In the top news story this week, research has shown that bariatric surgery can make savings for the NHS by preventing medical complications and improving quality of life.
The Guardian reports a new study found two thirds of patients diagnosed with type-2 diabetes who had surgery exhibited no symptoms of the disease two years late.
Study author Richard Welbourn, consultant surgeon and chair of the National Bariatric Surgery Registry (NBSR) said: ‘Severe and complex obesity is a lifelong condition associated with many major medical conditions, the cost of which threatens to bankrupt the NHS.’
And the BBC reports that an advert on e-cigarettes will be shown on television for the first time later tonight after an ‘overnight’ legal change.
The advert will air after the watershed, but critics warn that the advert could normalise smoking imagery and that the adverts ‘sexualise’ e-cigarettes to non-smokers.
Cigarette advertising was banned on television in 1965, and the Committee of Advertising Practice has ruled that adverts must not show tobacco in ‘a positive light’.
And finally a 150 year old, 60ft high Australian monument has been sheathed in a lurid-pink rubber condom as part of a new campaign to promote HIV awareness and safe sex amongst gay men.
The Independent reports the heritage –listed obelisk, in Sydney’s Hyde Park has attracted some criticism for its use in a park where children play, but reception has been largely positive.
Chief executive of health promotion organisation Acon, Nicholas Parkhill, said the high traffic area was deliberately chosen to turn lots of heads and raise a few eyebrows’.
