Mea Culpa: Setting a bad example for the loved ones

In an article about the bad example shown by Jose Mourinho, the football manager, who confronted and abused a referee in a car park after a game, we said: “A survey by the BBC of almost 1,000 members of the Referees’ Association found that more than 30 per cent said they had come in for physical abuse from spectators. A similar number said they had been threatened with violence against them or a loved one.”

I suspect that was the phrasing used in the survey, and it was certainly the phrase used by the BBC in reporting its finding, but I think “loved one” is twee and distracting. I realise this is a personal preference, and in some cases it is used to include partners and close friends, but in this case we could have said “against them or their family”.

Sick bean-counters: Our analysis of the potential use of injections that suppress the appetite in an effort to make the workforce healthier and more productive included this sentence: “The Treasury has traditionally been sceptical about investing in health prevention.” Thanks to Roger Thetford for pointing out that we did not mean to praise the Treasury for refusing to make people ill. We meant “preventative healthcare”, or similar words meaning “illness prevention”, which is the opposite of what we said.

Population matters: A “news in brief” item about an increase in syphilis and gonorrhoea cases (at least we spelt them correctly) said that the number of syphilis cases was the highest since 1948, and the number of gonorrhoea cases was “the highest number in any one year since records began in 1918, according to the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA)”.

Thanks to John Armitage for pointing out that these comparisons are useless, because they fail to take account of the growth in population since either of those years. In 1918 the UK population was 40 million, and in 1948 it was 48 million, as opposed to 67 million now. The numbers should have been reported as cases per 100,000 to allow a like-for-like comparison.

Unfortunately, those were the only facts put out by the UKHSA. We should either have asked for more information, or dropped the references to dates 75 and 105 years ago. The main point of the story was that syphilis diagnoses were up 8 per cent between 2019 and 2022, and gonorrhoea diagnoses up 16 per cent – increases large enough not to be much affected by the change in population over that period.

Going into battle: Another health-related “news in brief” story, about yoga for cancer patients, referred to “the toxicities of anti-cancer drugs, affecting the survival of individuals battling the condition”. First, that should be “toxicity”, as we are talking about a general property of anti-cancer drugs. Second, why “individuals” rather than “people” or “patients”?

Third, our style is to avoid describing illness as a “battle” – a term that implies that those who die have failed because they haven’t fought hard enough. And fourth, I don’t think cancer is a “condition”, which is in any case a weak and vague word. We could have just said “affecting the survival of patients”. Other than that, not much wrong with that half-sentence.

And finally: Any more. Two words. That is all.