"Busy" NHS hospital lets woman bleed to death

A teenager died a fortnight after having an abortion because of delays in giving her a vital blood transfusion, an inquest in Bristol has heard. A-level student Manon Jones, 18, from Caernarfon, Gwynedd began to bleed after the operation and admitted herself to hospital, where she died. A doctor told the inquest the Southmead Hospital ward in Bristol had been busy and "things could have been different". Miss Jones died in 2005. The coroner recorded a narrative verdict....

Two weeks after the procedure she went on holiday, against medical advice. She cut short her break after feeling ill and returned to Bristol, where she was a student, and admitted herself to Southmead Hospital. Initial blood tests taken at the hospital failed to alert medics to any serious condition, the coroner heard. But more tests showed she needed a blood transfusion.

However she was left waiting for the blood when another emergency broke out on the ward and her condition deteriorated, resulting in her needing life support. Post-mortem tests showed she died of low haemoglobin levels and shock caused by "retained products of conception" - that is the embryo.

Dr Lucy Jackson, who treated her at the hospital, said the results of an initial blood test did not immediately lead her to consider low haemoglobin levels. She said Miss Jones talked coherently when she arrived and bleeding was minimal.

Following a second blood test, Dr Jackson decided a blood transfusion was immediately required but Miss Jones was stable enough to "wait for the blood to arrive". The doctor was pulled away from Miss Jones when an emergency broke out elsewhere on the ward.

An emotional Dr Jackson told the inquest: "If we hadn't been so busy, particularly with the other emergency, we would have had more time and things could have been different."

The inquest heard from Dr Richard Porter, an obstetrician at Royal United Hospital, in Bath. He did not treat Miss Jones, but said it had been "wholly inadequate" to leave her waiting for a blood transfusion for more than four hours. But, the doctor said, it was "hard not to conclude" that Miss Jones would have survived had she not gone on holiday and had she attended hospital earlier.

The coroner said the death was not due to natural causes and a verdict of misadventure would have been inappropriate. He said the narrative verdict was because Miss Jones died as a result of retained products of conception following the termination of a pregnancy.

The coroner discussed the issue of neglect and said he did have concerns. He said an earlier transfusion of blood would have been likely to have saved her life. He also said that it was unsatisfactory that scans had gone missing.

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British cops surrender to Leftist thugs

BRITISH National Party members set to stage a controversial summer festival stormed out of a licensing meeting after police objected to their plan at the eleventh hour. However the BNP has vowed to go ahead with the event on land off Codnor Denby Lane despite withdrawing its application for a council license to sell alcohol and play live music.

BNP members were confronted by more than 30 protesters opposed to the party, who chanted and waved placards outside Ripley Town Hall before the meeting.

Derbyshire Constabulary had initially raised no objections to the festival, due to take place in August. However it changed its mind and submitted an objection after Amber Valley Borough Council's deadline after receiving "significant intelligence" opponents of the BNP would try and cause trouble at the event.

Party representatives told the council's licensing board on Tuesday the claims were "spurious and politically motivated" before branding the hearing a farce and withdrawing the application.

Craig Sutherland, solicitor for Derbyshire Police, told the meeting: "The fact is we are expecting trouble at this event. "We didn't object to this festival in 2007, and we didn't object initially in 2008 however towards the end of May the intelligence picture changed. "We have started to receive intelligence to say that groups opposed to the BNP may attack people attending this festival. "Having a large number of individuals with opposing views together in one area like this is going to be a powder keg."

Mr Sutherland told the panel that if they were willing to let the event go ahead they would like to see several new conditions in place including a seven foot high fence around the entire site and temporary security lighting installed.

John Walker, national treasurer of the BNP, said afterwards: "We came here with an open mind. As it went on we came to the conclusion that it was becoming a farce because of the hoops we were being asked to jump through by Derbyshire Police. "The police have caved in to mob rule. We are going to withdraw this application and this event will go ahead without a licence."

BNP member Alan Warner, who hosts the event on his land in Denby, said: "The festival will be going ahead. We won't be selling alcohol but people will be able to bring their own and there will be recorded music and music from the fair ground. "The police still have to police the event. I'm looking forward to it, hopefully it will be even better than last year. We're hoping to have as many as 5000 people here."

Peter Carney, Chief Executive at Amber Valley Borough Council said: "The organisers will now not be permitted to provide any licensable activities during the course of the festival, should it go ahead. They will not be able to sell alcohol on site and live or recorded music as a main activity will not be allowed at the event. "The Council will be considering, with the police, what further steps we will take in respect of the concerns raised by them and by residents at the hearing if the organisers decide to go ahead with the event despite the withdrawal of the application."

