A Happy New Year to you. I hope that 2015 brings you all you wish for yourself. Certainly toothbrush companies must be off to a high flying start.
Last year I reported how the humble oral hygiene aid had been pressed into service in the process of cleaning centuries of grime from the ancient Coliseum in Rome by painstaking brushing on the stone carvings. Now the bristles have been brought right up to date with a ‘simple blue toothbrush’ being one of the makeshift tools used to clean metal shavings from a bolt socket of a critical power-switching box on the outside of the International Space Station.
While the gladiators in ancient Rome would probably have had little time for matters as seemingly trivial as tooth brushing, astronauts are fully appraised of the importance of plaque control during long missions away from Earth. In space no one can hear you rinse and spit!
Walking mags
Ever puzzled why dentists always get joshed about old magazines in their waiting rooms?
Well the wait for this answer is over thanks to new research from New Zealand where a study looked into the question of why publications in waiting rooms are often out-of-date. And unlike toothbrushes, it doesn’t involve rocket science. Predictably, the more recent the issue date, the more likely it is to be taken by patients. Researchers at the University of Auckland found that GP waiting rooms generally contain older magazines no matter how hard staff try to keep supplies up to date and the magazines that get left behind are not only out of date, but also far more serious such as National Geographic or the Economist.
Researchers monitored 87 magazines in a practice between April and May but the study had to be terminated after 31 days when all of the gossipy magazines had been taken and only old editions of publications like Time magazine remained. The study concludes that practices hoping to save money by replacing magazines less often, should ‘supply old copies of non-gossipy magazines’. Hello!
Journalists not to blame?
And staying with publications, journalists may not be wholly responsible for ‘overhyped’ science stories, a study published in the BMJ has suggested. Researchers for the study, led by Cardiff University, analysed 462 press releases issued by 20 leading British universities to see how the claims matched up to the original scientific paper they were designed to publicise.
The researchers also analysed the corresponding press coverage to see how often the exaggerated claims in press releases made it into any of 12 major news outlets, including the main national newspaper broadsheets and tabloids, BBC online and the Reuters news agency. They found that 40 per cent of press releases contained exaggerated health advice, 33 per cent contained exaggerated claims about cause-and-effect, and 36 per cent contained exaggerated inferences to humans from research on animals, compared with the corresponding peer reviewed journal articles.
So, a good year already for toothbrushes, magazine publishers and journalists – and for dentists?