Prescription charges fall particularly heavily on those who just fail to meet the exemption criteria. Prescription charges are to be increased to £6.50 per item by John Reid, the Secretary of State for Health, a move which risks undermining Labour’s pre-election attack on the Tories over health charges.
The 10p rise, to be announced on Thursday by Mr Reid, will take the total increase to 70p since Labour came to power in 1997 and leaves the Government open to a charge of hypocrisy.Paul Burstow, the Liberal Democrat health spokesman, said: “This increase in prescription charges is a tax on ill-health. We are not changing the advice to parents – it is very important that babies are kept warm – but this does turn conventional wisdom on its head.”The technique is being developed, and a new study is underway at Hammersmith Hospital, London, involving whole body cooling for babies starved of oxygen at birth. “There is reason to think the therapy could be improved further,” says Professor Wyatt. “In the trial, there were delays with some babies before cooling could begin. If we started cooling sooner after birth we might get more of a therapeutic effect. We also don’t know what the optimum temperature is – it is likely to be lower than we have tried so far.

The technique we have used creates a temperature gradient across the brain in which the surface is cooler and the centre warmer. “For the last 40 years it has been paediatric orthodoxy that babies should be kept warm. All the textbooks were filled with the dire hazards of our hypothesis. So we only included babies in the trial who had significant abnormalities,” says Professor Wyatt.When the babies were examined 18 months later, the results showed that the proportion who had suffered severe disability or death was reduced from 66 per cent in the group given conventional care to 55 per cent in those treated with the cooling cap. This was improved to 48 per cent, achieving statistical significance, when the one-fifth most severely affected babies, who had least chance of recovery, were excluded.”It confirms what we would expect, that some babies are so severely affected that therapy can’t help them. For fans of The Avengers, it’s an Emma Peel of a car, beautiful, highly skilled, gorgeous to be seen with, and just slightly ironic about its amazing cleverness.

The rest of the world can queue up for the New Lightweight Coup?ater this year I’ll stick with my luxury ride All I need is £56,720 to buy the last XK8.. Automatic “rain-sensitive wipers” start up at the first drops from the sky, and light-sensitive xenon headlights come on by themselves at dusk.It doesn’t so much pamper the driver with its arsenal of special effects, as attend on him like a super-competent, super-athletic girl assistant. It corners like a flowing stream, accelerates like the most graceful thoroughbred at Aintree, glides away from the lights like an Olympic figure skater.There’s an adaptive cruise control to maintain your distance from the car in front, an automatic speed-limiter, a reverse-gear “reverse proximity warning” which beeps like a neurotic maiden aunt as you steer backwards into a wall. Your head brushes against the canvas roof so that you feel you’re in a collapsing tent. But what the hell? You don’t get a convertible and then admire the roof.