For leisure activities 99 per cent of adults had watched television in the four weeks before being

For leisure activities 99 per cent of adults had watched television in the four weeks before being interviewed. Women, in similar circumstances, were three times as likely to smoke.However, the reverse is true when it comes to drinking where professional women were three times as likely to drink more than the recommended levels than those living in unskilled households.Young women also showed a marked tendency to drink more than the suggested levels with a quarter of 18- to 24-year-olds drinking more than 14 units a week compared to one in seven in 1984.Men drink on average 16 units per week compared to 6.3 for women. However, they did smoke fewer cigarettes, with 16- to 19-year-old men smokers averaging 82 cigarettes per week and women 68, compared to 111 and 96 for men and women smokers overall.Social class plays a large part in determining how likely you are to smoke. The ONS found that men in households headed by someone in unskilled manual work were four times as likely to smoke as men from a professional household. Teenagers were most likely to smoke high-tar cigarettes with 79 per cent of men and 66 per cent of women doing so.

According to the General Household Survey, compiled by the Office for National Statistics (ONS), one in eight young men aged 18 to 24 drinks on average more than 50 units of alcohol a week when the Department of Health recommends no more than 21 units.
The proportion of young men drinking more than the recommended limit reached its highest level in 1996, with more than four in ten men exceeding the limit.Young men were also more likely than any other age group to smoke In 1996 43 per cent smoked compared to 37 per cent in 1988. As soon as we knew of them and asked for them [following the CND report], we got them.”. MORE young men are turning to unhealthy pub-based lifestyles, drinking and smoking too much and seeing games of snooker or pool as their favourite exercise. Professor Bridges, of Sussex University, said: “The MoD is a major player in the nuclear field and its responsibility is no less than other sectors of the nuclear industry to make relevant information available.”The MoD had been “caught in an impasse” because the relevant documents were classified secret. “They couldn’t tell us they existed, and because we didn’t know they existed, we couldn’t ask for them. Other counties, including Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire, also have high rates which are unexplained. Although the report confirms the earlier finding, that radioactivity in the area cannot explain the cancer cluster, the committee remains concerned that the public will lose trust in its work unless organisations can be depended on to co-operate.

Levels of radioactivity recorded by the MoD in 1961 were no higher than known releases from the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment at Aldermaston studied in the committee’s earlier report and were too low to account for the excess childhood cancers.Professor Bridges said the excess of cancers was not unique to west Berkshire. It concluded that the radioactivity from these sources was too low but did not know about the possibility of a release from the airbase.In 1996 the Department of Health asked the committee to return to the issue after the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament said, on the basis of a secret MoD report, that a nuclear weapon had been damaged in the Greenham Common accident, releasing a burst of radiation.In today’s report the committee says there is nothing to suggest, on the basis of the information supplied to it, that a nuclear weapon was involved in the accident, in which an aircraft preparing for an emergency landing dumped fuel in the wrong part of the airbase, destroying the B- 47 on the ground. That investigation considered whether the rate could have been caused by radioactivity released from the three nuclear establishments in the area, at Aldermaston, Burghfield and Harwell. The public would expect it to change.”The latest case of non- disclosure meant a 1989 investigation by the committee into the high incidence of childhood cancer in west Berkshire had to be reopened. Professor Bridges said: “I hope the climate of disclosure is changing.

Members of the Committee on Medical Aspects of Radiation in the Environment (Comare) were “quite angry and disturbed” when they found that details of the 1958 accident, in which a B-47 bomber was destroyed, had been concealed, Professor Bryn Bridges, the chairman, said yesterday.
It is the third time the committee has been lied to since it was established a decade ago to advise the Government on the effects of radiation in the environment. He received strong backing from the Deputy Prime Minister, John Prescott, who welcomed Mr Swift’s action.Industry observers say the plans contain little new money for the network.. VITAL information about the release of radioactivity after an accident at Greenham Common airbase was withheld by the Ministry of Defence from the government-appointed committee set up to investigate it, a report says today. Mr Kelly also denies dishonestly handling them.The case continues.. PLANS for a 10-year, pounds 17bn spending spree on the nation’s railways were attacked by the industry regulator yesterday, writes Randeep Ramesh.

Railtrack, which owns Britain’s stations and signalling, published its spending programme, which it described as “a blueprint to regenerate the railways”.
But John Swift QC, the regulator, said the programme contained “very few firm commitments to deliver significant improvements” for passengers and freight customers, and he launched an immediate investigation into the “commitments” to passengers.Mr Swift said he would find out if train operators thought Railtrack’s management statement met their needs. AN ARTIST “trying to understand death” rode a motorcycle through London carrying stolen bits of dead bodies wrapped in bin-liners inside a rucksack, a court was told yesterday. Anthony-Noel Kelly, 42, a former butcher, who made silver and gold-coloured sculptures from the parts, told police the largest and heaviest was the head and torso of an old man.
Fortunately, preserving fluid they had floated in for at least 18 years at the Royal College of Surgeons’ headquarters had kept them “limp”, and he had no trouble folding the arms across the chest for easier transportation, Southwark Crown Court in south London was told.Mr Kelly, of Clapham, south London, and Niel Lindsay, 25, a former trainee lab technician from Stoke Newington, north London, both deny stealing parts of dead bodies from the college between June 1991 and November 1994. Mr Sington said: “I haven’t decided yet whether I’m going to call it a Daily Mail book.”Trustees of Diana’s memorial fund last night refused permission for an American toy firm, Hasbro, to make a Sindy doll looking like the princess.. Adrian Sington, who signed the deal for Boxtree, part of the Macmillan group, said there would be a new 2,500-word introduction, but the Daily Mail insisted yesterday that the book would contain nothing which had not been published in the newspaper.Mr Sington said he expected it to be a success: “We expect to sell an awful lot of copies. It happens to be an extremely good book, it’s beautifully written and a great story.”No mention was made of the Daily Mail or Mr Levy in the information prepared for the London Book Fair because that was a rights fair for foreign buyers. But the spokesman said Richard Kay had received the information contained in the series as a Daily Mail reporter and that information belonged to the newspaper.The book will bind together the 12-part series with an introduction.