Ireland’s hospitals ‘may run out of cash by this October’
A consultant at the Mater Hospital in Dublin has suggested that hospitals in the city and other parts of the country could run out of money by October.
It comes as efforts are being made to resolve a split between the Government parties over proposed cuts to the health budget, with suggestions by some TDs that the rift could spark an early election.
The Minister for Public Expenditure Brendan Howlin met with the Health Minister James Reilly over the weekend in an effort to clear up the row, which centres on €130m worth of cuts announced earlier this week.
Consultant Ophthalmologist at the Mater Hospital in Dublin, Micheal O’Keeffe, has said it is not clear where these cuts can be made.
He also said there are strong rumours that hospitals in the capital may be out of cash before the year is out.
Mr O’Keeffe said: “We don’t know where these cutbacks are going to happen, where they are going to come, what the deficit is and what it means.
“There is a rumour, and I think it is more than a rumour, that a lot of hospitals in Dublin and elsewhere will run out of money by October and there is even a rumour that at that stage they will not even be able to pay the wages of the staff.
“This has a lot to run yet and if that is true, the crisis will be many times what it is now.”
Only 10% avail of Government’s €5 offer to register their septic tanks
With less than a month to go before a 10-fold rise in the registration fee, only about 30,000 people have so far registered their septic tanks under the Government scheme – far below the almost 500,000 septic tanks and other waste-water treatment systems in the State.
The charge for the mandatory registration, part of a scheme introduced by Minister for the Environment Phil Hogan on June 26th, goes up from €5 to €50 on September 28th.
Registration is required before February 1st, 2013.
There are 497,281 septic tanks and other on-site waste-water treatment systems in the State, according to last year’s census.
The controversial registration plan has been criticised by some rural dwellers, who claim it discriminates against them and will force them to spend thousands of euro upgrading their tanks, while city dwellers face no such charges.
The Government originally planned a flat €50 fee, but following an outcry, it announced in February that the charge would be €5 for the first three months.
A department spokesman said 22,500 applications for registration had been received online by last Friday. This figure does not include recent applications received across the counter at council offices, which are estimated to number 6,500.
On Friday Fianna Fáil agriculture spokesman Éamon Ó Cuív urged people not to register until they had more information.
“People shouldn’t register until the Minister outlines what he is going to do in relation to grant-aiding people who have to make mandatory upgrades,” he said.
He said a European Court ruling due in October would bring further clarity and he called on the Minister not to raise the registration fee until after the outcome of that ruling was known.
The department spokesman said newspaper adverts and a local radio campaign informing people of their obligations would be run in mid-September.
Franklin Templeton senior fund manager backs an Irish recovery
Ireland’s aggressive tackling of its fiscal mess has impressed many investors and policy makers – but arguably none more so than Michael Hasenstab, a senior fund manager at Franklin Templeton.
The venerable US money manager’s funds – primarily those controlled by Mr Hasenstab and Sonal Desai, his co-manager – snapped up Irish bonds with a face value of at least €6.1bn by the end of June, according to Financial Times calculations from Bloomberg data.
“Ireland has set itself apart from the peripheral nations in Europe in how it has embraced austerity through fiscal discipline and growth through maintaining competitive labour, tax and product markets,” Mr Hasenstab, co-director of the fund manager’s international bond department, told the FT by email.
Rival money managers are more circumspect, however. Some argue that the outstanding performance of Ireland’s bonds this year has, at least partly, been caused by Mr Hasenstab’s heavy purchases – giving the impression of a stronger recovery than is warranted by the country’s economic and financial fundamentals.
Rising exports last year helped the country return to growth for the first time since its economic crisis began in 2008. Yet anaemic growth in Europe and the UK, Ireland’s two biggest export markets, is derailing its recovery.
Citigroup economists expect Ireland’s economy to shrink 1 per cent this year and only eke out modest growth of 0.4 per cent in 2013. Coupled with a yawning budget deficit, Citi estimates that this will swell Ireland’s government debt to 130 per cent of gross domestic product next year – much higher even than Spain.
Ireland is also vulnerable to a worsening of the eurozone crisis. Some investors and economists warn that if Greece leaves the currency union, Ireland’s euro future would also come under intense scrutiny.
“Its future still rests on the broader eurozone,” argues one senior bond fund manager at another US investment group. “We continue to be cautious. Ireland’s economy has stabilised but they still have a lot of wood to chop.”
If Ireland’s borrowing costs start to rise again, Franklin Templeton would find itself in a precarious position. The asset manager’s holdings are so large and the market so thin and illiquid that traders say it would be extremely difficult to reduce them without big losses.
“You wouldn’t want to have to get rid of all that in a hurry,” a UK bond fund manager said. “Having a large position in the eurozone periphery is a pretty punchy decision.”
Nonetheless, investors and traders say Franklin Templeton’s big Irish bet could prove astute – and very profitable.
