The president and his wife Sabina have accepted an invitation from the Queen to stay at Windsor Castle for a three-day visit in April.
In May 2011 the Queen became the first British monarch to visit the Republic of Ireland.
Aras an Uachtarain – the president’s official Dublin residence – confirmed Mr Higgins had accepted the invitation.
During the Queen’s visit to Ireland, she paid paid her respects to republican dead at Dublin’s Garden of Remembrance and visited Croke Park – site of the 1920 Bloody Sunday massacre.
She also made a speech on Anglo-Irish history at Dublin Castle.
Mr Higgins, a former Labour government minister, poet and academic, has met members of the Royal Family before.
Both he and his wife met the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh in June 2012 at Belfast’s Lyric Theatre, and he has also met Princess Anne and the Duke of Kent.
Though he has visited the UK several times since becoming president, these were not official state visits.
“This is a further demonstration of the warm and positive relationship that now exists between Ireland and the United Kingdom,” he said.
It is expected that the Queen will host a state banquet for the president, during which both heads of state will make speeches.
Although the official programme is yet to be finalised it is expected that Mr and Mrs Higgins will stay at Windsor Castle from 8 April to 10 April.
The president is expected to include official visits to the prime minister at Downing Street as well as to the leader of the Opposition.
In line with other state visits it is likely the Lord Mayor of the City of London will host a banquet for the President and it is also expected that the Queen will host a State banquet.
The Health Service Executive has released the final list of primary care centres that have been given the go-ahead a year after the issue was embroiled in controversy.In mid-2012 Minister for Health James Reilly made changes to a list of primary care centres to be developed under a special Government stimulus fund.
Róisín Shortall, who was Minister for State at the time, had drawn up a list of 20 locations based primarily on a deprivation index compiled by the HSE.
Before that list was published Mr Reilly added 15 additional locations, including two in his own constituency.
The controversy led to Ms Shortall’s resignation and her claim that Mr Reilly had engaged in “stroke politics” - a claim he denied.
Boyle is one of the 16 locations where primary care centres will be developed.The county Roscommon town was one of the locations added by Mr Reilly to the list of locations being considered for funding.
Local independent TD Denis Naughten has told RTÉ’s This Week that the selection of Boyle for the Public-Private Partnership development will be seen as “payback” for Fine Gael’s TD in the constituency, Frank Feighan.
Mr Feighan sided with the government over the downgrading of local hospital services while Mr Naughten left the party over the issue.
Mr Feighan denied it was payback and said the location was selected on merit.
Boyle was at number 243 on a priority list of more than 300 locations drawn up by the HSE in mid-2012 when Mr Reilly added it and 14 other locations to the list drawn up by Ms Shortall.
Also added to the list by Mr Reilly were Balbriggan and Swords in his own north Dublin constituency.They are not going ahead by PPP, as they had already been earmarked for a different line of funding prior to the list being published.
Meanwhile, HSE’s head of estates Jim Curran told This Week that there was “no formula” used to boost the number of locations on the PPP list from 20 to 35.
The health minister told a Dáil debate on 3 October this year that the criteria used to select the additional sites was a complex “logistical logarithmic progression”.
However, Mr Curran said it was a case of having as many locations on the list so that 20 could ultimately proceed to the funding stage.
It has also emerged that the 16 primary care centres that will be developed will cost €115m - the same figure the HSE had estimated last year it would cost to build 20 such facilities.
Mr Curran told RTé that the costings had changed due to construction inflation while he also said that the size of some of the proposed facilities had changed.
In a separate reply, the HSE press office said the original estimate had not included certain fees and VAT costs.
Fianna Fáil’s Billy Kelleher said it was of concern that the HSE had failed to bring the project in on its original costing.
A spokesperson for the minister said that slightly less than one health centre per month had been opened in the lifetime of the current Government.
Primary care centres and primary care in general was an important element of health reform, the spokesperson said.
PPP was just one of several means by which such facilities were being delivered, he said.
The final list of 16 locations which will be developed by PPP under the special stimulus programme are: Ballymote, Boyle, Westport, Claremorris, Tuam, Limerick and Ballinrobe in the HSE west.
In the HSE South Dungarvan, Carrick-on-Suir, Wexford town and Waterford city have received funding approval.
In the greater-Dublin area, Kilcock, Knocklyon/Rathfarnham, Crumlin/Drimnagh, Coolock/Darndale and Summerhill have also been granted funding via PPP.
Details of deaths of Irish children in care system now revealed by the HSE
CONCERN OVER THE LACK OF CO-OPERATION, POOR ASSESSMENTS AND MISSED OPPORTUNITIES
Most of the children or young people were living with families who were known to child protection services. A small number were either in the care system or in after-care.
An independent review into the deaths of 23 children who were in contact with HSE social services last year has raised concern over the impact of heavy workloads and under-staffing in the social services area.
Figures released yesterday show most deaths were as a result of suicide (9), followed by natural causes (7), accidents (6) or homicide (1)
Most of the children or young people were living with families who were known to child protection services. A small number were either in the care system or in after-care.
