Author: DB

The Weald is an area of upland that covers most of Kent. Looking north you can see the flat plain and then the sandstone ridge that runs east-west across the north part of Kent.

Iron-rich sandstone was mined in the High Weald, beginning in the Iron Age (around 2,500 years ago), while the surrounding woodlands provided charcoal for heating the furnaces. Then when the Romans invaded, they managed and expanded the iron industry to for their navy.

Then came the blast furnace – a technological advance in the late 1400s, NS the High Weald became the industrial centre of England. That went on until the ndustry declined in the 1700s, as ironmaking shifted northwards.

Started watching ‘I’m All Right Jack’ – 1959 film about labour relations – and the main character’s last name is Windrush. And MV Empire Windrush, arrived in 1948, with workers from Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago to help fill post-war UK labour shortages.

In a hospital in the UK, an honorary consultant is a clinical academic who is employed by a higher education institution or other organisation in a research and/or teaching capacity, and who also provides services for NHS patients at a consultant level in NHS facilities.

Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge is officially within Cambridge University Hospitals, so that would qualify as a higher education institution and an NHS hospital.

From The Week, 25 March 2023

Several cold and cough remedies have been withdrawn from the shelves owing to the risk they pose to people who are having major surgery. The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency said that it was acting in the light of evidence that taking pholcodine – an opioid cough suppressant – in the year before an operation, slightly increases the risk of anaphylaxis while under general anesthetic. Pharmacists were told to stop supplying drugs that contain pholcodine, which include some Day Nurse and Night Nurse capsules, and Boots’ own-brand cough syrup, immediately. However, officials stressed that the risk of anaphylaxis (also known as anaphylactic shock) during surgery remained very small Anyone who is scheduled to have surgery, and who has taken cough medicines in the past 12 months, is advised to inform their anaesthetist.

Comment

A year before surgery? Who would have thought an after effect could last that long.

Because of Lumpy skin disease, about 155,000 milk cattle have been slaughtered in India. This is one factor lowering milk production in the country. Other factors are poor crop yields for cattle feed, and farmers who exited cattle trading during Covid.

There are approximately 59.5 million head of cattle in India, so the number slaughtered because of the disease is only a quarter of one percent of the head of milk cattle.

Lumpy skin disease is a viral disease that affects cattle. It is transmitted by certain species of blood-feeding insects – flies, mosquitoes, and ticks. It causes fever, nodules on the skin and can lead to death, especially in animals that that have not previously been exposed to the virus.

A huarache is a Mexican sandal having the upper woven of interlaced leather strips.

The style has spread all over the world, but many shoes called huaraches have no interlaced strips at all, just the name.

Huarache is pronouced wuh·ra·chuh in British English and wuh·raa·chee in American English.