Category Archives: Society

Business, Economic, Government, Politics, Society

A cultural shift is needed to end gender discrimination

GENDER EQUALITY

IF we truly wanted to tackle the gender pay gap, we should be focussing on our biggest challenge: by encouraging women into the highest paid positions across all aspects of industry and employment.

In Scotland, only about a quarter of FTSE 100 company directors, public body chief executives, university principals, sheriffs and councillors are women. There are no female editors of major newspapers, or chief executives of FTSE 100 companies. Only seven per cent of senior police officers are women.

A way needs to be found to give women and men the same opportunities, and to create a pathway of equal chances. The senior management posts and highest-level specialist posts in so many fields are still significantly dominated by men.

One way to do this is by changing the grass roots narrative. Girls should be told from the earliest age that they can be anything they want to be; from train driver to football player; and from nuclear scientist to chief executive. Young girls should only be limited by their ability and their desire: never by their gender.

Our society needs to change its attitude, and in many cases its practices. If we are to ensure that girls get to progress in significantly growing numbers, starting in the home and then through pre-school, school and further education, these changes must now be our priority.

It is widely acknowledged that STEM careers are male-dominated. In the UK, just 15 per cent of engineering graduates are female. The figures are 19% for computer studies and 38% for maths. The shortfall is hardly surprising when we consider that only 13% of the overall UK STEM workforce is female and there are relatively few female STEM role models as a consequence.

We all need to embrace and encourage a fundamental change in attitude, and deliver a new atmosphere of equality – not just in business, but across all areas of society. By creating senior role models across traditionally male dominated sectors, we can foster a new attitude in young women, by encouraging them to pursue careers that they may not have originally considered.

Some of this change will evolve naturally through time, but society needs it sooner rather than in a generation or two. Women need to be correctly recognised and valued, and their potential realised for the benefit of our economy.

Research generated in 2015 showed that a more diverse and inclusive workforce helps business by bringing new skills, creativity and innovation, and achieving higher staff retention. Moving towards parity at top positions is not only likely to help the company’s performance; it could bring in added tax revenue. The same study estimated that closing gender pay gaps in work could add £150billion to UK gross domestic product in 2025.

Yet, there are still businesses in Scotland that pay male staff a higher rate than their female colleagues for the same job. We should be tracking down the offenders in this area, where like for like jobs are not paid the same. These disparities are unacceptable.

The Institute of Directors strongly supports the principle of equal pay and the need to create a better balance between male and female participation in the workforce so as to broaden the talent pool available to firms and employers.

Measuring pay gaps is very complex, and the use of averages can be misleading as peculiarities of industry, the nature of companies, geographies or circumstances make such comparisons unfair.

Governments should focus more on affordable and accessible childcare, encouraging more girls to study STEM subjects and providing better careers advice in schools. Policymakers should also focus on provision of leave and other measures which could help spread the strain of caring for children or the elderly.

Ultimately, a concerted effort must now be made to challenge the cultural norms: by encouraging more men and women to enter jobs that are outside conventional gender roles. Publishing crude averages alone will not tackle the root causes of the gender pay gap. There are numerous ways to improve the prospects of women in business and in other walks of life, but these must be done as part of a package of complementary measures designed to aid real and lasting change. Advancing the cause of women in the workplace and dealing with the gender pay gap are issues that aren’t going to go away until they are properly dealt with.

Standard
Health, Medical, Research, Science, Society

What can we do about antibiotic resistance?

ANTIBIOTICS

Intro: In 2014, the World Health Organisation (WHO) stated that antibiotic resistance was “happening right now in every region of the world” – leaving us at risk of entering a “post-antibiotic era”, where common infections could once again become fatal.

The WHO’s first global report on antibiotic resistance may sound alarmist, but it reflects the crucial role antibiotics have played in treating microbial diseases and infections since first becoming available in the 1930s.

Antibiotics were discovered in 1928 by the Scottish bacteriologist Alexander Fleming while he was working at the St Mary’s Hospital Medical School in London. During the First World War he had served as a medic in military hospitals behind the Western Front, where he witnessed the death of many soldiers from wounds that had become septic as a consequence of bacterial infections. After the war, Fleming directed his research efforts towards finding better ways of dealing with such infections and, according to his later account, discovered penicillin through chance and luck. A fungal mould of the genus Penicillium had infected a Petri dish containing a bacterial culture, after the spores had apparently blown into Fleming’s laboratory through a window that had accidentally been left open. As he was about to throw the Petri dish away, Fleming noticed that the bacteria around the mould had been killed, leading him to isolate the active substance produced by the mould, which he named penicillin.

