Welcome to this week’s issue of The Week in Medicine – a round-up of all the happenings in the world of Irish medicine
One of the most depressing sights in Ireland in previous decades was the number of teenagers who smoked. Whether it was occasional, weekly or daily use, it was always depressing as it was ultimately likely to lead to the regular use of tobacco, and all the diseases to which smokers are liable.
Moreover, it was a vision of failure. How could we seriously say that we were taking on the tobacco companies if the next generation were ignoring the warnings and taking up the habit in big numbers? Tobacco companies were killing off their old customers, but replacing them with an eager new generation.
But teens don’t smoke in Ireland anymore. Less than two per cent of our young teens report smoking every week – a figure that’s lower than any other country in Europe, and continuing to trend downwards. That figure comes from the latest update on the State of the Nation’s Children report, updated in December 2024 and published by the Department of Children.
It’s a remarkably positive result for the anti-tobacco lobby. Ireland was the first country to make smoking illegal in workplaces, and its current success in limiting teenage smoking is almost certainly related to that, and the on-going work of anti-tobacco lobbyists to make Ireland smoke-free.
In the report, the percentage of Irish children aged 11,13, and 15 who reported smoking in the previous week was 1.8 per cent. In Spain, the figure was 4.4 per cent, in Finland it was 6.3 per cent and in Holland it was 18.3 per cent.
It’s an incredible achievement when you think about it. It’s only a few decades since a movie director could genuinely depict Ireland as backward and poor by showing a child smoking, and it would have been be perfectly believable then. Now, that would be classed as fantasy or horror. A slur on the nation 🙂
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This year will likely be a challenge for those who want to promote good public health in Ireland. While we have achieved a lot in the area of smoking, the next big battle will be for warnings on alcohol products which public health officials will see as simply providing the correct health information, and others – notably the world’s richest man, Elon Musk – may see as State overreach.
There was a time when that wouldn’t really matter. While we may have followed American culture in music, movies, clothes, brands and TV in the past, we didn’t legalise handguns for every teen, or arm our police with tanks and artillery.
But now that Musk has shown that he will use Twitter to promote his own political agenda, and spend huge amounts of money getting certain people elected to public office, there is a real danger that public health messaging will get confused and diluted.
It hasn’t been confirmed yet, but having Robert F Kennedy as the head of Health and Human Services would be a disaster – not just for the US but for the whole world. To have a person in that position who is openly distrustful of established science is dangerous as it will give credibility and credence to those who promote an anti-vax agenda.
But Musk is even more dangerous than RFK, with some idiotic ideas that he wants to push – not just in the US but all over the world. We have not faced this type of challenge before in Ireland. It will demand the highest performance and skill levels from our elected leaders.
On the one hand, we have to get on with President Musk and his buddy, Donald J Trump, but on the other, we will have to contradict them if they start spreading the type of misinformation and disinformation that has become Musk’s hallmark.
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The reaction to the murder of the United Healthcare CEO, Brian Thomson, has been astonishing as his alleged killer – Luigi Mangione – has received enormous amounts of positive feedback on social media about the killing.
It’s quite extraordinary that someone who seems to have committed a murder receives that level of tolerance and acceptance on social media, but that in itself is an indication of where ‘private’ medicine is in the US.
Many have taken to social media to describe the practices and procedures of health insurance companies in the US and how they operate. Stories of very sick people being denied proper healthcare resonate right across the American population, and many people have stories of how badly they were treated by their insurance companies when they made a claim.
And the over-reaction of New York and US authorities in the arrest of Mangione suggest that while the authorities want to make it the crime of the century, and are even promoting the killing as ‘terrorism’, a jury may not convict Mangione, even if they think he’s guilty.
This is where America is now. They can’t really complain that the public is idolizing a felon when the people elected one by a popular vote. There is a popular hashtag now which warns of the consequences of stupid decisions – #FAFO – F**k around and Find Out.
2025 will be the year that America – and the rest of the world – finds out what electing a felon as US President entails, and what that means for health insurers, people with illness and disability, Luigi Mangione, and the rest of the world.
There’s no need to worry though as Trump is a self-proclaimed genius and did really well on those cognitive tests. What could possibly go wrong?
