The dreadful peril of salty sausages

What utter nonsense. Our blood is roughly as salty as seawater so any idea that salt is a problem for us is just do-gooder claptrap. If we can't handle salt, we can't handle anything. People on salt restricted diets in fact die SOONER!

The iconic Aussie sausage sanger has been hauled over the coals for its "extreme salt content" in a new review showing the bread and everything inside it blows sodium guidelines. The product review found that one single sausage sandwich at a barbecue contains an adult's daily recommended dose of salt, and double that suggested for a child.

Researchers reviewed almost 200 sausage, bread and sauce products found on supermarket shelves and found the vast majority exceed acceptable salt levels set in the UK. Just two per cent of 44 sausage and hotdog brands and 16 per cent of the 43 white bread products met the guidelines. There were huge content variations across products, with some sausages containing over three times as much salt as others, the researchers said. Dozens of tomato and barbecue sauce brands also were checked, with more than half failing to make the cut.

"That's an incredible salt overload on its own, let alone with everything else you eat in a day," said Dr Bruce Neal, research director at The George Institute for International Health in Sydney. "I know it's an icon of the Australian diet but if people knew what they were eating and what it's doing to their health they might well think twice about it."

Anecdotal evidence suggests the average Australian adult consumes about nine grams of salt a day, well above the six grams recommended for good health. The new review suggests the six-gram threshold would be met by one sandwich, bringing with it increased health risks. "There's very clear evidence that eating more salt pushes your blood pressure up and that increases your risk of stroke and heart attack," Dr Neal said. "You're obviously not going to fall dead as you bite into the sausage but you're going to pay for it down the track."

The study was released today as part of a national campaign to cut salt levels in food at home and in restaurants and supermarkets by 25 per cent over five years. The Australian Food and Grocery Council has lent support to the campaign, and several big brands like Coles, Kellogg and Unilever have begun efforts to reduce salt content in products. "The government now needs to make salt a national health priority and lead negotiations on maximum salt targets for different products," said Dr Neal, who chairs the Australian Division of World Action on Salt and Health.

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Australian schools ignoring the Holocaust

The Left has now reverted to its prewar antisemitism so this omission from Left-dominated curricula is no surprise

An obsession with Australian history in curriculums has left students able to leave school without knowing that the Holocaust occurred. In a speech to high school principals, NSW education department head Michael Coutts-Trotter regretted the omission of the Holocaust from the state's mandatory history course. "I discovered for the first time about a month ago that you can get through compulsory schooling in NSW and never know that the Holocaust, the destruction of Jews in Europe, actually happened," he said. "You will know a lot about Don Bradman, and that's terrific. But I think to live life, you need to know the Holocaust happened."

The only mention of the Holocaust in the NSW syllabus for Years 7-10 is in the beginning, with the rationale for the course starting with a quotation from a Holocaust survivor about the importance of learning history. Compulsory history or social studies courses for schools in the other states also fail to mention the Holocaust.

A spokeswoman for the NSW Board of Studies said the history course for Years 7-10 had a lot to cover and the board did not want to overcrowd the curriculum. "There are opportunities to study the Holocaust and its consequences in a number of ways in both mandatory and elective history," she said.

Asked about those opportunities, the board pointed to the website of the Sydney Jewish Museum, which highlighted links to NSW syllabuses. The museum suggests it could be the subject of a site visit, compulsory for Year 9 students, and for Year 10 students looking at post-war Australia to the 1970s, it suggests examining the contribution of Jewish migrants.

The NSW Jewish Board of Deputies said yesterday it had been concerned for some time about the omission of the Holocaust from school history, and was working with the education department and the board of studies on the issue. Board chief executive Vic Alhadeff said the Jewish community regarded as essential the signposting across the curriculum of issues relating to discrimination, racism and genocide, including the Holocaust. "It is indeed possible to complete 13 years of schooling in NSW without having studied the Holocaust," he said. "This is a matter of great concern to the Jewish community, which works towards social cohesion as a matter of principle."

Wollongong University professor of history and politics Gregory Melleuish said the nation had become increasingly obsessed with Australian history over the past 10 or 15 years. "So we tend to look at things like World War I and II as Australia's involvement rather than what was at stake, why did it occur and what was going on," Professor Melleuish said. "Part of the problem of doing it from the point of view of Australia is students get the perspective that Australia saves the world."

Federal Education Minister Julia Gillard said the Government had asked the National Curriculum Board to develop a rigorous world-class curriculum for all students in four initial areas, including history.

Opposition education spokesman Tony Smith said it should not be possible for a student to leave school without being taught key events such as the two world wars, the Holocaust and the Cold War.

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Infection alert as dangerous superbugs hit South Australian public hospital

SUPERBUGS are on the rise at Royal Adelaide Hospital and some patients are carrying two different strains. Fifteen patients are now colonised with vancomycin-resistant enterococci, three times as many as there were in May. Four more patients have two different strains of antibiotic-resistant bugs, VRE as well as MRSA or golden staph. VRE has forced ward closures interstate, while golden staph kills about one person in five. SA Health confirmed the cases yesterday.

