Elections, quitting and crazy headlines.

I tried to keep the political stuff away for a while because it was overpowering everything else, but allow me this small indulgence at the end of the conference just to get me through the cold, hard winter.

There's been two major things happen at the conference which people outside Labour might actually care about. Obviously, the first is that Ed Miliband is the new leader, as I've already talked about. Second, is that a few days later David decided the best thing for him and the party would be to leave front line politics.

For all you Daily Mail readers (not that I think anyone who reads it is capable of logging onto a computer and pressing the right keys to get here) the scandal of the week is that Ed Miliband is living with his partner and their child... out of wedlock! Shock and horror should follow this startling revelation, if you live in the 1800's that is. If that's the best they've got (other than the fact he's not signed the birth certificate yet.. again, shock and horror) then I'd say he's done a decent job so far.

On the whole David issue, clearly I'm disappointed he's leaving seeing as I voted for him as leader, but I think he probably made the right decision out of two bad options. If he'd of stayed we'd have spent the entirety of Ed's leadership with the media scanning every word he and David muttered looking for any sign of a none existent split and it would have become Brown and Blair Mark II. This way he can give his brother the room he needs to take on the government and become the next Prime Minister.

As for Ed himself, whilst my view on who would be the best leader hasn't changed in the last two days, I think he will be more than competent to lead Labour back into power. He's closer to me on policy than David, so if he can get his presentation skills up to the mark then he could be very good indeed. For those who don't think he'll be able to cut it in an election with the others, look at how he overturned the massive gap between him and his brother who was the  clear favourite at the start. He knows how to win people over, and that will come in handy.

I thought I'd take a look at some of the ways the right wing press have tried to define him over the last few days:

• The Sun decided that whilst it couldn't criticise the contents of his speech, they disliked the order. “But how will putting gender equality before thanking Our Heroes bring him closer to voters?” Its the first time I've ever seen anyone claim the order of a speech shows your true feelings, I'll bear that one in mind.
• The Telegraph decided they'd completely ignore the results and imagine what they want. “Miliband E and his supporters in the parliamentary party are aware of how exposed he is because of the mark of the unions upon him, and his lack of support in the old shadow cabinet and scarcity of support in the Commons.” I wouldn't say 47% showed a lack of support, especially considering he got most of his brothers second preferences. Would they claim David had a lack of support because he only got 53% of MP's?
• Again at the Telegraph they decided to stoop to lying in order to make their point more valid. “It’s hard to occupy the moral high ground when you’ve been pushed across the finishing line by trade union bosses.” Of course, anyone with any nous will have checked and realised that the union bosses got one vote each, hardly enough to push him over the line. Seeing as block voting was abolished, the union leaders can't decide who their members voted for, meaning those who voted for Ed were mostly those most communist, left wing of beasts, ordinary working people.

The 'Red Ed' tag is so hilariously wide of the mark it's not even worth going over again. The idea that Ed is much more left wing than any of the other candidates is just plain wrong.

Back from the Dead

This is about Horizon from last night, it had some incredible stuff, definitely worth an iPlayer visit if you like what you read.

Humans are very intricate machines, but that means we're also very sensitive to change. In terms of temperature, we vary very little from our standard 37 degrees celsius. If we dropped 1 degree it would be painful, about four or five and you'd feel pretty woozy before passing out. Stay there, and you'd die. Which makes it all the more strange that a woman whose core temperature fell to 14 degrees, a drop of 23, managed to survive for around 2 hours with no heart beat. She had no pumping blood, no breathing, not even any signs of brain activity. By any conventional measure she was dead. But a few months later she was alive, exactly as healthy as she was before.

Now is it just me in my little nerdy medical school bubble that thinks that's pretty cool?

It was precisely because she was so much colder than she should have been that she survived. Without blood the brain would usually starve and die irreversibly, but she was so cold that the brain stopped functioning before it had a chance to starve. It essentially went into hibernation, ready to be warmed back up again. As soon as she started getting heat back, her heart started beating and her brain started again. She wasn't back to normal in a day, or even a week, but the fact she recovered at all is incredible enough.

That might have just been sheer luck, but now hospitals can use the same principle to operate on people who would otherwise have been consigned to death. They can stop the blood flow without starving the organs, something you can't do any other way.

