Health Fears As Gp Surgeries ‘Refuse’ To Register Asylum Seekers Some GP surgeries are refusing to register asylum seekers and refugees - even though they are eligible for treatment under NHS guidelines, according to a charity. Two-fifths of patients that Doctors of the World attempted to register were refused at GP surgeries in England. The vast majority of asylum seekers and refugees were rejected because they did not have ID or a proof of address, but these documents are not legally required to sign up for primary healthcare. Meanwhile, 13% were turned away specifically
because of their immigration status. Primary care in England is free to almost everyone, and GP surgeries are crucial to ease pressure on A&E departments and prevent the spread of disease. Tuberculosis expert Dr Al Story thinks the situation poses a real risk to public health. He said: “If people get turned away from primary care and they are symptomatic and they could have tuberculosis, the consequences of that is transmission in the community, so it’s in all our interests to diagnose TB early.”
Microsoft And Facebook Team Up To Lay Internet Cable Across The Atlantic Microsoft and Facebook on Thursday announced they will work together to lay a high-speed Internet cable across the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. A new, sub-sea “MAREA” cable was expected to be completed by late 2017, with the aim of meeting growing demand by the tech companies’ customers for fast, reliable data connections. MAREA will be the highest-capacity sub-sea cable crossing the Atlantic, with an expected capacity of some 160 terabytes of data per second of data, according to the companies. Microsoft aims for the cable — dubbed MAREA
(Spanish for “tide”) — to help maintain and expand services for its cloud products, such as Bing, Office 365, Skype, Xbox Live and Microsoft Azure. Facebook, with 1.6 billion people on its social network, will use the cable to push vast amounts of information between its expanding network of data centres. It’ll also deal with data linked to Instagram and WhatsApp, two hugely popular apps that Facebook now owns. The 6,600 kilometre cable system will be the first connecting the US and southern Europe, funning from Virginia to Bilbao, Spain.
Action To Stop Smoking The UK has become the second country in the world to implement standardised tobacco packaging. It welcomes this new legislation which is a landmark policy for tobacco control and calls on countries across the world to follow the UK in implementing standardised packaging. Smoking remains the single biggest cause of
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preventable deaths in the district and is a threat to young people in particular. Two thirds of smokers start before the age of 18 and in 2013. Standardised packaging will protect our young people from taking up this lethal habit by making packs less appealing and health warnings more effective.
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