NHS "I'm Scared" Ad scares UK children

There was news about children being scared of a new NHS anti-smoking advert, posted bellow:

I was at the cinema recently and saw that ad before the film started. Honestly, the ad freaked me out. I can imagine a five-year old child having nightmares about it. The mother in the ad seemed so pale and sick. I understand the whole purpose is to discourage parents from smoking because their children need them. But involving children in such an ad was not the best idea I believe.

The voice of a young girl saying: "I'm not scared of spiders, clowns or bullies, but I'm scared of mum dying" is depressing. If this ad is targeting parents, I think children should not watch it. They would think badly of their smoker parents if they do imagining them dying or terminally ill.

A similar approach was taken in the UAE but in a softer way. A girl was singing to her father a song called "Leave it, your breath is my breath" asking him to stop smoking because she loves him and does not want to see him suffer. She says "Who do I have but you in this world, put out your cigarette... Leave it and hug me...". Here is the video bellow:

'Love Handles' can kill

If you have "love handles" then beware that your lungs may be in danger. A research on 120,000 men and women showed that the more weight you have on your waist, the more you will experience shortage of breath and thus lung malfunction.

Dr Noemi Eiser, honorary medical director of the British Lung Foundation, told the BBC: "It is widely known that obesity and a lack of exercise is detrimental to your health but this research highlights how being overweight affects your lungs."

A big waist size can be deadly. Each extra 2ins (5cm) raised the chance of early death by between 13% and 17%, according to a New England Journal of Medicine study.

The British Heart Foundation also find out that risk of heart disease is higher when there is fat concentrated around the waist.

Sedentary lifestyle, unhealthy food and lack of exercise add to a bigger waist and thus bring more health risks.

Children TV fans are more likely to have asthma

For some mothers, TV is a good way to keep their children busy when they need time for themselves or have some household work to do. They do not know that they are putting their children in danger.

Children who spend more than two hours a day on TV are more likely to develop asthma. Not because TV takes their breath away, but because it keeps children too attached to it that they do not want to have other activities any more.

This has been scientifically proven through a study at Glasgow University on 14,000 children followed from the age of birth and until the age of 11 and a half. Children who watched more than two hours of TV a day at 39 months were twice as likely to have developed the condition, according to the study that was appeared today in the journal Thorax.

Elaine Vickers at the charity Asthma UK told The Guardian: "We have one of the highest rates of childhood asthma in the world so it is especially important that parents in the UK try to prise their kids away from the TV and encourage them to lead an active lifestyle. This includes children with asthma, who can also greatly benefit from regular exercise."

Why your hair turns gray.

Ever wondered why your hair inevitably will turn gray as you grow up? Scientists have almost found that out why and are doing their studies to develop anti-graying strategies. According to Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology, the drop in the level of enzyme called catalase is the reason.
As it appeared: "The process starts when there is a dip in levels of an enzyme called catalase. That catalase shortfall means that the hydrogen peroxide that naturally occurs in hair can't be broken down. So hydrogen peroxide builds up in the hair, and because other enzymes that would repair hydrogen peroxide's damage are also in short supply, the hair goes gray".

Blonds are luckier on this part as grey hair don't stand out as much as those with dark hair!

FACEBOOK can harm your health!

It seems like Facebook and other social networking websites are substituting natural meetings between people. The face-to-face interaction between people is replaced by hours and hours spent on online socialising. Why would they do the effort to go out to meet friends and family while they can do so in bed with their laptops over their laps!

This might seem that it made life easier, however, a UK expert thinks online social networking websites might harm your health.

Dr Aric Sigman told the BBC, "a lack of face-to-face networking could alter the way genes work, upset immune responses, hormone levels, the function of arteries, and influence mental performance". It could also "increase the risk of health problems as serious as cancer, strokes, heart disease, and dementia".

What is special about face-to-face communication is that you could understand people in front of you more clearly through their voice intonation and their body language. It is very easy to misunderstand your friends online because what is said in a joking context must not be aquired as a serious issue. And you cannot actually know unless you hear and see the person in front of you. As the doctor said, these websites "undermines people's social skills and their ability to read body language".

Plastic surgey born in wars

The War and Medicine exhibition that concluded on the 15th of February at the Wellcome Trust drew attention to the inevitable relationship between war and human injuries leading to the advancement of medicine.

War injuries taught physician how to develop their treatments and update them according to the different cases they experience in soldiers. This introduced us to new fields of medicine, such as plastic surgery that was founded in World War One (WW1), between 1914-1918.

During that war, the New Zealand born Harold Dolf Gillies used to treat wounded soldiers of the British Army across the fields of Belgium and France in 1914 and 1915. Gillies was developing new ways of fixing deformed faces of the soldiers. He developed the idea of using wide skin from different parts of the body for facial wounds closure. A soldier's face may be attached to his shoulder by a piece of skin to cover his wounded cheek.

War had a positive effect that it urged physicians to develop new ways and treatments to deal with the different cases and the pressure of the number of soldiers being injured at the same time. This may be the only benefit of wars.

In 1917, The Queen's Hospital opened in London provided with over 1000 beds. And that's where Gillies and his colleagues developed plastic surgery. Around 11,000 operations were performed on over 5,000 men, mostly soldiers with facial wounds.

Plastic surgery's roots started back then and it's still growing until today.

The Pill for under 16s!

There was a news recently that even girls under 16 can buy contraceptive pills. I wonder what benefit would that bring?
Obviously this is aimed to decrease the number of teenage pregnancies. On the other hand, the British government has policies to make the single mothers' lives easier. Single mothers are provided with a house, milk and whatever that could ease their responsibilities. When teenage girls see this kind of independent life that seems "cool" and fully supported, how could they be held against doing what they are doing? There is nothing to worry about. Everything is facilitated for them and their babies.

Now selling The Pill to those teenagers is like saying "you are allowed to have sex at this young age, but be careful not to get pregnant". What morals are we expecting these "children" to have. They are no longer living their age of innocence. And that's not to mention the danger of STI and STD.