Donie's daily news Ireland BLOG Wednesday

A Local 46-year-old man arrested in search for the missing 5 year old Welsh girl April Jones

 

The parents of the five-year-old Welsh girl April Jones, who has been missing since she got into a van just yards from her home on last Monday evening have pleaded with the person who took her to let “our beautiful little girl come home”.

A Local man was arrested on Tuesday afternoon and taken to a police station in Aberystwyth for questioning over the missing five-year-old girl who still remains missing. The man arrested over the abduction was known to the Jones family.

April Jones who was last seen by another child getting into the driver’s side of a grey van which drove off in the town of Machynlleth.

A 46-year-old local man has been arrested in the Machynlleth area where five-year-old April Jones was apparently abducted on Monday night. Police said he had been taken to a police station in Aberystwyth for questioning, but April has not been found.

At a press conference on Tuesday afternoon, Detective Superintendent Reg Bevan, of Dyfed-Powys police, said: “We are continuing our investigation to find April, however, within the last hour we have arrested a 46-year-old male from the Machynlleth area who is being detained at Aberystwyth police station.

“We made the arrest just outside Machynlleth and we are hopeful this individual will assist us in finding April, who is still missing. We are still pursuing all lines of inquiry with the view that April is still alive and we will continue to do so until we find her.

“For obvious reasons we are not able to give you details of the individual that we have assisting us with our inquiries.”

The man had a similar vehicle as the one described and was arrested on foot walking outside the town. The vehicle has been located and is being examined.

  

Key places in events surrounding April Jones’s disappearance

Bevan said the police’s priority was to find April and bring her home to her family.

Coral Jones, 40, and her husband Paul, 43, were due to appeal for information at the police press conference in Aberystwyth just under 22 hours after their daughter was seen getting into a van-type vehicle on Monday evening.

Officers said they were becoming increasingly concerned for the safety of the five-year-old, who disappeared while playing out with a friend near her home on the Bryn-y-Gog estate in the market town in Dyfi valley, north of Aberystwyth.

Earlier the force said she had apparently got into a vehicle willingly, prompting a major search by officers and scores of volunteers.

Police confirmed they were looking closely at the movements of known registered sex offenders living in the area.

Meanwhile, in north Wales, a 12-mile stretch of the A487 has been closed off by police. The force referred all inquiries to Dyfed-Powys police.

Rise in Irish people’s mental health problems linked to economic crisis

  

The economic crisis is putting a major strain on people’s mental health with an increase in the rate of suicide, self-harm and admissions into psychiatric hospitals over recent years, according to campaigners.

In its pre-budget submission, the Mental Health Reform campaign group says these indicators highlight the urgent need for the Government to ensure mental health services are protected over the coming months.

Latest official figures show a 7 per cent increase in suicides between 2010 and 2011, while the number of people reporting to hospital with self-harm increased by 4 per cent during the same period, the fourth successive increase.

In the meantime, the rate of first admissions to inpatient psychiatric units increased by 5 per cent in 2010, the most recent year for which figures are available.

In its submission, the group says that by continuing to invest in reforming mental health services and related public services, authorities can ensure that people experiencing poor mental health have the best chance of recovering and participating fully in society.

 The Minister for Disability, Equality, Mental Health and Older People Kathleen Lynch needs to tackle the mental health problem head-on.

“The Government has a duty to protect the vulnerable in society, and must ensure that the already negative effects of the economic crisis are not exacerbated by the lack of services for people experiencing poor mental health,” its submission states.

In the programme for government, the Coalition parties pledged to “vastly improve access to modern mental health services in the community”.

It also pledged to ring-fence €35 million annually for the development of community mental health services.

However, there are growing doubts among campaign groups and Opposition political parties that these pledges will be fulfilled.

Latest figures indicate that not enough appointments have been made to staff community mental health teams which will be needed to modernise services over the coming years.

The Mental Health Reform group makes eight key recommendations for the Government ahead of December’s budget.

They include a commitment to continue investing in community-based mental health services – €35 million in 2013 – which, it says, have been shown to be better value for money than hospital-based services.

It also calls on authorities to:

  Invest in the governance structures to support implementation of A Vision for Change, including resourcing support for the director for mental health.

