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Sheer size. The NHS employs around a million people (882,000 for England alone) and you are talking about the records for nearly 60 million living people (and the digitised records of dead people - some clinical records are required to be kept for 75 years after the death of the patient). The NHS is 58 years old. That's a lot of data. Tax records are far simpler

Number of locations - every GP surgery in the country - even the ones in the islands 10,465 of them in 2004 (figures here) plus all the dentists (5-10,000 practices) opthalmic practitioners (8,000), the 10,000 contracted pharmacies (More figures), and so on.

ALL of these will need to be connected. There probably isn't much like it anywhere on that scale - and expectations of it are wildly unrealistic.

The backbone will be fun to build out to the islands where power is often flaky in winter - and the UK is rather longer than it is wide. I doubt adequate telco infrastructure is in place for quite large parts of the country - think everywhere where you can't get a mobile signal.

In practice for most NHS workers, all this stuff is taking huge amounts of money away from what really matters - care for the patients. The (7 year old) PC eating half my desk is only useful for receiving bureaucratic garbage - anything important gets done on the phone or in the wards. A huge amount of time is wasted, going through all the garbage that gets emailed to all and sundry, some of which actually needs reading but the vast majority doesn't. The problem is figuring out which is which without reading it first. My favourite one was the day that 10,000 people in got the email about the new lines being painted in a rural health centre car park (staff 8) meaning that there would be 2 less parking spaces that day.

Touch screens are used routinely in computer assisted surgery, control of fluoroscopy systems and any number of other mission-critical applications.

Only an application developed with an absolutely staggering degree of incompetence and ignorance of basic touchscreen design constraints would be subject to anything like the issues described here. This is particularly true given that, unlike the medical applications of touchscreens, virtually 100% of the screen real estate in e-voting applications is available for BUTTONS. A 1 cm apparent shift on a touchscreen is a HUGE miscalibration, and any resonable e-voting design should have buttons that are on the order of 10 cm on a side to accomodate the full range of voter motor control and perceptual limitations.

Far worse than the gross incompetence of the second raters who designed these machines, is the complacency so clearly evident in the responses seen here.

Basically people are saying, "Yeah, touchscreens are lousy technology and we have to expect this kind of problem with them and that's ok."

Why, exactly is that ok? Because voting doesn't matter? Is it just some kind of bizzare ritual to you people, passively engaged in, like voting in the old Soviet Union?

Even if this is just an example of criminally poor software design, all that it proves is that no jurisdiction should ever use electronic voting because it is demonstrably impossible for the losers who are implementing it to get even the most rudimentary aspects of user interface design adequately robust.

And the American people should be up in arms, perhaps literally, rather than making excuses for the liars and cheats who are leading them into oblivion.

See relevant web pages from the UK Medical Research Council, the UK Department of Health, the NIBSC and Cambridge University's Stem Cell Institute.

Research in this area is also being conducted by the UK universities of Bath and Liverpool, in collaboration with the Wellcome Trust and Smith & Nephew.

The NHS National Information Technology Plan

On the other hand, the most recent stats I can find from the National Health Service (NHS) seem to indicate that teen pregnancy rates are declining in the UK, and have been since 1998. Teen pregnancy rates in the UK, while the highest in Western Europe, still remain well below the rate in the United States.

The most recent NHS data that I could find seem to indicate that alcohol and drug use have also remained relatively flat over the last five years (changes were mostly small and within the margins of error of the survey.)

With respect to depression, I haven't checked the figures; they weren't mentioned in the original post. Part of the increase may be due to increased (over-?) diagnosis.

"Although there is no documentation of the transmission of prions to humans..."

I'd have to go check to see if there's any body of research that deals with other animals, because prions aren't species specific, which is why we have BSE ('Mad Cow'), Scrapie (in sheep) and Cruetzfeld-Jakob disease in humans. It's notoriously suspicious to start using 'in humans' as a caveat.

"This is why we don't take blood donations from people who spent time in England."

Stronger wording than the actuality;

"Because of the theoretical risk of vCJD transmission, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) advises blood services not to receive blood from people who might have been exposed to the disease. This includes, among other groups, those who lived in the UK for 3 months or more between 1980 and 1996, people who received a blood transfusion in the UK anytime since 1980, and people who lived in Europe for 5 years or longer starting anytime since 1980."
http://www.cidrap.umn.edu/cidrap/content/hot/bse/n ews/dec1903blood.html

As an addendum, here's something from the UK Government - http://www.doh.gov.uk/cmo/vcjdstatement.pdf

"I also heard on NPR yesterday that Mad Cow is often mistaken for Alzheimer's so Mad Cow deaths may be higher then we suspected."