A review of how the cases were handled by social services has raised concern over poor co-operation between State agencies and sub-standard assessments of vulnerable children’s needs.
While the review found no evidence that action or inaction by the HSE played a “direct contributory factor” in the child or young person’s death, there was evidence of weaknesses in management and social work practice.
In as many as one-third of cases reviewed last year, social work services were struggling to deal with the volume of work being referred to them.
‘Significantly compromised’
This meant cases were not responded to quickly enough or were held in the duty system for so long that in-depth social work could not be undertaken.
In four cases, for example, it found frontline intake services appeared to be “blocked”. In a small number of cases, it said, unfilled posts added to this difficulty.
Overall, there was very mixed evidence of co-operation between agencies. In more than half the cases, it found, inter-agency reviews would have assisted in the management of cases.
A small but significant number of reviews found that young people who died had been placed with relatives who had not been adequately supported to deal with challenging behaviour displayed by the children.
Since 2010, the HSE is obliged to notify the Health Information and Quality Authority of deaths involving children in care.
A total of 60 children or young people in contact with social services have died since then.
These cases are examined by a national review panel whose function is to determine the quality of services available to individual children or young people prior to their deaths.
Dr
Helen Buckley , chairwoman of the review panel, said there were “very disturbing” findings in a small number of deaths.
Overall, she said the cases demonstrated both the strengths and weaknesses of the child protection system.
“Some were already very ill before they came into contact with the services, others had mental health and behavioural problems and some young people habitually engaged in risk-taking behaviour,” she said.
Particular concern,
Paul Harrison , head of policy for HSE child and family services, said there was “significant learning” to be derived from the reviews, including the importance of early intervention.
He said the creation of the new Child and Family Agency – due early next year – will provide an opportunity for services to work closely together and improve outcomes for children.
Super-bugs could erase a century of medical advances
SAY EXPERTS
Doctors issue new warning of devastating effect of over-prescribing antibiotics for trivial ailments.
Drug-resistant “superbugs” represent one of the gravest threats in the history of medicine, leading experts have warned.
Routine operations could become deadly “in the very near future” as bacteria evolve to resist the drugs we use to combat them. This process could erase a century of medical advances, say government doctors in a special editorial in The Lancet health journal.
Although the looming threat of antibiotic, or anti-microbial, resistance has been known about for years, the new warning reflects growing concern that the NHS and other national health systems, already under pressure from ageing populations, will struggle to cope with the rising cost of caring for people in the “post-antibiotic era”.
In a stark reflection of the seriousness of the threat, England’s deputy chief medical officer, Professor John Watson, said: “I am concerned that in 20 years, if I go into hospital for a hip replacement, I could get an infection leading to major complications and possible death, simply because antibiotics no longer work as they do now.”
About 35 million antibiotics are prescribed by GPs in England every year. The more the drugs circulate, the more bacteria are able to evolve to resist them. In the past, drug development kept pace with evolving microbes, with a constant production line of new classes of antibiotics. But the drugs have ceased to be profitable and a new class has not been created since 1987.
Writing in The Lancet , experts, including England’s chief medical officer, Dame Sally Davies, warn that death rates from bacterial infections “might return to those of the early 20th century”. They write: “Rarely has modern medicine faced such a grave threat.
Without antibiotics, treatments from minor surgery to major transplants could become impossible, and health-care costs are likely to spiral as we resort to newer, more expensive antibiotics and sustain longer hospital admissions.”
Strategies to combat the rise in resistance include cutting the amount of antibiotics prescribed, improving hospital hygiene and incentivising the pharmaceutical industry to work on novel antibiotics and antibiotic alternatives.
However, a leading GP told The Independent on Sunday that the time had come for the general public to take responsibility. “The change needs to come in patient expectation. We need public education: that not every ill needs a pill,” said Dr Peter Swinyard, chairman of the Family Doctor Association.
“We try hard not to prescribe, but it’s difficult in practice. The patient will be dissatisfied with your consultation, and is likely to vote with their feet, register somewhere else or go to the walk-in centre and get antibiotics from the nurse.
“But if we go into a post-antibiotic phase, we may find that people with pneumonia will not be treatable with an antibiotic, and will die, whereas at the moment they would live.
“People need to realise the link. If you treat little Johnny’s ear infection with antibiotics, his mummy may end up dying of pneumonia. It’s stark and it’s, of course, not direct, but on a population-wide level, that’s the kind of link we’re talking about.”
There are no reliable estimates of what resistance could cost health systems in the future, but the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control believes that €1.5bn (£1.2bn) a year is already being spent on health problems associated with antibiotic resistance in Europe.
Joanna Coast, professor of health economics at the University of Birmingham, said that the problem of resistance had the potential to “affect how entire health systems work”.
Professor Coast added: “We don’t know how big this is going to be. It’s like the problems with planning for global warming. We know what the costs are now but we don’t know what the costs will be into the future.
