Magic Statistics

Yvonne Sullivan, 28, of Weston-super-Mare, England, suffered severe blood poisoning when her baby died shortly after childbirth.  She was in a coma for two weeks, and doctors told her husband, Dom, who kept watch at her bedside, that they were thinking about turning off her life-support machine.

Dom then gave her a stern talking-to, and she began to recover.

A mum who fell into a coma came back from the brink of death after her husband gave her "a bloody good rollicking" when he heard doctors wanted to turn off her life-support machine.
. . .
[W]hen doctors told him they may have to switch off her life-support machine, distraught Dom took drastic action - by giving his wife a firm telling-off.

Dom's stern words managed to penetrate through the near-fatal coma and Yvonne even remembers him making the impassioned speech, admitting that she "never liked getting told off".

Dom held Yvonne's hand and demanded: "You start fighting, don't you dare give up on me now. I've had enough, stop mucking around and start breathing. Come back to me."

Incredibly, just two hours later, she steadily began to start breathing again.

Her ventilator was shut off five days later and she regained consciousness.  A week later, she went home.  She says her husband’s desperate fighting words saved her life.

Previous related post: Doctors ordered to keep Sam Golubchuk on life support

“Crisps” is the British name for salty crispy snacks generally known in North America as “chips”.  That’s right: Muslims in the UK are up in arms over junk food.

Senior Muslim figures have said that they are shocked that a number of Walkers snacks contain traces of alcohol and eating them is therefore against their religion.

A tiny amount of alcohol is used in some products as a chemical agent to extract flavour.
. . .
Shuja Shafi, who chairs the food standards committee of the Muslim Council of Britain, said that he intended to investigate. “Certainly we would find it very offensive to have eaten food with alcohol.”

Predictably, Muslim authorities are divided over whether Islam requires the faithful to abstain from trace amounts of alcohol. 

[S]cientists and scholars from the Islamic Food Council agree that from 0.01 to 0.05 percentage is insignificant and therefore the product can be considered halal.
. . .
"It does not matter what percentage of alcohol is involved. Besides Muslims, there are a lot of teetotal people who would not like to consume alcohol in any form," [Masood] Khawaja [of the Halal Food Authority] said.

Somehow I doubt that sane teetotalers would feel duty-bound to avoid products containing less than one-twentieth of one-percent alcohol.

What's more, the UK Muslim Law Council, “Britain’s highest authority on halal food”, issued a fatwa in 2004 approving for Muslim consumption soft drinks containing, not only very small amounts of alcohol, but also pork by-products.

I must admit that I did find one aspect of this story very shocking:  Brits spell “chilli” with two l’s.  I didn’t know that!

Previous related posts:

• Doctors in Scotland forbidden to eat at desks during Ramadan
• Is there anything these people are not offended by?
• Free Piglet