That wouldn't surprise me, although pathology would immediately show the difference. One of the reasons why suspected cases in the UK are always sent through the pathologist.

The thing is that BSE crept up on us in the UK. We had cattle infected with BSE for the best part of fifteen years, which let to the pyres of curiously nice-smelling carcasses all over the place. 143 confirmed cases in that time, and bear in mind that the UK is actively looking is not a huge amount. However, the 'incubation' period can be a few years.

I wonder how many incidents of Deep Vein Thrombosis there will be among those sitting through the 10 hour epic?

Cars cost me (a non-driver) money

Really, lets see

subsidies to the roads

Income from motorists (petrol and road tax) in of the order of \xa330bn. Expendi
ture on road maintenece is in the order of \xa36bn.

to the NHS for healthcare in looking after the broken bodies of victims of ca
rs

Do smokers pay enough for all the lung cancer treatments? I'm sure that the £30bn difference between expenditures and costs on roads covers this. Cant find any concrete figures though.

in asthma

Professor Emeritus Stanley Feldman, Charing Cross and Westminster Medical School
-
"In the last 40 years the level of (outdoor) air pollution has decreased dramati
cally"
"Nevertheless the incidence of asthma has risen"
"Pollution does not cause bronchitis or asthma, nor does wearing a so-called an
ti-pollution mask do anything except identify the wearer as a sucker"

The Department of Health, in its Report on transport and health, 1999
(section C5 p44)

"...the available evidence does not support a causative role [re. asthma] for ou
tdoor air pollution"

The National Asthma Campaign says that house-dust mite droppings are the number
one asthma trigger, but also points out new evidence that the mites can actually
cause asthma to develop in the first place.

PM10 particulates causing lung cancer
The National Asthma Campaign says that house-dust mite droppings are the number
one asthma trigger, but also points out new evidence that the mites can actually
cause asthma to develop in the first place.

PM10 particulates causing lung cancer

Petrol transport sources contribute only 5% of PM10s. Diesel transport sources;
i.e., the buses, taxis and diesel rail locos so-beloved of the anti-car lobby, c
ontribute nearly four times this amount (19%).

pumping CO2 and other greenhouse gasses into the air...

96.5% of all carbon dioxide emissions are from natural sources, mankind is respo
nsible for only 3.5%, with 0.6% coming from fuel to move vehicles, and about 1%
from fuel to heat buildings.

And I have to stop and give way to the buggers on the way to the shops. Make
cars give way to pedestrians, I say!

Causes even more congestion, and congestion is bad for the economy, quite simply
. Besides while the cars are waiting for you to slaunter arround the road, the d
elivery vans are stuck at the end of the queue - unable to stock your shops.

Spend the money for this scheme on relieving congestion

The UK Govt already have the ability to cut off the general publics cell phone ability using the obscurely named feature of GSM ACCOLC 'Access Overload Control for cellular radio systems' - here are some links: http://www.doh.gov.uk/epcu/epcu/refdocs/accolcqa.p df, http://www.co-ordination.gov.uk/contingencies/dwd/ information.htm

A follow up on Apple:

Apple also makes its iMac line of computers with polycarbonate plastic. This plastic contains bisphenol A.

Apple acknologies the plastic outgasses enough for people to notice the smell.

A list of links from 'it causes testicles to shrink' to 'everything is ok'
http://www.wwfcanada.org/red uce-risk/questionable.html
http://www.sciencedai ly.com/releases/1999/10/991021075812.htm
http://www.niehs.nih.gov/oc/news/seala nt.htm
http://www.doh.gov.uk/hef/bisphena.htm
The Pro BPA page telling you everything is Ok, nothign to see here...http://www.bisphenol-a.org/

Now the question:
Is it socially responsible to
1) be making this kind of machine covering
2) have these computers in schools, where endocrine disruption has more of an effect.

Keep in mind that the Good Design (tm) award given out in Japan was NOT given to the iMac. Why? Because of the use of bisphenol-A. (this is how I found out in fact....)

Ditto s/Canada/UK/

Free healthcare, everything is within a day's drive (even most of Europe), ADSL and GPRS are being rolled out nationwide next year, no mad people with guns (not even the police), we have strong beer and even stronger cider, you can get laid at 16 and drunk at 18, we don't have daft crypto laws, and most people are atheists.

London sucks, petrol (gasoline) prices suck (70p/litre, US$5/gallon), but other than that it's a pretty cool place to be.

I know a couple of people who telecommute to jobs in the States. Once you have remote reboot installed on your machine, being on the same continent doesn't really matter anymore.

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