Ensure there are no further cuts to funding for mental health and related voluntary and community organisations.

Avoid reducing the living standards of people with a mental health condition on social welfare payments by maintaining rates at their current level; reducing the individual minimum contribution for rent supplement back down by €6 per week; and restoring the fuel allowance cut made in 2012.

The submission notes that the link between economic downturns and poor mental health has been firmly established, as reported by the State’s mental health watchdog, the Mental Health Commission.

In a recent submission, it said there was a “wide-ranging and reliable body of evidence which documents a strong negative association between poverty, debt, unemployment, and mental health”.

During this recession, known factors for poor mental health such as unemployment and income inequality are increasing.

With unemployment rates of almost 15 per cent, a widening gap between rich and poor, and some tax increases disproportionately hitting the poor, there is little sign that economic pressure on much of the population will ease any time soon, it says.

Health minister James Reilly:

Wants to Charge no-show patients for follow-up appointments

  

HEALTH MINISTER JAMES REILLY WANTS HOSPITALS TO USE TEXT MESSAGING TO MANAGE OUT-PATIENT APPOINTMENTS.

“I want all out-patients attendees to be texted at least three days in advance and to text back either ‘Y’ or ‘N’ as to whether they are going to attend or not,” he said.

Dr Reilly said patients would be reminded again by text message on the day of their appointment.

“And if they don’t turn up and don’t respond, then I don’t believe it’s unreasonable that we should charge them the next time they wish to come.”

Dr Reilly, speaking at a conference in Dublin yesterday organised by the Health Management Institute, said out-patient departments should also show people some respect in managing appointments.

He said 35 patients should not be asked to turn up at 9am for just one appointment slot.

“That just displays disdain to our fellow citizens and that is possibly part of the reason why many people do not turn up,” he said.

Dr Reilly told how a paediatric clinic in the West had changed monthly appointments to better suit parents and their children.

“Quite often at these monthly sessions, it becomes clear that the parents and children did not really need to attend at all.

“So we are dragging parents away from their jobs, dragging children out of school — wasting time, wasting money.”

Dr Reilly said parents were texted in advance of the appointment and were delighted to be invited to be a real part of the team taking care of their child.

Many parents who replied to the text messages said their children were making progress and did not need to attend the clinic.

“This is a hugely important cultural change, where we bring the clients and the patients who use our service into the decision-making process. As a GP, I long ago [rejected] the paternalistic attitude that doctor knows best.”

Dr Reilly also said the importance of strong leadership in the health services was insufficiently valued.

Dr Reilly said the HSE’s Succession Management Programme was being piloted in each of the four health service regions.

An initial 30 people have completed the 12-month programme, a further 10 people started the programme last month, and an additional 60 would take part over the next year or so.

“This has to be a very positive development,” said Dr Reilly.

Brendan Gleeson now shooting a new comedy film in Sligo

   

Principal photography has begun in Co Sligo on Calvary, the new black comedy-drama which reunites Brendan Gleeson with The Guard‘s writer-director John Michael McDonagh.

‘Calvary’ is a dark comedy about a priest Father James Lavelle (Brendan Gleeson) who is tormented by members of his own parish in Sligo. ‘Calvary‘ has received a whopping €975,000 production loan in the last round ofIrish Film Board funding.

First day of principle photography has been set for the 24th of September with 3 week shoot in Sligo followed by a further 2 weeks in North County Dublin.

The press release announcing the commencement of principal photography says: “Calvary‘s Priest [Brendan Gleeson] is the flipside to The Guard‘s Sergeant Gerry Boyle. A good man intent on making the world a better place, he is continually shocked and saddened by the spiteful and confrontational inhabitants of his small country town. After being threatened during confession, he must battle the dark forces closing in around him.”

Calvary also stars Marie Josée Crozé, Isaach De Bankolé, Aidan Gillen, Domhnall Gleeson, Dylan Moran, Chris O’Dowd, Kelly Reilly, Pat Shortt and David Wilmot.

 Writer-director McDonagh said: “It is with great excitement, bordering on tumescence, that I am looking forward to collaborating once more with Ireland’s greatest actor, Brendan Gleeson, and working with the finest ensemble cast ever assembled in the history of Irish cinema.