With the patient on the operating table they cool them down to around 18 degrees by taking out the warm blood, passing it through a freezing heart lung machine, and putting it back in. Then, slightly less high tech, they surround them with ice packs. They can then shut down the heart lung machine, have no pumping blood getting in the way, but rather than the patient dying in a matter of seconds, they have about an hour in which to work. Obviously, they can't push the window much further because no-one is going to risk a patient just to prove a point.

Then there's the even more exciting use for the idea. Most young deaths are caused by trauma, and in trauma cases (hit by a car, stabbings etc.) there's a very short amount of time to help someone before its too late. But what if you could give someone an extra hour, how much more help could you get then?

When you get to A&E for a very serious case and you're heart isn't beating, one of the things they may well do is open up your chest to massage your heart. Some doctors figured, whilst we're in there, why not infuse the blood with freezing cold saline to drop their body temperature rapidly. If they could preserve the brain for long enough, they'd have more chance to repair the damage. In an environment where every second counts, having an extra hour would be worth more than words could say. Millions of people could be saved.

Then just as if we hadn't had enough, there was what for me showed the future of medicine. People always say its genetics and I'm sure that will transform it, but this could be huge. Its just an idea at the moment, but when its fleshed out it could be incredible.

A researcher showed that cells don't automatically die when starved, they die once they start getting oxygen again because they can no longer perform their old job. Once a cell becomes useless it essentially commits suicide. Now this works well in the human body, keeping us refreshed, but obviously if too many cells decide enough's enough at the same time then you're in trouble.

What this guy found is that a certain part of the cell, the mitochondria, controls the cell death, and it might be able to be interfered with. If you could stop the cell committing suicide, you could essentially put someone into limbo, giving you enough time to repair them. The exciting thing would be, if this could be given as some form of injection or infusion, you'd have no need to be in an operating room to be frozen. You could get to a stage where paramedics in the field could hit the pause button on you and whizz you back to the hospital without you dying a little more every second.

If you can stop cells dying, the possibilities for how you could use it in medicine are truly endless. Survival rates for all sorts of things would rocket immediately. Death wouldn't be inevitable in any situation. We're not even close to having it ready right now. But at least we know its a possibility, and one day we might make it.

Saviour Siblings

I've had far too many political posts recently for a blog that was originally meant to have a lot of health care related posts, so I thought I'd redress the balance.

I saw a piece on the BBC about whether people should be able to use IVF to have children who could then be a bone marrow (or blood stem cell) donor for a sick brother or sister. As you might imagine, the idea of having another child, and 'designing' them to ensure they could save a sibling is pretty controversial.

At first, the idea of having a child to use them for their marrow seems very questionable indeed and possibly the start of a slippery slope towards a society where parents see one child simply as an organ donor for others. Similar to the premise behind the film 'The Island', but maybe without the Hollywood drama of it all. I thought it was a dangerous idea when I first looked at it, but I've come around to it.

To understand, it's probably easier to go through how it might work in an example. Many young children are born with life-threatening and degenerative conditions, where the only hope of cure is a tissue matched donor. The best hope of a match is a close blood relative, so brothers, sisters and parents are your best bets. But what to do if the parents and any older siblings aren't matches?

At the moment doctors can advise that if the parents had another child, there is a chance that they could be a match. There's nothing controversial about just having another child, it may well have been in the couple's plans already. But with many of these blood disorders the chances of any sibling being a close enough match are only 25%. Couple that with the fact there's a 25% chance they will have the same disease as the already ill child and it means that having another child will only solve the problem 19% of the time. Quite a low chance for such a big decision.

Depending on whether the family think they could cope with another child with this illness there are either going to be several pregnancies or several terminations before any hope of saving the elder child is borne out. Either way, it's a horrific mental strain on the mother.

There is another option.

Modern IVF allows for the option of pre-selecting embryos which will be tissue matched for a sibling. You can guarantee that pregnancy will mean both a healthy child, and a child that is able to do something to save the life of their sibling. No-one is talking about producing a 'perfect child', simply one which is going to be able to live a full life.

It makes both moral sense, and economic sense for the NHS to fund it. It may seem insensitive to talk about money when looking at life and death, but like it or not you need to have money to save lives, and the more cost effective the NHS can be, the more lives can ultimately be saved.

The total cost of one cycle of IVF, plus all the other tests and tissue matching etc. costs less than £10,000. Compare that to the cost of refusing to fund this IVF and caring for a child with an incurable illness for the rest of their lives, paying for drugs and constant care and support. It could easily run into the millions.

