These severe symptoms are due to the production of toxin by the invading germ. An antitoxin is available to neutralise this poison and the bacterium which causes diphtheria will usually respond to antibiotics.

Are your children up to date with all their immunisations? Perhaps I should also ask: are you, also up to date?

These injections can be given by your local doctor, or you might have them, free of charge, from your local council.

Do you have neighbors who are migrants and, speaking little English, may be unaware of the availability of immunisation in this country?

A neighborly and perhaps life-saving act would be to talk to them about the advantages of immunisation for their children. If it appears they do not understand you, it is very simple to pick up the telephone and call the Interpreter Service, which will translate your message at once.

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It is useful to think about cancer treatment as falling into two quite different groups. There are cancer treatments which can drastically change the natural course of the disease (that is, change the eventual outcome) and there are those which cannot. I he first group includes all treatments which offer the possibility of a complete and permanent cure. The second group consists of treatments which temporarily arrest the cancer but hold out no chance of an eventual cure. You should insist that your practitioner tells you whether or not it is possible that the proposed treatment will cure you.

This is not to say that treatments from the second group are not sometimes worth having. If your cancer is temporarily arrested, this may result in you feeling better and perhaps living longer. In deciding whether or not the inconveniences and discomforts of treatment are worth the trouble, you need to know what is on the other side of the scale—the potential advantage. Many people who would put up with very unpleasant treatment if there was a chance of being cured, wouldn’t consider having the same treatment for the sake of a few more months before still dying of cancer anyway.

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