A Medical Revolution

It took ten years for any serious work to start on developing penicillin into a usable antibiotic and, in the meantime, the German pharmaceutical company Bayer developed the sulphonamide antibacterial drugs, sold under the name of Prontosil. The beginning of the Second World War led to renewed interest in penicillin, and a team at Oxford University – led by Howard Florey and including the Jewish, German-born Ernst Chain, who had fled Germany in 1933 to escape persecution – developed a method of producing penicillin for medicinal use. For this work they, together with Fleming, were later awarded the Nobel Prize for medicine.

Making enough penicillin for armies during the Second World War proved difficult until deep fermentation was developed in America, coming just in time to provide sufficient supplies for the armed forces during the invasion of Normandy in June 1944. After the war, further research improved penicillin, and other antibiotics were developed, leading to a medical revolution that, coupled with the widespread use of vaccines, has dramatically reduced the impact of fatal or debilitating diseases and infections.

Growing Resistance

Almost as soon as he began to work on penicillin, Alexander Fleming recognised the potential for bacteria to develop resistance, because of the capacity such microbes have to replicate very rapidly, providing the opportunity for evolution to occur. Should a mutation arise which confers resistance, it can spread quickly – facilitated by the further use of antibiotics, because these would then wipe out any non-resistant bacteria that would otherwise compete with the resistant strain. Despite repeated warnings by Fleming and many others not to misuse antibiotics, it quickly became common practice for doctors to prescribe them for a much wider range of illnesses than they should have, often simply because patients demanded them.

Today, antibiotics are still being given to patients who have colds or flu – viral infections against which such treatments are ineffective – and are also widely used in veterinary medicine as a preventative measure in livestock farming rather than as a treatment for a specific disease. In some countries, antibiotics are also used as growth promoters in livestock, it having been found that animals treated in this way often perform better. About two-thirds of all antibiotics are now used on farms, and while these are different from the ones used to treat people, such use can nevertheless result in a build-up of resistance, which has the potential through genetic mutation to transfer to medicinal human antibiotics.

Resistance will build up in bacteria even where antibiotics are used responsibly, but the more they are used, the quicker this will happen, so it is vitally important that they are not overprescribed or misused in livestock farming. Unfortunately, this advice has not always been followed, leading to a number of infectious diseases becoming increasingly difficult to treat. Some of the best-known examples are those particularly associated with hospitals, known by most people as “superbugs”, such as MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus). These bacteria are not necessarily any more virulent than strains that remain sensitive to antibiotics – the problem being that they are much more difficult to treat, particularly those which have become what is known as multidrug-resistance. Stricter regimes of hygiene in hospitals have been found to minimise the spread of MRSA, but it nevertheless represents a serious and ongoing problem for healthcare.

Multidrug-resistant Mycobacterium tuberculosis is another microbe becoming more common worldwide. As its name suggests, this bacterium is responsible for tuberculosis, a potentially fatal infectious disease of the respiratory system, which was thought to be under control through the use of antibiotics until the 1980s, when resistant strains began to emerge. Today, more than 100,000 people are thought to die every year as a consequence of this resistance – many of whom live on the African continent, where treatment may not be available and where, in some cases, those infected already have an immune system weakened by HIV.

Developing Solutions

One potential solution to antibiotic resistance would be the regular introduction of new classes of antibiotics to which pathogens have no resistance, but so far this has not happened. Big pharmaceutical companies, responsible for the design and introduction of most new drugs, have been reluctant to invest in developing new antibiotics because it is difficult and expensive, and antibiotics are not very lucrative compared to other classes of drugs. Patients usually only need antibiotics for about a week, and new ones would only remain effective for as long as it took for resistance to build up, which can take just a few years. Drugs for conditions such as heart disease, for example, are often used for long-term treatments so, once pharmaceutical companies have made the initial investment involved in development and clinical trials, they can expect to sell successful drugs for a much longer period.

In its 2014 report, the WHO identified serious gaps in available information on the types of antibiotic resistance occurring globally, which, together with a lack of coordination between countries, was impeding possible responses to what has become a serious problem. As well as stating that increased information gathering, and sharing is needed, the report recommended greater government investment in research, and the responsible use of antibiotics in medicine and agriculture. Everybody has a part to play, though, from doctors not overprescribing antibiotics to patients using them exactly as prescribed.

