Urgent plea for O negative blood donors
The NHS has warned that supplies of O negative blood in the West Midlands are "critically low", as it urges people to donate.
NHS Blood and Transplant has revealed there are 4,033 donors in the region with the O negative blood type whose last donation was more than 12 months ago.
It is calling on these donors to come forward urgently to help the NHS rebuild supplies, after a combination of factors have left this blood type under particular pressure.
England remains on amber alert for low stocks of O type blood.
The NHS said four bank holidays, the Easter holidays and half-term break all falling within a six-week period had made maintaining steady stocks particularly challenging.
Blood donations often drop over bank holiday weekends and holiday periods when people are busy and forget to donate.
Gerry Gogarty, director of blood supply for NHS Blood and Transplant, said: "Our 'missing' O negative donors in the West Midlands have the power to relieve the pressure on supplies of this vital blood type.
"If you are O negative and haven't given blood in a while, please book an appointment to donate today. Don't hesitate - patients need you now.
"Our donor centres like the one in Birmingham's New Street generally have the best availability. If you can't find an appointment straight away please book further ahead or keep checking back to help fill last minute appointments or cancellations. Every donation makes a critical difference."
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Yahoo
24 minutes ago
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The Countess of Wemyss, trepanning enthusiast who researched the medical benefits of psychedelics
The Countess of Wemyss and March, better known as Amanda Feilding, who has died aged 82, spent decades as a lonely voice crusading for the legalisation of LSD and its rehabilitation as a medical treatment, and claimed that the war on drugs had caused 'more suffering worldwide than any other act'. Once ridiculed as 'Lady Mindbender' or the 'crackpot countess of Brainblood Hall', she lived to see her life's work vindicated in the 'psychedelic renaissance' of recent years, with acid microdosing now evangelised in Silicon Valley and psychedelics heralded by regulators as a breakthrough in treating severe depression. When Amanda Feilding first encountered LSD in the mid-Sixties, she discovered with her friends that small doses – enough to feel 'sparkly' but not high – sharpened their faculties, helping them to win at the Chinese strategy game Go, or bowl better in cricket. 'We used to call it a psychovitamin,' she recalled. But the international flourishing of medical research into LSD was squashed in 1968 when a panicked US government classified psychedelics as 'Schedule 1 substances', designated as having the highest potential for abuse, and no medical value whatsoever. This anti-psychedelic backlash would last until the late 1990s, a combination of stigma and prohibitive red tape putting off any serious scientist interest. During those decades Amanda Feilding's campaign on behalf of psychedelics – 'the flesh of the gods' – was largely pursued through art, which she admitted was 'an uphill struggle'. It did not help that she was easily characterised as a batty aristocrat, living in her family's triple-moated Tudor hunting lodge, Beckley Park, which lent her pronouncements on legalising drugs a touch of 'de haut en bas'. She was also given to unguarded comments such as: 'I have always considered myself my own best laboratory.' As the Daily Mail once asked: 'Is the countess just an amusing and irrelevant eccentric? Or could she be a real danger to society?' But perhaps the greatest hindrance to her credibility as a drug policy reformer was that, between the 1960s and the 1990s, she had been more visible as a trepanning enthusiast, who in 1970 was filmed in a floral shower cap, boring a hole into her shaven skull with a dentist's drill to create more room for blood to pulse through her brain. She then ate a rare steak to replace the lost iron and went out to a party in Chelsea. The resulting documentary, Heartbeat in the Brain, was later screened in New York, where – as one reviewer put it – the fainting audience members could be seen 'dropping off their seats one by one like ripe plums'. Amanda Feilding went on to stand twice for parliament, in 1979 and 1983, on a platform of free trepanation on the NHS, but she was later canny enough to distance herself from the practice, which the new science of brain imaging had failed to support. For the rehabilitation of psychedelics, on the other hand, brain imaging proved a watershed, giving 'you a visual perspective that you can't deny,' she said. Realising that she would have 'to use science as a tool to prove what one was saying was true, not part of a kind of druggy fantasy,' in 1998 Amanda Feilding launched the Beckley Foundation as a 'trojan horse' to infiltrate the establishment. She assembled a board of leading neuroscientists and borrowed her family crest for its double-headed eagle logo, 'to make it look like a college,' she recalled. She converted a 17th-century cowshed knee-deep in manure into the nerve centre of her operation – nicknamed 'World Consciousness House' by her husband Jamie Charteris (Lord Neidpath, and later Earl of Wemyss) – and from it she built the Beckley Foundation into one of the largest organisations campaigning for drug reform around the world. The rarefied atmosphere of Beckley Park lent the organisation a gravitas not ordinarily to be found in drug reform circles. Amanda Feilding was able to give seminars at the House of Lords and in 2011 the foundation's open letter calling for an end to the war on drugs attracted the signatures of Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Desmond Tutu and Mario Vargas Llosa. 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That year another Beckley/Imperial study, published in The Lancet Psychiatry, became the first of its kind to demonstrate that psilocybin – the LSD-like active ingredient in magic mushrooms – in conjunction with psychotherapy could be effective against treatment-resistant depression. By 2019 US regulators had fast-tracked further research by designating psilocybin a 'breakthrough therapy' for treatment-resistant depression. Despite being, in her own words, 'a female with no letters to my name', Amanda Feilding was widely judged to have contributed to a step change in our understanding of the brain mechanism of psychedelics and in laying the foundations for a new era of clinical research. 'I am very, very happy to be proved wrong,' she said. 'What I want to do is know.' Amanda Claire Marian Feilding was born on January 30 1943, the fourth child of Basil Feilding and his wife – and distant cousin – Margaret (Peggy), née Feilding; both were descended from the Habsburgs, and from two illegitimate children of Charles II. Amanda's early life was reminiscent of I Capture the Castle: money and fuel were forever running out, while she ran wild in the topiaried garden, her greatest delight being to coax laughter out of her private god: 'that kind of orgasm experience that I think a lot of young children have and then forget'. Her father, a great-grandson of both the Earl of Denbigh and the Marquess of Bath, farmed at night so that the day could be free for painting. 'Violent-tempered, very eccentric, charming and mercurial,' he had an anarchist temperament, and advised her: 'Whatever the authorities or the government tells you to do – do the opposite.' The Tudor house, seemingly adrift in a sea of mist, inspired free-thinking, like 'an island outside culture in which you are free to explore,' Amanda recalled. Aldous Huxley was said to have been inspired to write his debut novel Crome Yellow after visiting Beckley Park for tea in 1921. Her own father read to her at bedtime from The Seven Pillars of Wisdom and The Third Eye. There was, Amanda Feilding recalled, 'a deep feeling that one didn't need to follow society because one was slightly above it'. Although her father was an atheist, her mother was a Catholic and sent her to convent school. Amanda abandoned formal education at 16, however, when she won the science prize but the nuns refused her request to be given as a reward a book on Buddhism. With £25 in her pocket she set off for Ceylon to visit the godfather she had never met, a Buddhist monk called Bertie Moore, but lost her passport in Syria and instead lived for a time with the Bedouin. 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