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Aggressive British police

But only towards law-abiding people

A man who laughed too hard at a comedian on TV ended up being pepper sprayed at his home by UK police and spending the night naked in a cell. Chris Cocker, 36, from Blackburn, laughed so hard while watching BBC TV's Have I Got News For You that he fell off the sofa, the BBC reported. A neighbour in the flat below heard the thud and called police.

"I fell off the settee in hysterics and hit the floor and got myself up and started carrying on watching the telly and the next thing I know there was a knock on the door," Mr Cocker said. The knock was from police officers, but Mr Cocker was not happy to see them and refused to co-operate.

"The bit where I lost it the most was when I shut the door and the policeman had stuck his foot in the doorway and was refusing to let me shut my own front door," he said. Police then pepper-sprayed Mr Cocker, bundled him into a police van and took him to a police station where he said he was stripped naked and made to spend a night in a jail cell, the BBC said.

Lancashire Police said the officers used the pepper spray after fearing for their safety when Mr Cocker became aggressive [What pansies!]. Mr Cocker admitted in court that he had resisted a police officer, the BBC said. He was given a conditional discharge for assault.

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Breast cancer victims have normal lifespan - if it is detected early enough

Women whose breast cancers are detected early live as long as those who never developed the disease, a new audit has shown. The findings will come as a huge boost to the more than 60 per cent of women whose cancers are detected when small and before they have spread to the lymph nodes. The new audit, by the Association of Breast Surgery and the NHS Breast Screening Programme, traced the outcomes for women with breast cancer diagnosed in 1990-91 and 2000-01.

Women in the first group whose prognosis at the time of detection was classified as "excellent" showed the same life expectancy as women of the same age who had never had cancer. This was also true for the second group of women whose prognosis was "good". The two categories include 61 per cent of cancers detected through screening.

The audit also showed that survival rates are also improving for women with more aggressive types of breast cancer. Overall, 15-year survival stands at 86 per cent for women with a screen-detected invasive breast cancer in England, Wales and Northern Ire-land. But not all breast cancers are screen-detected. About two thirds are found in other ways, either because they appear during the intervals between screenings and produce symptoms, or because they occur in women who fall outside the age groups routinely screened. Screening is to be extended to include women aged between 47 and 73 by 2012. This means that an extra 400,000 women a year will be screened and an increased proportion of cancers detected.

Martin Lee, president of the Association of Breast Surgery, said: "It is vital that women are aware of the excellent survival now achieved for breast cancers diagnosed through screening and they should be confident in the quality of the service they receive. I would encourage all women who are invited to be screened to attend. Any woman who has previously ignored an invitation to breast screening should contact her local unit."

Professor Julietta Patnick, director of the NHS Breast Screening Programme, said that this year marked the twentieth anniversary of the introduction of breast screening in England. "Huge strides have been made over the past two decades and more women than ever before are surviving breast cancer, many of whom have benefited from early detection through routine breast screening," she said.

Gill Lawrence, director of the West Midlands Cancer Intelligence Unit, which coordinates the audit, said that over the past 12 years it had mapped improvements in the quality of the screening programme. "The data clearly demonstrate significant improvements in the quality of the service women receive, from the reduction in the number of women requiring surgery to obtain a definitive diagnosis of breast cancer, to an increase in the proportion of cancers that are diagnosed through screening" she said.

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Bungling Brits can't even run nuclear subs safely: "A minister and the head of the Royal Navy made public apologies yesterday after a report into the deaths of two crew who were killed in an explosion on a nuclear submarine uncovered safety flaws and dangerously defective equipment. Leading Operator Mechanic Paul McCann, 32, and Operator Mechanic Anthony Huntrod, 20, were killed on board HMS Tireless when an oxygen-generating device blew up as they activated it during a training exercise under the Arctic ice cap on March 20 last year. The board of inquiry discovered that 996 of the "Scogs" (self-contained oxygen generators) had been defined as unserviceable and placed in a hazardous waste store. But they had been put back into service, regraded "A1" and the relevant paperwork had been changed. Royal Navy military police also found that the sodium chlorate briquettes in the containers, which had to be ignited to produce oxygen, had been removed from drying ovens too soon, which had led to cracks."


One British Conservative still fights for liberty: "The Conservative Party was tonight reeling from the extraordinary resignation of one of their most senior frontbenchers to fight an unprecedented "single-issue" by-election. David Davis, a right-winger and one of the Tories' political heavyweights, stunned Westminster by announcing he was quitting as both an MP and Shadow Home Secretary to fight against the Government's "strangulation" of British freedoms. Mr Davis, who lost the 2005 Tory leadership contest to David Cameron, has been the driving force behind Tory opposition to Gordon Brown's plans to extend detention without charge for terrorist suspects from 28 to 42 days. He is known as a staunch libertarian."