The serious impact of noise on health outcomes is an emerging issue. I blogged last year about a World Health Organisation study on noise impact in Europe which suggested - among other things - that as many people died in the UK because of the effects of persistent traffic noise as in collisions. Now a [...]
The most interesting new word I’ve heard so far this year is ‘solastalgia‘, buried in some notes that Matt Jones made at a recent lecture by Geoff Manaugh of BLDGBLOG. It was coined five years ago by an Australian, Glenn Albrecht, and seeks to capture notions of place-related distress. Albrecht was quoted in an Australian [...]
I was at a play last night in which the fact that a character smokes cigars is important to the characterisation, if not essential to the plot. Now, since July 2007 in England it has been illegal to smoke in a public place, but it turns out that there’s clause in the Act which allows [...]
I pricked up my ears at news of the recent launch of the global ‘Dump Soda’ campaign - whose ambitions are pretty much as stated on the can, as it were. The reason: a few years ago my colleague Rachel Kelnar and I wrote some scenarios on the impact of obesity on the food and [...]
CNN’s ‘health’ blog has a take on five healthy food trends. They’re a bit impressionistic - although some data is attached - and maybe apart from the first one won’t come as much of a surprise to European readers. The way in which consumer wellbeing (and lifestyle) trends are aligning with both health trends [...]
What happens if the pervasive chemicals in the everyday products we buy and use are the reason that we generally feel below par so much of the time? It could cause a backlash by consumers who increasingly regard their well-being as important to them. The thought comes both because of the wave of stories about [...]
Two stories in the past week remind us that health is one of the things that consistently shows the limits of affluent societies. The first is data which show that the number of alcohol-related hospital admissions have doubled in ten years. The second is a report from several charities which says that obesity [...]
Pharma 2020, a new report from PWC suggests that although global demand for medicines is growing rapidly, the pharmaceuticals industry business model is unable unsustainable because it’s simply unable to respond effectively - or rapidly - to changing market dynamics.
Only depressing news coming out from the Children’s Society’s “Good Childhood Inquiry” - and I mean that fairly literally.
