A round-up of today's other stories in brief
MS SERVICES: The neurological service is a shambles with a huge deficit in service to the 7,000 people with MS and their carers, according to the chairwoman of Multiple Sclerosis Ireland.
Louise Wardells claimed that Ireland has one of the most understaffed and inaccessible neurological services in Europe. She said there were only 17 neurologists in the Republic servicing around four million people. "Northern Ireland by comparison has 30 neurologists for a population of 1.5 million."
She said MS Ireland was calling on the Government to meet the basic needs of people with MS by appointing an additional 20 neurologists.
SMOKING EFFECTS: A new international study of more than 20,000 children confirms that exposure to cigarette smoke before and after birth impairs their lung function, and that parental smoking remains a serious public health issue.
The effects of smoking during pregnancy last up to age 12, while exposure to cigarette smoking after birth further worsens lung function, said Dr Manfred A Neuberger of the Medical University in Vienna, one of the study's authors. Children whose mothers smoked during pregnancy were 31-40 per cent more likely to have poor lung function than children born to non-smokers, the researchers found.
MAMMOGRAM RISK: Mammograms may increase the risk of breast cancer in women with a genetic predisposition to the disease. A study of 1,600 women with BRCA 1 and 2 mutations, defective genes linked to breast cancer, found they were 54 per cent more likely to suffer the disease if they had ever had a chest X-ray. For women given chest X-rays before the age of 20, the risk of developing breast cancer before their 40th birthday more than doubled. Dr David Goldgar, who led the study in France, said: "This is one of the first studies to demonstrate that women genetically predisposed to breast cancer may be more susceptible to low-dose ionising radiation than other women."