French press review 30 August 2011

Athough there is no one theme dominating the front pages, several papers darken our day with health scares.

Aujourd’hui en France leads with a story on a rogue bacteria, resistant to antibiotics, which has killed three people at a hospital near Paris. It’s known as Klebsiella pneumonia and has doctors baffled.

The hospital in question has recalled 180 patients to confirm that they are not infected. The fear, of course, is that unless the virus is contained it will spread like wild-fire.

Le Figaro reminds us that the abuse of antibiotics is dangerous especially for children who, it seems, are taking far too many. On average, the paper says, a child in a developed country such as France receives between ten and twenty treatments with antibiotics  before he or she reaches the age of 18.

Why is this risky. Evidently, the consumption of antibiotics increases the likelihood of obesity which is already a growing problem - so to speak - diabetes and assorted cancers.

It appears that the drug can upset the workings of the intestines. This, says a specialist of the celebrated Necker children’s hospital in Paris, plays a key role in preventing health problems.

All this aside from the fact that the over-use of antibiotics can make them ineffective.

So. What’s the message? Don’t keep taking the medicine? I’m not sure.

Les Echos reports at length on a warning from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization that bird flu could be about to make a come-back. The last outbreak five years ago prompted the slaughter of 400 million fowl and cost an estimated 14 billion euros.

Now, it seems, the virus is at large again, in South East Asia at least, among chickens and wild birds. This month in Cambodia eight people were infected and all died.

What’s more, countries newly contaminated with the virus include Bulgaria, Romania, Israel and Palestine.

The news begs the question of how we fight the virus. With antibiotics?

La Croix is worried about alcohol particularly young people's drinking in the streets. It reports that hospitals are admitting under sixteen year olds drunk after a day’s boozing on the streets. Rest assured that the trend has not gone unnoticed.

La Croix says that increasing numbers of local authorities have or are seeking to outlaw the sale of take-away liquor and public drinking. How effective these measures will be is hard to evaluate, the paper concludes, rather weakly.

Dependence on nuclear power to generate electricity might also be regarded as a health issue. It certainly is in Japan where reactor meltdowns following the tsunami and earthquake spilled radioactivity into the water and wider environment.

Not here in France, however. Libération pictures the prime Minister and other luminaries in front of a giant cooling tower in south eastern France. The site of four of the country’s fifty-eight nuclear reactors.

The prime minister reaffirmed the country’s commitment to nuclear power and, equally important, what he called the continuous and demanding commitment to safety.

La Rentrée, which translates as  back-to-work and back-to-school in September after the long summer idyll, gets some attention.

Aujourd’hui en France reports that the costs in large part of equipping children for school will be three per cent higher than last year. The paper devotes two inside pages to the issue of how to economize.

The paper offers five pieces of advice. Shop around. Learn to say no if your child nags you for the latest fashion items. Buy items that are durable and ecologically friendly, for example pens made from recycled materials. Go on-line to swap or sell unwanted items. Get together with other parents to buy in bulk.

Sounds like good advice for everyone, with or without school-age infants.

Libération is more concerned about the cutting of the number of teachers in French schools. La Rentrée will see a reduction of 16,000. Sarkozyists - that’s to say the French president’s henchmen - claim it will be “painless”. Naturally, left-leaning Libération doubts this. Standards will fall, the paper laments.

It also reminds us of the words of President Sarkozy earlier this year - It is easy to promise more classes and so forth. But it is the French who pay. Indeed . . .