Alternative Theories

In January 2015, researchers at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts, reported that they had discovered a new antibiotic named teixobactin, which they had isolated from the soil bacterium Eleftheria terrae through a new culturing method. It was the first new class of antibiotic to be found for almost 30 years, and in tests proved effective against a range of bacteria, including MRSA and Mycobacterium tuberculosis, neither of which appeared to develop resistance to it. Teixobactin works by inhibiting the production of those fats that form a constituent part of cell walls and preventing bacteria from growing, while most other antibiotics target proteins in the cell wall or inside the cell to kill fully grown bacteria. The research team thought that E. terrae might have developed this function in response to naturally occurring resistance.

If they are correct, resistance to teixobactin is less likely to develop in the first place and, even if it does, will take much longer to build up than resistance against existing antibiotics. Clinical trials should take about five years and, if it passes, the research team predicts that teixobactin could remain effective for over 30 years. Even if teixobactin fails these trials, this new method of culturing soil bacteria in the laboratory can be used to investigate the potential of many other species of bacteria to produce antibiotics. This on its own could lead to a whole new era in the fight against antibiotic resistance.

Standard
Britain, Government, Health, Politics, Society

NHS at 70: The Health Service faces tough choices to survive

THE NATIONAL HEALTH SERVICE

Intro: The NHS is creaking under the strain of an ageing and unfit population

The natural lifespan of a human being was once viewed as being three score years and ten. But while a baby girl born in 1948 could reasonably look forward to a life that long, the life expectancy of a boy was less than 66.

How times have changed. Today, the respective figures for either gender are about 10 years longer, thanks in large part to the National Health Service which turned 70 on the 5 July.

Among its major achievements, the NHS has saved countless lives from infection or injury, eliminated horrific diseases like polio from the UK, introduced comprehensive vaccination programmes, and enabled the birth of the world’s first IVF baby. It has many other successes to its name.

NHS staff have become the heroes of modern-day Britain: nurses were last year voted the most trusted profession, with doctors a close second. Nurse Pauline Cafferkey, who contracted Ebola while working in Sierra Leone, recently told of how she was “astounded” by the level of care she received, with medical staff “putting their lives on hold and working round the clock” to save her.

And she is certainly not alone. The Commonwealth Fund, a US think tank, last year ranked the NHS as the best healthcare system in 11 leading countries, including the US, France, Germany and Australia.

The UK’s total spending on public and private healthcare is about 10 per cent of national income. This is lower than in the US (16%), as well as Japan, France and Germany (11%). The simple comparisons would suggest we are getting a top-class health service on the cheap; indeed, the NHS has been described in the British Medical Journal as the “world’s most cost-effective healthcare system.”

Yet, for all that, the NHS is clearly showing signs of decrepitude as it moves on from its 70th anniversary. Its success at enabling the average person to live an extra decade has created a vast amount of new work to keep the diseases of old age at bay. Meanwhile, poor trends of bad diets and physical inactivity have produced a surge in rates of obesity and associated illnesses, some of which are threatening to overwhelm the NHS.

While healthcare funding has been increased by both Labour and Conservative governments, the extra cash has failed to keep pace with the rise in demand, leaving doctors and nurses increasingly overworked and stressed as waiting times for treatment have increased.

However, whilst governments and health secretaries can change, we, the public, must share some of the blame. Most people bang the table to demand appointments and yet a staggering 1.7million, about 10 per cent, of them were missed over the last decade at a cost of some £200million. Many also insist on antibiotics when they are not needed.

If we wish the NHS to continue as part of the societal fabric of the UK, then some tough choices may need to be made. And, on this, the public may be more accepting of the need for change than politicians realise.

A recent poll found 75 per cent of respondents backed fining patients who repeatedly missed appointments. Plastic surgery for purely cosmetic reasons and other non-vital procedures may need to be cut or scrapped completely.

Laws that were enacted in applying a 5p charge for plastic bags resulted in an 80-90 per cent fall in their use. So, unless we can be persuaded to stop putting so much pressure on the NHS, perhaps the time has come to consider small charges for prescriptions and even GP appointments to make us all value them more.

For if the NHS is ever lost, we will rue the day we lost sight of just how worthwhile it is.

Standard