COUNTY CADET OF THE YEAR

ON Saturday, 29 October, 2005, the annual search for the St John Ambulance County Cadet of the Year was held at the Merseyside Headquarters in Liverpool, where Cadets from all over the country took part in a tough day of leadership exercises and interviews.

Heateher Lowe, 16 years a Leading Cadet from Southport St John Ambulance Division was a very worthy winner, beating off Cadets from other units to take the title which she will hold for the next year.

Southport Youth Section has been very successful, producing Five County Cadets in six years, and Heather will follow in their footsteps, representing Merseyside at the National Finals in the New Year.

She can also expect to attend at high profile venues such as Buckingham Palace rubbing shoulders with Royality and promoting St John Ambulance voluntary work at various events.

Heather, a student at King George V College, takes over from Becky Bolton, who has represented Southport and Merseyside for the past 12 months, also a student at KGV and a Southport St John Ambulance Cadet Leader.

Divisional Officer, Keith Lloyd, in charge of the Youth Section at Southport, said he was "extremely proud of the young people under his charge, and they arte the future of tomorrow and Heather is a leading example of what St John Ambulance Cadets can achieve".

The Southport Reporter wishes to convey their congratulations to her on her hard earned achievement, well done Heather!

Cadets aged between 10 and 16 years, meet at the Southport Q in Scarisbrick street at 6.30pm each Thursday.

ET OF THE YEAR

TV GENIUS, the intelligent search engine for UK television, has launched a trial service which adds internet TV to its comprehensive and popular guide at www.tvgenius.co.uk. As well as getting listings for the best of UK TV, users searching for programmes will also be presented with possible shows from premium online video sources such as the BBC, Fox, CBS, RooTV, the Internet Archive and Forbes.

Tom Weiss, co-founder of TV Genius, comments:- “An amazing number of high quality videos are freely available on the internet. You only need to search for Popeye, Neighbours, or Coldplay to find good quality content you wouldn’t find on regular TV. Our goal is to index all the legal, free video available on the internet and present the content to our users as another channel that sits alongside conventional television listings. The television market is clearly going to change significantly as people watch more television over the internet, and we’re planning to be right at the heart of that change."

To date, TV Genius has indexed tens of thousands of internet videos and will have more than 100,000 items by early next year.

MAN FLU - IT’S OFFICIAL, SAYS BENENDEN RESEARCH

IT’S official. As women have long suspected “man flu” really does exist, with men taking more time off work for colds and flu than their female counterparts, new research from Benenden Healthcare shows. However women don’t have it all their own way. The study shows they are more likely to take time off due to sickness and stomach bugs than men.

The research sought to find out the main reasons full and part-time workers take time off and established that colds and flu are the most common causes for sick leave with more than 3.6 million people – or 12.5% of the working population – absent because of those conditions in the past year. And it’s men who are the worst affected by colds and flu with 31% or over 2 million of them taking time off for a sniffle. This compares with just 1.5 million or 22% of women - backing up the commonly-held female belief that “man flu” is a real condition, distinct from the colds suffered by women.

Sickness and stomach bugs accounted for the absence of 3.3 million of Britain’s full and part-time workers and on sickness women are the weaker sex. Over 2 million women took time off with this sort of complaint in the last year, compared to 1.2 million men. Workers in the East and West Midlands suffered from the most bouts of flu, with 961,000 people having taken time off in the last 12 months because of this. This compares to 17% of those in Greater London and just 12% of workers in the North East and Yorkshire area. However Scots and people in the North West were more prone to stomach bugs and sickness, notching up 894,000 absences among them.

Jakki Stubbington of Benenden Healthcare said:- “All women know that “man flu” exists and now here is official proof. Women have all seen men making a meal of a sniffle and claiming a bit of a cold is the latest deadly flu virus. It is not however entirely a laughing matter. Unfortunately there is no cure for the common cold and although a relatively unserious condition the symptoms can be very unpleasant and can make it hard to concentrate at work. Colds also have a nasty habit of working their way around the workplace so it is important that staff take time off when they are suffering to reduce the chances of passing it on to their colleagues.”

As well as these common conditions, over 1.16 million people had to take time off to have or recover from an operation, whilst 8% or around 1 million people were off after being injured in an accident. More concerning is that 225,000 people admitted to taking time off work due to the knock-on effects of alcohol from the night before.

Top 10 conditions that resulted in a work absence:-

The research also found that workers in Britain have collectively taken off around 78 million working days in the last 12 months, with some 13.9 million people having taken at least 1 day off work due to sickness.