Press Releases Saturday 17 April 1999
No 7190 Volume 318
Please remember to credit the BMJ as source when publicising
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article and to tell your readers that they can read its full text on
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(1) RECORDING
PATIENTS' SOCIO-ECONOMIC STATUS
IS NECESSARY FOR TACKLING HEALTH INEQUALITIES
(2) NO LINK
TO CJD IN PEOPLE WORKING WITH
ANIMALS....AT LEAST NOT YET
(1) RECORDING PATIENTS'
SOCIO-ECONOMIC STATUS
IS NECESSARY
FOR TACKLING HEALTH INEQUALITIES
(Tackling health inequalities in
primary care)
http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/318/7190/1020
By way of diminishing health problems through
social
inequalities, general practitioners in
the UK should routinely
record socio-economic information about
their patients, say
researchers in this week's BMJ. Dr Liam
Smeeth from the
Royal Free and University College London
Medical School and
Dr Iona Heath from the Royal College of
General Practitioners
write that eliciting and recording of
societal risk factors for poor
health will help to identify those patients
whose health is at risk
from their social status and enable appropriate
targeting of
preventive healthcare measures.
Diseases have both biological and societal
causes and yet
medical treatment is focused on the biological
factors, say the
authors. In the UK, death rates are two
to three times higher
among people in social class V than among
those in social class
I. Moreover, they say, the traditional
classification of social
classes is cumbersome to use, does not
always provide a good
measure of the socioeconomic factors important
to health and
may not be appropriate in countries other
than the UK.
Smeeth and Heath argue that a more valid
and easy to use form
of social classification is required and
with this tool and the
increasing computerisation of practices,
the recording of
valuable socioeconomic data could be straightforward.
The authors conclude that for general practice
to play a part in
translating the government's commitment
to tackling health
inequalities, the recording of accurate
and valid socioeconomic
information about patients is needed.
Contact:
Dr Liam Smeeth, Clinical Lecturer, Department
of Primary
Care and Population Sciences, Royal Free
and University
College London Medical School, London
Email: l.smeeth{at}ucl.ac.uk
(2) NO LINK TO CJD IN
PEOPLE WORKING WITH
ANIMALS....AT
LEAST NOT YET
(Mortality from dementia in occupations
at risk of exposure to
bovINE spongiform encephalopathy:
analysis of death
registrations)
http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/318/7190/1044
(Commentary: Uncertainty over length
of incubation tempers
optimism)
http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/318/7190/1044#resp1
In a study to ascertain whether transmissible
spongiform
encephalopathy has had any effect on people
working in animal
husbandry and slaughter, researchers in
this week's BMJ find
that there has been no increase in certified
deaths from
Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease or other dementias
in this group
during the period 1979-96.
Dr Paul Aylin from Imperial College of
Medicine and colleagues
scrutinized people aged 20-74 years who
died in England and
Wales between 1979-96 and for whom the
occupation
information recorded at death included
butcher and abattoir
worker, farmer and farm worker or veterinarian.
They found
that those few deaths (four farmers/farm
workers) that were
certified as due to Creutzfeldt-Jakob
disease were not higher
than might be expected by chance.
However, in an accompanying commentary
Dr Annick
Alpérovitch writes that these results
should be interpreted with
caution when using them to predict future
deaths from the
disease. She says that the incubation
period of
Creutzfeldt-Jakob is unknown and could
be anything from two
to more than 30 years. She concludes that
despite Aylin et al's
optimistic findings, this uncertainty
re-emphasises the need to
continue epidemiological surveillance
of Creutzfeldt-Jakob
disease in Europe.
Contact:
Dr Paul Aylin, Senior Clinical Lecturer,
Department of
Epidemiology and Public Health, Imperial
College of Medicine
at St Mary's, London
Email: p.aylin{at}ic.ac.uk
Dr Annick Alpérovitch, Head of Unit,
Institut National de la
Santé et de la Recherche Médicale,
Research Unit 360,
Epidemiologie des Maladies Neurologiques,
Hôpital la Salp tri re, Paris, France
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