“Much of what we do in modern health system relies on us having antibiotics. We need them for prophylaxis for surgery, for people having chemotherapy for cancer. The worry is that it might make big changes to how we run our health system.”
Antibiotics are also used in vast quantities in agriculture, fisheries and by vets, the resulting environmental exposure adding to bacterial resistance, with further consequences for human health.
Experts say that to meet demand without increasing resistance, drug companies will need to find new ways of financing antibiotic development that are not linked to expectations of large volume sales. Global health authorities such as the World Health Organisation have also warned that global drives to reduce antibiotic use must not harm access to life-saving drugs in poorer countries.
Writing in The Lancet, Professor Otto Cars of Uppsala University in Sweden, and one of the world’s leading experts on antibiotic resistance, said: “Antibiotic resistance is a complex ecological problem which doesn’t just affect people, but is also intimately connected with agriculture and the environment.
“We need to move on from ‘blaming and shaming’ among the many stakeholders who have all contributed to the problem, towards concrete political action and commitment to address this threat.”
Maven probe may help solve the riddle of Mars’s missing air
That is the latest piece in the scientific exploration of whether Mars could have been, perhaps four billion years ago, a place friendly for life.
The answer may come from a space probe known as Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution, or Maven for short, which is ready for the launching pad at Cape Canaveral, Fla., and poised to lift off Monday at 1:28 p.m. After a 10-month journey, the spacecraft is to enter orbit around Mars and spend at least a year observing Mars’s atmosphere.
“It’s clear that major questions about the history of Mars center on the history of its climate and atmosphere, and how that’s influenced the surface, the geology and on the possibility for life,” Bruce M. Jakosky, a professor of geological sciences at the University of Colorado who is Maven’s principal investigator, said at a NASA news conference last month.
Planetary scientists believe that young Mars was blanketed with a thick layer of air — heat-trapping carbon dioxide, in particular — that kept it warmer and wetter. Ancient channels on Mars look as if they were carved by flowing water.
Sometime between then and now, the atmosphere went away, and Mars today is an airless, frigid desert with average surface temperatures of minus 64 degrees Fahrenheit, or minus 53 degrees Celsius.
The once-bountiful air molecules must have either gone up, escaping into space, or down, transformed by chemical reactions into rock. Hydrogen, the lightest of gases, can simply float away from gravity’s grasp. Heavier molecules like oxygen and carbon dioxide might have been knocked out by particles and radiation streaming from the sun.
“As the solar wind sweeps by, it is able to strip off the atmospheric gas,” Dr. Jakosky said. “It’s actually stripped away, molecule by molecule, atom by atom.”
To figure out the puzzle of the missing atmosphere, Maven will carefully measure the wisps that remain.
The spacecraft — which will widen to the length of a school bus after it fans out its solar arrays — will loop Mars in an elliptical, 4.5-hour orbit, climbing 3,860 miles above the planet then swooping down to within 93 miles of the surface. It will also make some particularly deep dips, to within 77.6 miles of the surface.
Maven’s eight instruments will take stock of what is in Mars’s upper atmosphere as well as catalog the solar wind particles bombarding Mars. That will allow the scientists to determine not only the rate at which the atmosphere is disappearing, but also the particulars of how it is disappearing.
“There are a lot of processes that we think may have played a role, and we don’t have the measurements to understand them today,” Dr. Jakosky said.
James F. Kasting, a professor of geosciences at Pennsylvania State University who is not involved with the Maven mission, said it would be useful to know how quickly Mars was losing its atmosphere today. He was less sure about what it would say about Mars in the ancient past. “Conditions would have been, I think, very different,” he said.
The young sun, for example, was about 30 percent dimmer, but emitted more ultraviolet light.
But Dr. Kasting also said the data could help in understanding whether distant Earth-size planets that are being discovered around other stars would be likely to have significant atmospheres. “That’s interesting for us who are interested in exo-Earths,” he said.
Forecasts on Friday gave a 60 percent chance of favorable weather during Monday’s two-hour launch window, with concerns that a cold weather front would generate clouds, strong winds and thunderstorms. If weather or technical problems keep Maven on the ground, NASA will still have three more weeks to launch it before Mars and Earth move too far out of alignment.
The $671 million mission was almost derailed by the federal government shutdown last month, with work halted when almost all of NASA’s employees and contractors were furloughed. Within a couple of days, however, top NASA officials decided that Maven’s launching fell into the category of “essential,” not because of an urgent need to study the Martian atmosphere but because Maven is also to serve as a communication relay for the Curiosity and Opportunity rovers on Mars.
Nasa has two other orbiters circling Mars — Mars Odyssey and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter — but both are aging. If Maven does not launch this year, the next chance would be in 2016, and a less favorable configuration of orbits means that it would have to expend more fuel to get to Mars, diminishing its worth as a communication relay. At present, Nasa does not have any plans for orbiters to follow Maven.
But Maven is back on schedule, Dr. Jakosky said, and once it completes its primary work, it should be able to stay in orbit for almost another decade. “We’re hoping for a very long mission,” he said.
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