IoS letters, emails & online postings (29 June 2014)

The British Medical Association is right to warn of a funding crisis in the NHS ("Doctors' leader warns of more NHS rationing," 22 June). There are two clear issues. First, Jeremy Hunt's naïve presumption that healthcare, like sales, can be run on economies of scale. This is simply not true. There is a minimum cost per patient, and this cannot be reduced. To continue to cut budgets will have a detrimental impact.

The second is the spiralling debt incurred by Labour's years of pandering to headlines about waiting times and beds. The debt escalated and was then sold off in chunks to try and recoup value. The reality is that not even the Treasury has a grasp of who owns Private Finance Initiative debts, and Trusts and Clinical Commissioning Groups are still racking up interest, reducing their ability to invest in better care.

We need an approach that puts patients first, not pennies. A system where you get good quality care quickly and locally. And for goodness sake stop treating a public service like a factory production line. This is people we're talking about.

Kelly-Marie Blundell

Social Liberal Forum

Lib Dem Parliamentary Candidate for Guildford

Jeremy Hunt, the Health Secretary, says the NHS can save yet more money by avoiding litigation costs. Has it not occurred to him that people exhausted by long hours, lack of resources and staff shortages will inevitably make mistakes, especially if they face a constant barrage of criticism from their masters in Government? And in the NHS such mistakes will prove very costly, both in human and monetary terms.

BJ Cairns

London N22

Hamish McRae (June 22) is missing a fourth reason why the amount of tax being collected is going down: even though there are more of us in employment, a lot of us are earning less, in some cases much less.

As a small-business owner I am earning about half what I used to, and there is less work available. A friend of mine, working in what used to be a stable job in education, has been forced to take a 15 per cent salary reduction – he now cuts his own hair, so presumably his former barber isn't earning as much either.

Many people who are now no longer classed as unemployed have gone, in some cases very reluctantly, into self-employment, and are making very little money. Many used to have well-paid, secure jobs, from which they have been made redundant. It is not always the big picture that provides the clues – the devil is in the detail, and for many of us, the devil is driving us pretty hard.

Name and address withheld

Ben Williamson of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals rolls out that old chestnut of "90 per cent of medicines that pass animal tests fail in humans" (Letters, 22 June).

This is an utterly misleading statistic. The 90 per cent figure is the proportion of new drugs that never make it though all levels of testing and to licensing. This includes the drugs that don't make it out of preclinical non-animal tests, the ones that are shown to be dangerous or ineffective in animal studies, all of the drugs that fail during the various stages of testing in humans, and all the drugs that regulators do not license at the end of testing.

The point of animal testing is to see whether a drug has any potential therapeutic value and, more importantly, to see whether it is safe to test in humans. It should tell you something that over 30 years there has not been a death in Phase 1 trials.

The fact is, animal testing saves lives. It isn't perfect – but it is the best we have for now.

Jo Selwood

Headington, Oxford

Archie Bland's article on rape (22 June) seems to imply that men cannot be victims. Rape is common in prisons worldwide, prevalent in the theatre of war and, as is the case for many women, a violent assault committed by someone they know and once trusted.

Rape is about power, whether perpetrated on male or female. Please do not simply paint men as the villains because all victims need to be shown support.

Emilie Lamplough

Trowbridge, Wiltshire