted witnessing people starving to death in the streets, or just collapsing, their bodies eventually collected and disposed of in mass graves. Both dead and those still dying. In rare moments when he'd open up about it, it was very clear that the event deeply scarred him for life. To conceal the extent of the genocide, Stalin's regime erased evidence, executed census takers, and resettled russian populations in Ukrainian villages. For decades, the Holodomor remained a silenced history, buried beneath layers of Soviet propaganda. The Holodomor at that time broke the Ukrainian resistance, but it made the desire for Ukraine's independence eternal, forever imprinting it in our DNA. As russia's brutal invasion of Ukraine continues, the specter of the Holodomor looms large. Every fourth Saturday of November, we light a candle to remember the victims of the Holodomor. This year, I ask you to light a candle with us and share information about the bloody genocide of the Ukrainian people that is happening yet again.

"She suddenly remembered she’d left her phone in the car. We stepped outside to get it - we’d only walked two or three meters from the gate when suddenly... There was no sound, no whistle, nothing. Just a flash, a boom - and then we were already on the ground: she was in front of me, and I was behind her. When I started shouting, 'Karyna!', she couldn’t answer me. I crawled over to her, because I couldn’t stand on my leg, and realized that my child was most likely gone." On 19 November, Berestyn, Kharkiv region, said goodbye to 17-year-old European kickboxing champion Karyna Bakhur, who was killed by a Russian strike on 18 November. Her father, Vitalii Bakhur, says that on 19 November his daughter was supposed to leave for Austria to compete. 📷: Suspilne Kharkiv

POV: you are a young woman celebrating a recent academic success

Nothing short of journalistic malpractice to not mention this rise is driven by people moving off legacy benefits and onto UC. If there was any code of standards among your profession you'd be fucking struck off as would most of your colleagues.

The Times: “1 million more claim UC without looking for work.” Reality: They were predominantly moved from legacy benefits by the DWP. That’s managed migration, not mass laziness. Stop moralising admin. It is extremely damaging, actively worsening the nation’s mental health.

So how can you dump sewage into the environment for 454,155 hours in just one year, and fail to meet your customer satisfaction targets, fail to meet your per capita consumption targets, fail to meet your supply interruption targets, fail to meet your DRINKING WATER QUALITY targets, fail to meet your internal sewer flooding targets, fail to meet you serious pollution targets, and get fined £2 million for "reckless" pollution and still get a four * rating? Apparently the minister for water Emma Hardy has the answer.

@helenadollimore My Southern Water bill in West Sussex has gone up by 52% already this year - that’s on top of a gradual 40% increase in previous years. Fined multiple times for sewage, yet pay enormous bonuses to CEOs. Labour says… meh 🫤 x.com/tweetfortheman…

Thanks to hard work of volunteers at weekend - they cleared 70% of what could be seen on the beach BUT more beads wash in with every tide & many beads are now also tangled in the sand and seaweed. I have asked Southern Water to dispatch marine surveyors to look for beads at sea