“I would like to thank the Irish Film Board, and the BFI [British Film Institute], for their continuing support for filmmaking that seeks to escape from the tiresome, rarefied confines of Dublin 4. Up the West!”

American farmer eaten by own pigs while feeding them

   

The Farm near Riverton, Oregon above, where investigators believe 700-pound pigs ate their 70-year-old owner.

American authorities are investigating how an Oregon farmer came to be eaten by his own pigs, after some of the man’s remains were found at the hog enclosure.

Terry Vance Garner, 70, did not return after leaving his house last week to feed the pigs, some of which weigh 318 kilograms or more.

At least one of the pigs had reportedly bitten the farmer in the past.

“Mr Garner was not observed for several hours,” Paul Frasier, district attorney for Coos County, said in a statement.

“When a family member went to look for him, when he arrived at the hog enclosure, he found the dentures of Mr Garner on the ground.

“Further searching of the enclosure revealed that Mr Garner’s body was in several pieces, with a great majority of the body having been consumed by the hogs.”

Detectives were investigating various theories of how he died, including that he suffered a heart attack or some other medical emergency “which then put him in a position where the hogs could consume him”.

“Another scenario … is that given the age and health of Mr Garner, that one or more of the hogs knocked Mr Garner to the ground, whereupon hogs killed and consumed him,” the statement said.

Mr Frasier says there are reports “that at least one of the hogs in the past had bitten or was otherwise aggressive towards Mr Garner”.

“What little that was left of Mr Garner’s body was examined by a forensic pathologist on Saturday,” the statement said.

“The pathologist was not able to identify, from what remained, the cause and manner of death.”

Police and the district attorney are continuing their investigation, but for the moment the cause of death is listed as “undetermined.”

Foul play has not been ruled out.

“Due to the unusual circumstances presented by this case, the sheriff’s office is investigating to determine if foul play may have resulted in the death of Mr Garner,” Mr Frasier told the local Register Guard newspaper.

“For all we know, it was a horrific accident, but it’s so doggone weird that we have to look at all possibilities.”

Donie's Ireland news daily Blog

‘Mental Health’ improving the length as well as the quality of life is paramount

   

Mental healthcare is different. A substantial proportion of us will have mental health problems at some point in our lives.

The Government current policy is based on the 2006 report A Vision for Change, it aims to provide services “equitably and across all service user groups”. It calls for an orientation towards recovery and more social inclusion. I welcome this, but I am struck by how different policy is from general medical care, which is based on treating specific illnesses to improve outcome.

Perhaps these, more fundamental aims, have already been met in mental healthcare? Having spent almost 20 years as a clinician treating and researching severe mental illness I do not believe this is true. I find the difference disturbing.

If you have a heart attack or stroke and are too incapacitated to consent, you will receive medical care using the “best interests” principle. Many people with serious mental illness don’t believe that being admitted to hospital is in their best interest. However, there were 2,057 involuntary admissions in 2011 under the Mental Health Act 2001.

At least three-quarters of these were for treatment of two disorders:schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. What the figures reflect is that these two conditions are more common than generally appreciated (there are likely to be more than 50,000 people in Ireland affected).

Most treatment is actually provided in the community by teams including doctors, nurses, psychologists, social workers and occupational therapists. Involuntary admission is reserved for where this approach fails because a person’s judgment is impaired by illness. This could mean that you develop a complete conviction that others are involved in an international conspiracy to kill you or that you have uncontrolled mania causing you to behave recklessly.

This is likely to affect your decision-making, but admission under the Act is reserved for situations where “judgment of the person is so impaired that failure to admit would result in a serious deterioration in the condition, or immediate and serious harm to the person or others”. The average duration of admission, unclear to me from annual reports, is probably fewer than 21 days.

Similar legislation is present in other EU countries. With the implementation of the 2001 Act, Irish admission rates, average by European standards, have fallen by more than a third.

Representative of much of the debate about mental health by Dr Pat Bracken, a consultant psychiatrist, arguing that this practice is too “paternalistic” and “at odds with” national policy. I couldn’t help wondering how this might sound if applied to acute medical care. Would one argue that the provision of care to incapacitated medical patients is too “paternalistic”.