For example, Dublin’s indebtedness would be significantly reduced if eurozone negotiations lead to some form of European banking union that allows thecontinent’s rescue funds to assume responsibility for about €64bn of Irish bank debt currently guaranteed by Ireland.
While hedge funds could try to bet against Dublin – much as JPMorgan found itself wrongfooted in the credit derivatives market this year – this would be difficult in the Irish bond market given its small size and Franklin Templeton’s heft.
“The advantage of buying big in a small market is that it makes it hard to short it,”a senior London-based government bond trader said.
The US money manager has certainly done well out of its Irish bet so far. Ireland’s nine-year bond yield – which moves inversely to the price of the securities – has fallen below 6 per cent, the lowest since October 2010.
Although the progress this implies might be exaggerated by Mr Hasenstab’s big bet, Ireland can still draw comfort that a respected bond investor is willing to back the country’s recovery story to the hilt.
“Having large international fund managers like Franklin Templeton willing to buy Irish government debt is an important sign that investors believe in the Irish recovery story,” said Owen Callan, a bond trader at Danske Bank, one of the biggest dealers in Irish bonds.
The benefits of frozen IVF human embryos highlighted
CURRENT BEST practice in the preparation of embryos for in-vitro fertilisation may be wrong and may have to change.
New research shows both the mother and the infant do better if the embryos used have been frozen and then thawed prior to implantation in the mother’s womb.
The assumption has been that it was always better to use a fresh embryo rather than a stored embryo, said Dr Abha Maheshwari, senior lecturer at the University of Aberdeen and consultant in reproductive medicine with UK National Health Service Grampian.
Research has shown that foetuses developing from previously frozen embryos stood less of a chance of being born early and at low birth weight, while the mother experienced less bleeding during the pregnancy.
Dr Maheshwari’s findings are presented this morning on the opening day of the British Science Association’s annual Festival of Science, taking place this year at the University of Aberdeen. They have also just been published in the journal Fertility Sterility.
He and his research team had looked at 11 international published studies involving more than 37,000 pregnancies following implantation of either a fresh or a thawed frozen embryo.
“We found pregnancies arising from the transfer of frozen thawed embryos seem to have better outcomes both for mums and babies when compared to those after fresh embryo transfer,” he said. The assumption had been that “fresh is always better”, with fresh embryos used as a first choice.
Doctors working in the field have traditionally tried to increase the chances of implantation and a successful pregnancy by introducing several embryos into the womb, with a higher than usual multiple birth rate when using these techniques.
Over time, however, there has been a move to single embryo transfer, backed by the UK’s Health and Fertilisation and Embryology Authority.
It has still been the practice, however, to extract several eggs at the same time, leading to the increased use of freezing to preserve viable embryos, said Dr Maheshwari. “If pregnancy rates are equal and outcome in pregnancies are better, our results question whether one should consider freezing all embryos and transfer them at a later date, rather than transferring fresh embryos,” he said.
He noted the existing data had limitations, and larger studies were needed before any change in best practice was introduced.
Meanwhile, attendees at the festival heard yesterday of advances in silicon chip technology that have the potential to make phones and computers effectively unhackable. Scientists at the University of Bristol’s Centre for Quantum Photonics announced a chip that can be mass-manufactured and which works not by channelling the movement of electrons through its circuits, but the transfer of light particles or photons.
The prototype devices were 1,000 times smaller and more complex than current technologies, said Prof Mark Thompson, deputy director of the centre. The full chip is only two by four millimetres and the circuits handling the photons are only several hundred-millionths of a metre across.
The Festival of Science is an annual celebration of science that typically attracts 50,000 people, including 10,000 schoolchildren. Those attending will be able to choose from 200 different events involving 350 international scientists at the six-day event, which runs until September 9th.
Do you want to live a longer life? Then go eat your calories
A study involving rhesus monkeys over a period of 20 years had anticipated that if monkeys lived longer, healthier lives by eating a lot less, then maybe humans would too.
A new study on monkeys did not bring the vindication calorie-restricted enthusiasts anticpated
For more than 20 years, the rhesus monkeys were kept semi-starved, lean and hungry. The males’ weights were so low they were the equivalent of a 6ft-tall man who tipped the scales at just 120-133 pounds. The hope was that if the monkeys lived longer, healthier lives by eating a lot less, then maybe people, their evolutionary cousins, would too.
Some scientists, anticipating such benefits, began severely restricting their own diets. The results of this major, long-awaited study, which began in 1987, are finally in. But it did not bring the vindication calorie-restriction enthusiasts had anticipated. It turns out the skinny monkeys did not live any longer than those kept at more normal weights. Some lab test results improved, but only in monkeys that were put on the diet when they were old. The causes of death – cancer, heart disease – were the same in both the underfed and the normally fed monkeys.
Lab test results showed lower levels of cholesterol and blood sugar in the male monkeys that started eating 30 per cent fewer calories in old age, but not in the females. Males and females who started dieting when they were old had lower levels of triglycerides, which are linked to heart disease risk.