We should be careful about taking blind leaps into wherever science opens up opportunities. But we shouldn't let that fear stop us saving the lives of people for whom the only hope is the cutting edge. There is no reason why the NHS shouldn't be funding these 'saviour siblings', especially in a country where genetics is so highly regulated.

Creating a 'perfect child' is morally questionable. Creating one free of deadly illness with the ability to save a sibling isn't.

Tah-dah, here's our new leader.

So, yeah, Labour has Ed Miliband as its brand new leader, in an insanely close election.

It's been a very long campaign, and it's kind of nice for it all to be over. I didn't get who I voted for, as some might have noticed, but I'm more than happy for Ed to be leader. I had David as first choice, and as he walked out with a beaming smile I was sure he'd won it. Never play poker against a Miliband is the lesson for everyone.

Already I hear the cries of 'Red Ed' from ConservativeHome which is frankly hilarious. The fact that he overwhelmingly won the union vote is completely inconsequential. First, the party was founded by unions and exists to support the working man so it's only right they have a third of the vote, are people suggesting union members are all communist monsters?

Second, there is no block voting, which means the unions that voted for Ed are individual members. Teachers, nurses, police, shop workers.. normal people. And let's remember, Tony Blair won a massive union majority in his election, and I don't think there'd be many calling him 'Red Tony'. The idea that Conservative's are happy and we've shot ourselves in the foot by not electing the one they thought was better would be laughable if it wasn't meant to be a serious argument. They were hardly likely to come out and say 'Oh shit, the good one won, now we're screwed!' were they!

The idea that Ed is a far left leader is plain wrong. His ideas are progressive, they are centre-left, but a 'lurch to the left' this is not.

The highest form of flattery - When your opponents feel the need to attack you with nothing but ideological names.

The great thing about this contest is that we haven't completely destroyed ourselves, which was a real possibility if people had resorted to back stabbing and massive ideological arguments which tore the party in two. And the fact that any of the four losers could easily work in the shadow cabinet without any trouble is a testament to how Labour has stopped the back-biting of the past.

Now we have to wait to see who's going to be in the shadow cabinet. I think the key ones to watch will be whether Ed Balls gets his Shadow Chancellor spot and where David slots in. I used to think it was probably wiser to keep Balls away from the chancellorship but have completely changed my mind after the last few weeks where he's impressed so many people with his economic intelligence and different vision for the future. Ed was right in his victory speech, Ed Balls has ripped Michael Gove to shreds in the past months, and will beat Osborne to a bloody pulp.

As for David, he's clearly more than qualified for any of the top jobs. He might want to keep his foreign office mandate, or he may want to go for another top job, maybe Home Secretary?

It's the end of one contest, and the beginning of trying to win an election.

Pipe down Lansley, you're a nuisance.

You'll be glad to know I'm not a raving nutbag. I thought maybe my fears about the privatisation of the NHS by Lansley's reorganisation might just be paranoia, but it looks like the very people he's trying to snuggle up to agree with me on this one.

This is about his plans to put the job of arranging budgets into the hands of GPs (I wrote about why it could mean the privatisation of the NHS here). Now, the Royal College of GPs have released the findings from their consultation with members, and they aren't too promising for Lansley.

Here's a few of their concerns, I'll simplify them to save space, but I'm not twisting anything they said, it's here for all to see if you fancy checking up on me:

- Rather than being efficiency savings, money and manpower will move away from clinical care and be wasted in resource management.

- Health inequality will increase as different areas have different services.

- GPs will be blamed for cuts in services as they're seen as the ones in charge of the purse-strings, which will damage the crucial doctor-patient bond.

- GPs don't have enough time to take on this additional role.

And most importantly of all so I'll quote it word for word -

"The reforms open a door to increased involvement of the for-profit private sector in the NHS, and tax-payer's money will be diverted into private companies and their shareholders. This could be seen as the break up of the NHS with some private companies ready to take over the provision of services."

Yeah, like I said, not just me.

So after his reforms have been met by a less than rapturous welcome and been seen as privatising the NHS,  he's been completely shot down over his plans to shut down NHS Direct, and insulted Jamie Oliver's healthy eating campaign based on completely inaccurate data, I'm forced to ask, what the hell can this man actually do right?

I'll say it once more. We like our NHS being public. We like the fact that everyone is treated equal based on need rather than wealth. We like the fact that we have one of the best healthcare systems in the world. Leave it alone you joke of a government!