He appears to argue for a person’s “right to define the nature of one’s own problems” even if judgment is impaired by illness. Do we expect patients suffering heart attacks or strokes to “define” their own problems? No. He questions the central role of the consultant in providing acute psychiatric care. We trust hospital consultants to manage acute medical problems.

Maybe serious mental illness is not medically important compared to cardiac disorders, strokes or cancer? Tragically, this is not so. People with schizophrenia have an average life expectancy 17 to 25 years shorter than the general population; for bipolar disorder the figure is 10 years. This is based on international data – Irish figures are not collated – but I doubt the picture is better here.

The facts and their potential consequences for thousands of people go unmentioned in the Irish mental health policy document. If these conditions were physical, with this information, wouldn’t health policy focus on improving the length, not just the quality, of life?

Perhaps psychiatry has nothing to offer? Dr Bracken echoes a prevalent view that effective medical treatments are unavailable and describes current treatments as “a mess” and “toxic”. This is wrong. Take schizophrenia; we know the condition is debilitating and 80 per cent of patients relapse within five years.

Treatment with medication is effective in reducing initial symptoms, but staying on medication, from early in the illness, reduces risk of relapse by more than 50 per cent.

This is similar in efficacy to treatments for diabetes, and better than current treatments for asthma and high blood pressure. Despite the evidence, medical nihilism has had a damning impact on investment in the development of new and better treatments compared to other medical areas. (Pre-empting criticism that as an academic psychiatrist my opinions are “corrupted” by the pharmaceutical industry, I don’t receive funding from industry for my work.)

Rather than helping people to live with serious mental illness, our focus could include improving life expectancy. People with serious mental illness die because of suicide, increased rates of accidental death, from heart disease and as a consequence of poor health related to smoking, low physical activity, poor nutrition and medication.

Can we improve life expectancy? Yes. One function of the Mental Health Act is to allow the management of immediate risk of suicide or serious accident. Patients who take antipsychotic medication live longer. Treating depression in schizophrenia with antidepressant medication reduces death by suicide.

Addressing lifestyle changes and reducing smoking rates is challenging but achievable. People with heart disease and schizophrenia die because of poor medical care. Across international studies, it has been shown that these patients receive fewer heart surgeries and are less likely to be prescribed heart medication than the rest of the population.

Mental healthcare policy is different, but it shouldn’t be. All patients should have access to the best medical care irrespective of whether their condition is physical or mental. The focus of this article has been on only one aspect of treatment. Regrettably provisions for psychological or social interventions are also neglected. Limited mental health resources are currently spread “equitably and across all service user groups”. Based on medical need and available medical interventions, people with serious mental illness may have the greatest claim.

Irish Government appoints a new head of banking policy

  

John Hogan has been appointed to the new position of head of banking policy in the financial services division in the Department of Finance.

According to a statement from the department, Mr Hogan will be responsible for developing and delivering policy in key areas such as credit and lending to small and medium-sized businesses, mortgage arrears and consumer issues.

The department appointed Mr Hogan following a competitive process ran by the Top Level Appointments Committee.

The head of banking policy is a newly created position in the restructured financial services division as set out in the department’s strategy statement, which was published in May. Mr Hogan’s appointment will complete this restructuring.

Mr Hogan has held a number of positions in the department to date and joined the financial services division in 2009. He is head of credit and lending policy and played a key role in the completion of the inter-departmental report on mortgage arrears (Keane report).

How & why our muscles become paralysed during sleep?

  

When you are asleep, you cycle through different phases, including one called rapid eye movement or REM sleep. This is the phase where you typically have the dreams you later recall.

Did you know though that in normal REM sleep, your eyes may be moving but many muscles in other parts of your body don’t act like they do when you are awake? Why is that?

The muscles that go offline in normal REM sleep are skeletal muscles, which are involved in moving parts of your body like your arms and legs, rather than other muscle types that keep the heart or other vital processes chugging along.

One theory is that these skeletal muscles go into a temporary state of paralysis during REM sleep to literally stop us acting out movements from our dreams.

Quite how that happens at a biochemical level is still a matter of debate, and a new study on a rat model suggests that multiple brain chemicals and receptors could be involved.

