Landlord & Health Minister ‘Dr Debt’
Still gets rent from his doctors surgery
The Health Minister Dr James Reilly is continuing to get a rental income for his north Dublin GP surgery, it was confirmed yesterday.
Dr Reilly had a large GP practice at the Fingal Clinic in Lusk Town Centre in Dublin, where he is also landlord.
When he became a minister, he transferred the practice to Dr Susan Keenan, who now runs the surgery, which also employs doctors and nurses.
A spokesman for Dr Reilly told the Irish Independent that he was on leave of absence from the practice and the beneficiary income goes to the staff. However, Dr Reilly continues to take a rental payment.
Dr Reilly has a large list of medical card patients for whom he received an annual capitation payment and other allowances, leaving him among the highest earners in the scheme.
When he was a practising GP he rowed in with the then Health Minister, Micheal Martin, who published the individual earnings of GPs from the medical card scheme.
Dr Reilly, who earned €214,000 in annual payments from the scheme, said: “I do hope there will be no more PR stunts by the minister. I don’t want to up the ante in the row, but I think it regrettable they have tried this tactic of individualising and embarrassing GPs.”
He said the so-called “gravy train” cash was spent on paying his and his partner’s full-time doctor’s salaries, and those of an assistant and part-time doctor. It also paid for three nurses and three secretaries, running costs and a mortgage for two surgeries in north Dublin.
Meanwhile, the Cabinet sub-committee on health, chaired by Taoiseach Enda Kenny and attended by Dr Reilly, Public Service Minister Brendan Howlin and Children’s Minister Frances Fitzgerald, met yesterday to discuss the funding crisis that has seen the Health Service Executive (HSE) overrun rise to €281.6m in May.
A spokesman for Dr Reilly said it was decided to go back to the HSE and ask for a plan to be drawn up to tackle spending in areas such as agency staff, drugs, procurement, absenteeism and sick leave.
The HSE has been told not to close beds or cut admissions of patients from waiting lists. However, as hospitals struggle with a deficit of €133m, it will be impossible to avoid bed closures and a possible freeze on staff recruitment.
Dr Reilly had promised to generate more income for the HSE by making health insurers pay if one of their subscribers is put in a public bed, but this this has not yet materialised.
Bacteria is gut key to good health
‘A study shows’
Are you a regular “tea and toaster”, a person who habitually makes a meal out of these two items or some other restricted combination of foods? If so, you probably have an unhappy gut.
The notion that you are what you eat has taken on a whole new meaning based on research coming out of University College Cork and Teagasc. What you eat has a direct influence on what bacteria see fit to populate your gut, and the community of bacteria that live there in turn have a direct influence on your health.
Details of how this works are published this morning in the journal Nature and were released yesterday at the ongoing EuroScience Open Forum at the Convention Centre Dublin.
This community or the “gut microbiota” is an essential part of life, said Dr Paul O’Toole of UCC. “The gut biota is very important for human health. You need to think of the gut biota as an extra organ of the body.”
Clearly it must be important given there are about 10 times more bacterial cells in your gut than human cells in your entire body.
This amounts to kilos of bacteria working away happily in the gut, helping to break down food and deliver nutrients to the body.
Dr O’Toole and his colleagues, including Prof Fergus Shanahan and Dr Ian Jeffery, both of UCC, and Prof Paul Ross of Teagasc, have been exploring this community, which is most readily assessed from faecal samples.
It provides a wealth of information and can now be used to assess issues such as health, the nature of a person’s diet and whether an older person lived in the community or in long-term care.
The Eldermet project, headed by Dr O’Toole, seeks to understand the links between a person’s microbiota and general health status.
This latest study looked at the microbiota of 178 elderly people with an average age of 78.
A startling amount of information began to emerge about links between diet, level of frailty and residential status.
The research team showed that the mix of gut bacteria was linked to health status with higher levels of variety associated with better general health and lower levels of frailty.
It also indicates that having a poor mix of bacteria in the gut had long-term implications for health.
“This suggests we may be able to improve the health of older people by modifying the microbiota,” Dr O’Toole said.
There was a mix of subjects, some in long-term care facilities and some in the community. The team could predict on the basis of the microbiota present to which group the subject belonged.
There was usually a more varied bacterial mix in those living in the community. Lower variety was also correlated to frailty and poorer health, the researchers said. The lack of variety was linked in turn to a lack of variety in the diet, a condition seen as typical in the “tea and toasters”, Prof Shanahan said.
Many people ate a repetitive diet for physical or habitual reasons. But this was not enough to keep the gut bacteria happy, he said. “They [bacteria] are not parasites, but we must feed them as well. “We will all be elderly and we want to live well when elderly,” he said.
A Gene test could soon see if future lovers are compatible
A scientist has said the falling cost of DNA testing means Britain is on the verge of a new era of eugenics.
It sounds like something from a dystopian nightmare. Instead of couples settling down after falling in love with each other, they will choose their partners based on the compatibility of their genes.
According to a leading scientist, the falling cost of DNA testing means Britain is on the verge of a new era of eugenics.
Professor Armand Leroi, of Imperial College London, said that within five to ten years it will be common for young people to pay for a read-out of their entire genetic code.
The desire to have a healthy baby will then lead them to requesting to see the genetic blueprint of any prospective long-term partner.
Armed with the information, the couple could then use IVF to weed out babies with incurable diseases, a major science conference in Dublin heard.
He added that it is unlikely that people will have the ‘luxury’ of using the technology to design babies by intellect or eye colour and instead the focus will be on stopping genetic diseases.
Professor Leroi told the Euroscience Open Forum 2012 that in some ways eugenics are already here, with tens of thousands of unborn babies with Down’s syndrome and other illnesses being aborted every year.
He said: ‘These processes are very well established in most European countries.
‘Many of the ethical problems that people raise when they speak of neo-eugenics are nought once you offer gene selection or mate selection as a eugenic tool.’
Critics have hit out at the development of DNA testing. Picture posed by model
He said that the cost of genetic sequencing is falling so rapidly that ‘it is going to become very, very accessible, very, very soon’.
Lone Frank, a Danish neurobiologist, predicted some countries will embrace the idea.
‘Some cultures will say, “Let’s get a lot of genomes out on the table and see who’s got the best one”,’ she said. But she added that others will see it as an attempt to play God.
Philippa Taylor, of the Christian Medical Fellowship, said: ‘Our society’s increasing obsession with celebrity status, physical perfection and high intelligence fuels the view that the lives of people with disabilities or genetic diseases are somehow less worth living.
‘We must recognise and resist the eugenic mind set. Our priorities should be to develop treatments and supportive measures for those with genetic disease; not to search them out and destroy them before birth.’
Lafferty’s Donegal shop is buzzing as '40,000 bees move in there'
Staff and shoppers at a village supermarket were forced to flee the store — after 40,000 bees took up residence there.
The native black Irish honey bees set up home at the entrance to Lafferty’s Supermarket in the village of Creeslough in Co Donegal.
The shop had to close for almost four hours while experts removed them.
Supermarket owner Danny Lafferty said there were so many bees swarming around the shop, it looked like a storm cloud.
“I looked outside and I could see people waving their arms outside. It looked like it was snowing for a while,” he said.
“Then I looked closer and I could see this cloud of bees. Needless to say a lot of people were afraid to come near the shop for the afternoon while they were here,” he said.
No one was stung during the incident and Mr Lafferty called a local beekeeper, who arrived with equipment to get rid of the swarm.
“There is still a perception out that that bees sting but it rarely happens. Most bees are so full of honey that they wouldn’t have the energy,” the beekeeper said.
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