Monkeys put on the diet when they were young or middle-aged did not get the same benefits, although they had less cancer. But the bottom line was that the monkeys that ate less did not live any longer than those that ate normally.
Rafael de Cabo, lead author of the diet study, published last week in the journal Nature, says he is surprised and disappointed that the underfed monkeys did not live longer. Like many other researchers on ageing, he had expected an outcome similar to that of a 2009 study from the University of Wisconsin that concluded that calorific restriction did extend monkeys’ lifespans.
But even that study had a question mark hanging over it. Its authors had disregarded about half of the deaths among the monkeys they studied, saying they were not related to ageing. If they had included all of the deaths, there was no extension of life span in the Wisconsin study, either.
“This shows the importance of replication in science,” says Steven Austad, interim director of the Barshop Institute for Longevity and Aging Studies at the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio. Austad, who was not involved with either study, says the University of Wisconsin study “was not nearly as conclusive as it was made out to be” and that the new study casts further doubt on the belief that caloric restriction extends life.
But other researchers still think that it does, and one of the authors of the new study, Julie A Mattison, says there is still a bit of hope. The study is continuing until the youngest monkeys are 22 years old. While the data almost certainly rule out any notion that the low-calorie diet will increase average lifespans, there still is a chance that the study might find that the diet increases the animals’ maximum lifespan, she says.
Meanwhile, some others say that the Wisconsin study makes them reluctant to dismiss the idea that low-calorie diets result in longer life. “I wouldn’t discard the whole thing on the basis of one study when another study in the same species showed an increase in life span,” says Eric Ravussin, director of the nutritional obesity research centre at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Louisiana. “I would still bet on an extension of life.”
The idea that a low-calorie diet would extend life originated in the 1930s with a study of lab rats. But it was not until the 1980s that the theory took off. Scientists reported that in species ranging from yeast to flies to worms to mice, eating less meant living longer. And, in mice at least, a low-calorie diet also meant less cancer. It was not known whether the same thing would hold true in humans, and no one expected such a study would ever be done. It would take decades to get an answer, to say nothing of the expense and difficulty of getting people to be randomly assigned to starve themselves or not.
Researchers concluded the best way to test the hypothesis would be through the monkey studies at the University of Wisconsin and the National Institute on Aging, although the animals would have to be followed for decades. It was a major endeavour. The National Institute on Aging study involved 121 monkeys, 49 of which are still alive, housed at a facility in Poolesville, Maryland.
Those that got the low-calorie diet did not act famished, de Cabo says. They did not gobble their food, for example, but ate at the same speed as the control animals, even though their calories had been cut by 30 per cent.
As the studies were under way, some human enthusiasts decided to start eating a lot less, too. In those same years, though, studies in mice began indicating there might not be a predictable response to a low-calorie diet. Mice that came from the wild, instead of being born and raised in the lab, did not live longer on low-calorie diets. And in 2009, a study of 41 inbred strains of laboratory mice found that about a third had no response to the diets. Of those that responded, more strains had shorter life spans than had longer ones when they were given less food.
The response to that study was “absolute disbelief,” Austad says. “Even though the authors are well-respected calorie restrictors, people said the result was not interesting, that there was something weird about the mice.”
Now, with the new study, researchers are asking why the University of Wisconsin study found an effect on lifespan and the National Institute on Aging study did not.
There were several differences between the studies that some have pointed to as possible explanations.
The composition of the food given to the monkeys in the Wisconsin study was different from that in the ageing institute’s study.
The university’s control monkeys were allowed to eat as much as they wanted and were fatter than those in the ageing institute’s study, which were fed in amounts that were considered enough to maintain a healthy weight but were not unlimited.
The animals in the Wisconsin study were from India.
Those in the ageing institute’s study were from India and China, and so were more genetically diverse.
De Cabo, who says he is overweight, advises people that if they want to try a reduced-calorie diet, they should consult a doctor first. If they can handle such a diet, he says, he believes they would be healthier but, he says, he does not know if they would live longer.
Some scientists still have faith in the low-calorie diets. Richard Weindruch, a director of the Wisconsin study, says he is “a hopeless caloric-restriction romantic”, but adds that he was not very good at restricting his own calories. He says he might start trying harder. “I’m only 62,” he says. “It isn’t too late.”
Then there is Mark Mattson, chief of the laboratory of neurosciences at the National Institute on Aging, who was not part of the monkey study.
He believes there is merit to caloric restriction, but his routine is to do it intermittently, eating much less, but not every day. It can help the brain, he says, as well as make people healthier and probably make them live longer.
Mattson, who is 5ft 9in and weighs 130lbs (59kg), skips breakfast and lunch on weekdays and skips breakfast on weekends. “I get a little hungry,” he admits. “But we think being hungry is actually good.”
No comments:
Post a Comment