More rubbish about booze, fags and fast food.

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No time to comment in detail on this utter drivel from my local newspaper:

Smoking, drinking and obesity are now causing a massive £80 million a year drain on health services in the Bradford district. The cost of treating smoking-related conditions alone could be as high as £50m from hard-pressed NHS budgets.

The figures are apparently taken from the Annual Report of the Director of Public Health (described by one Council colleague as a mystery figure who we never see and certainly never get a chance to question). So no surprise then that it's a pack of unsupported nonsense based not on any real study but on 'back-of-the envelope' calculations derived from unsupported and unresearched national figures.

The newspaper report contains a set of largely unrelated figures presented as some kind of "evidence" to support the health fascists' contention that drinking, smoking and "obesity" are the big problems facing the City when the truth is that poor housing, inadequate heating and poor diet (not too much food but not a balanced diet) are the big killers. All this can be easily found out from figures published by the Health Service.

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