The research, carried out at the University of Toronto, found that chemicals called GABA and glycine shut off motor neurons during REM sleep and appear to trigger REM paralysis, according to researcher John Peever from the University of Toronto in a press release about the findings.

“But we also identified the way cells detect GABA and glycine,” he adds.

“Motor neurons, like all brain cells, listen to these transmitters through receptors and we identified the receptors that allow GABA and glycine to shut the motor neurons off – the three different types of receptors that are required.”

The study was published this month in The Journal of Neuroscience.

W.B. Yeats was ‘conflicted’ about death of close friend Lady Gregory

     

YEATS SUMMER SCHOOL SLIGO:

Had she lived longer, Lady Augusta Gregory might have tempered the increasingly strident political views WB Yeats adopted in the late 1930s. She might also have discouraged the poet’s “somewhat adolescent dalliances” with women half his age, students at the 53rd International Yeats Summer School in Sligo heard yesterday.

James Pethica, director of the school, explored Yeats’s “massively conflicted” feelings on the death of his oldest friend, concluding that, as well as being a blow he had dreaded, her passing was a “liberation”.

Students heard that the woman Yeats had described as “more than mother or father or friend . . . the only person in the world to whom I could tell my every thought” had also been his moral compass up to her death in May 1932.

Pethica, who is writing a biography of Lady Gregory, said critics suspected that the owner of Coole Park in Galway would have tempered the “increasingly strident political views Yeats adopted in the late 1930s”, including his flirtation with fascism and the Blueshirts.

She would also have disapproved of his dalliances with “name hunters, would-be bohemians and hostesses”.

“It is hard to imagine that she would have remained silent about his treatment of his wife and his disingenuous effort to hide his last affairs from her,” Pethica said.

Lady Gregory had been quick to reprove Yeats, and when he fell “too obviously” for a young London actor called Florence Darragh, who performed at the Abbey Theatre, she had told him “with relish” how Darragh had mocked the way he “trotted all over the theatre after her like a little dog”.

When another young woman told Yeats, in 1913, that she was pregnant by him, which turned out to be untrue, his sometimes “domineering and unforgiving” friend told him that the episode “has not been worthy of you”.

But Yeats’s devotion to the long-time friend, who helped found the Abbey, was underlined when he stayed at Coole for the last nine months of her life.

The poet was not there when Lady Gregory died in the early hours of May 23rd, 1932, but arrived at Gort station hours after being summoned by telegram.

Lady Gregory’s granddaughter Catherine, then 18, told Pethica how she and Yeats had travelled from the station, facing each other in a side car, in total silence. “He wasn’t in a state where he could talk to anyone. He was sobbing.”

Pethica said there had been a claustrophobic co-dependent aspect to the Yeats-Gregory relationship, and, after her death, the poet had embraced the possibility of new beginnings.

While he was bereft at the loss, he also felt freed from the judgment of a woman he regarded as thoroughly Victorian.

HSE to fund blood-thinning Pradaxa drug for some Irish patients 

 

A Heart drug that could prevent up to seven strokes a week that the Health Service Executive (HSE) had refused to fund will now be funded for some, according to the HSE.

Pradaxa, a prescription blood thinner, is claimed to be safer and more effective than the widely used warfarin for many patients with atrial fibrillation, a condition that affects some 57,000 people in Ireland.

One clinical trial showed it reduced the risk of stroke 35 per cent more than warfarin.

While some Irish clinicians switched their atrial fibrillation patients to Pradaxa when it was approved by the Irish Medicines Board last year, the HSE said that while those switched before November 9th would be reimbursed under the GMS scheme to remain on it, future patients would not.

Last week, however, the HSE said while warfarin remained the default treatment, it would now reimburse Pradaxa for patients with poor coagulation control, those whose other medicines interact poorly with warfarin and those allergic to it.

The HSE said physicians would have to justify prescribing Pradaxa, which has a wholesale cost of €2.35 per patient per day, before it will be reimbursed.

Separately, the chief executive of the Cystic Fibrosis Association of Ireland, Philip Watt, has called on the HSE to expedite its approval of the cystic fibrosis drug, Kalydeco, also known as Ivacaftor.

The oral drug, the first to treat the underlying causes of a particular form of CF, has recently been approved by the European Medicines Agency.