The other main metropolitan hospitals have no recorded cases of VRE, except the Queen Elizabeth Hospital, which has had one case. Communicable Disease Control Branch director Dr Ann Koehler said there were no ward closures in SA. "VRE and other bacteria such as MRSA are becoming more common causes of healthcare-associated infections in SA and other states across Australia," she said.

Dr Koehler said the department had infection control teams supporting hospital workers and patients, but emphasised visitors had a role to play in reducing infections. "We can't stress enough the importance of visitors to our hospitals to follow simple and effective hand hygiene steps to stop their spread," she said. SA Health has taken actions to control the infection spreading, such as:

DAILY meetings of a VRE response team, increased staff education and frequent communication with relevant staff.

ENHANCED cleaning in identified wards.

ENVIRONMENTAL monitoring and active surveillance of groups at risk of colonisation.

FOCUS on hand hygiene, and compliance with precautions such as single-use gloves and gowns.

VRE does not normally cause illness, so patients are said to be `colonised' rather than infected. It can be a risk to patients with compromised immune systems.

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Kevin Rudd's carbon war may be good politics for him

Both the following speakers are Australian politicians. One is announcing an increase in the war effort in World War II. The other is talking about climate change. Spot who's who.

"No longer can this nation rest upon the basis of the ordinary way of life, of conducting business in the way we did, of working the way to which we have been accustomed. The [current crisis] has put an end to that period in our history."

"The penalty clause for us not acting is almost unthinkable . This country is on the verge of cataclysmic times, such as the human collective experience has never known."

You can probably tell the difference because of the hysteria in the second quotation. Prime minister John Curtin and his generation did not do hysteria, at least not in public. Senator Bob Brown (in the second quotation, from his address to the National Press Club this week) and many of his colleagues don't only use hysteria, they get elected on its back.

The rhetoric surrounding global warming is drawing increasingly on notions of religion and war. As has been often noted, environmentalism in its more extreme forms is deeply appealing to those of us with a need to believe in something, but who have decided that science has killed off Christianity. Brown, with his apocalyptic talk of cataclysm, exemplifies this. Ross Garnaut's use of the term "diabolical" when presenting his report pressed the same button. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse certainly get a good gallop in the report, with predictions of war (geopolitical instability), famine (collapse of agricultural productivity), pestilence (dengue fever) and death (all the above, plus heat-related fatalities).

ABC TV's political editor, Chris Uhlmann, picked up on the religious element in the carbon crusade on Insiders last Sunday. Speaking, he said, as a former seminarian, "one of the things that strikes me most strongly about this debate is its theological nature - and that's essentially that we have sinned against the environment, that we are now being punished and the only way we can escape that punishment is to wear a hair shirt for the rest of our lives".

Uhlmann said that while he was willing to "sign up" to climate change, "I do not believe every proposition that's been put. When the weather department can tell me what the weather is going to be like next Friday with any certainty and Treasury can get within a million dollars of what the surplus is going to be next year, I'll believe an economic model that marries those two things and casts them out over 100 years. I'll make one prediction - that whatever number Garnaut puts on where we'll be in 2100, it will be at least a trillion dollars either way wrong."

Turning from religion to war, it's not hard to see why politicians might be attracted to the military connotations of a carbon crusade. Wars, after all, are usually good for democratic governments, who see their support go up in the early stages of the conflict because in the public mind the ruling party's interests have become the same (at least temporarily) as the nation's. This phenomenon has been widely noted, and forms the basis for the rather splendid novel American Hero by Larry Beinhart, and the 1997 film version, Wag the Dog.

Wars have proved so useful in attracting or maintaining voter support that the war model has been extended into non-military zones by politicians around the world, with inventions such as the "war on drugs" and the "war on obesity". But the war approach, whether military or not, presents dangers. John Howard in his "war on terror" took Australia into Iraq in search of weapons of mass destruction that proved to be non-existent. Time will tell whether Kevin Rudd, in his "war on carbon", ends up harming another nation (in this case our own, by damaging the economy) in pursuit of another illusory danger.

Still, there will be lots of press releases and photo stops along the way, and Rudd will get the opportunity to talk at plenty of televised gatherings of international leaders, something he seems to enjoy very much. Already you can see the heads of powerful nations giving Rudd that nervous look Howard attracted at these gatherings. He, too, would approach them with one hand ready to pat them on the back, the other grasping theirs in a remorseless handshake for as long as the cameras were pointing the right way.

While it might be argued that Iraq got Howard in the end, it provided him with a lot of benefits along the way, and not just photo sessions with the American president. It made Australian politics and the thousands who earn their living from it (yes, including journalists and commentators) feel important. Another useful result was that many on the right felt it was inappropriate to criticise the government for other things (such as its betrayal of much of the liberal policy agenda) in a time of crisis. And the left became so excited they became obsessed by minor issues such as David Hicks, instead of domestic matters of substance.

The benefits of the Iraq war couldn't last for ever, of course. But they helped John Howard have one of the longest runs of any Australia prime minister. If carefully managed, the war on carbon could do the same for Kevin Rudd.

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