All articles by Michael White – Page 18
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Michael White on pandemic flu
Did you clock the government's new national risk register, published by the Cabinet Office? It was widely reported as putting pandemic flu as potentially the most lethal threat mankind is facing.
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Michael White on relatonships with the media
A grizzled ex-minister, just back from an evidently refreshing holiday, was muttering the other day about what he calls the 'BBC mindset', by which he means all of us in the inky-fingered media trades.
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Michael White on feminism
I couldn't help noticing in recent days how feminism kept popping up. As part of the wider debate about equality affecting class and poverty, gender, race, disability, it never goes away.
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Michael White on facing up to obesity
Amid the hype over Labour's defeat in Glasgow East, I suspect the most important consequence of the by-election will not be the ejection of Gordon Brown.
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Michael White on palliative care
Eleven years ago a good friend died of lung cancer in the palliative ward of a London hospital. Since the operation(s) had gone wrong and he was only 62, it wasn't ideal.
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Michael White on rating doctors
As the government winds down towards what it hopes will be a welcome summer break (don’t bank on it), it’s been home secretary Jacqui Smith’s week.
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Michael White on how Darzi looks from abroad
An impeccable sense of timing and a wedding of young friends in Washington DC ensured I stepped off the plane at Heathrow this week uninformed about Lord Darzi's master plan for the NHS.
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Michael White on Darzi politics
Even before the saintly Lord Darzi uttered the first sentence of his latest report, or Henley had even voted, the Cameroon Conservatives had got their NHS retaliation in first.
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Michael White on public health
The other weekend I found myself discussing the public sector with an old leftie who had worked most of his life in housing and hated what he feels the Blair-Brown governments have done. In a word, marketisation.
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Michael White on specialist trauma response
The other day health minister Ben Bradshaw read out to concerned MPs a list of all the places on the body where young people get pierced these days.
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Michael White on dealing with the Treasury
Right, enough of this gloom. All together now, we are going to say 'let's stay cheerful for the rest of this column, whatever happens'.
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Michael White on private vs public
The detail I am most likely to remember from this week's events is the revelation that when Harold Macmillan was chancellor in 1956 he suppressed evidence of the link between cancer and smoking.
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Michael White on dementia services
Being in government is a bit like fighting forest fires, the kind that sweep through tinder-dry acres in countries a lot hotter than ours.
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Michael White on the embryology bill
Another roller-coaster week as ministers and MPs engage in close combat over the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill with one hand, while battling to maintain momentum on NHS reform with the other.
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Michael White on Darzi's plans
How hard it is to get your message across when opinion turns against you, let alone when Prezza, Cherie and Lord Levy are all trying to sell books, as the government has been demonstrating this past week.
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Michael White on NICE decisions
Did you hear Ian Gibson, left wing MP for Norwich North, giving Gordon Brown a piece of his mind in the wake of Labour's disastrous performance in the local elections?
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Michael White on health policy attacks
In the run-up to the local elections, not to mention the Royal College of Nursing's conference, the government took a fearsome bombardment on the health front.
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Michael White on disease politics
I was reading a book about politicians and their illnesses when news broke that John Prescott has suffered from bulimia, what some newspapers were unkind enough to call a girl's illness.
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Michael White on audit culture
Reading the high-minded Times Literary Supplement on a comfortable sofa the other weekend, I stumbled on a ferocious attack on the audit culture that is now so much a routine feature of national life, NHS included.
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Michael White on biosimilars and generics
At my bus-pass holding time of life, you don't often come across a word whose meaning you could no more guess at than a street sign in Tokyo. It happened to me when trawling Hansard the other day. The word was 'biosimilars'.