Mum to three amazing kids l former 🏴 MSP l FT Carer
Hamilton, Scotland
Joined December 2015
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Stephanie Callaghan retweeted
One word to describe BBC Scotland these days would be 'unscrupulous'. It can't be trusted. Reporting that "Stephen Flynn was emailed before the meeting" is designed to deceive. He was emailed *minutes* before as he prepared to enter the session and wasn't aware of the emails.
Stephanie Callaghan retweeted
BEFORE YOU BOARD YOUR NEXT FLIGHT, READ THIS.
27 BRITISH PILOTS WERE TESTED. ALL 27 SHOWED EVIDENCE OF TOXIC EXPOSURE.
A former commercial airline captain named John Hoyte @JohnHoytePilot contacted me recently.
He flew passenger aircraft for nearly 30 years before developing serious neurological damage and losing his flying career. For almost two decades, he has been trying to force proper investigation of what pilots and cabin crew call contaminated cabin air.
Then he sent me the evidence.
Parliamentary records. House of Lords testimony. A 320-page report published by the British pilots union. University testing. BBC Panorama. Court cases. Coroner evidence. Litigation in several countries.
This story has reached Parliament, scientists, courts, unions and broadcasters.
Yet most passengers have probably never heard of it.
Most commercial jets use something called bleed air. Compressed air is taken from the engines and fed into the aircraft cabin for passengers and crew to breathe.
If engine seals leak, oil and other fluids can enter that air supply.
That is where the controversy begins.
In 2006, 27 BALPA pilots were tested by researchers at University College London after concerns about exposure to contaminated cabin air.
John Hoyte was one of them.
All 27 showed evidence consistent with toxic exposure and reduced cognitive performance.
@BBCPanorama investigated the issue in its 2008 documentary Something in the Air.
The House of Lords Science and Technology Committee heard evidence about contaminated cabin air in 2007 and 2008.
In February 2007, around 40 passengers on an XL Airways flight reported illness following a cabin air incident. Litigation followed, including proceedings involving passengers who secured the right to pursue claims in the United States.
A UK coroner raised concerns about contaminated cabin air following the death of pilot Richard Westgate in 2012.
And the issue has never gone away.
France has seen occupational disease claims involving aerotoxic syndrome. Litigation involving pilots, crew and passengers has continued internationally. US law firm Morgan & Morgan is now advertising for airline passengers and crew who say they were injured by toxic cabin air.
John founded the Aerotoxic Association at the Houses of Parliament in 2007. The organisation says more than 2,500 people have contacted it believing they were affected.
Then there is one fact I find particularly difficult to ignore.
Almost every major commercial jet uses engine bleed air for cabin ventilation.
The Boeing 787 Dreamliner does not.
Boeing designed the 787 with an electrically powered air system that does not take cabin air from the engines.
So the technology to avoid engine bleed air already exists.
The UK Civil Aviation Authority continues to say that available research has not established a causal link between cabin air exposure and long-term illness.
That disagreement is exactly why this deserves serious investigation.
John has spent nearly 20 years collecting evidence. He has parliamentary material, medical evidence, technical reports, court documents and first-hand testimony. He is also prepared to speak openly with investigative journalists.
He can introduce journalists to Samantha Sabatino, a passenger from the 2007 XL Airways incident whose experience entered the parliamentary record.
So this post has one purpose.
I WANT A SERIOUS INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALIST TO PICK THIS UP.
Not a two-minute news item. A proper investigation.
If you work in investigative journalism, aviation, medicine, toxicology or occupational health, John is willing to answer questions and provide the documents behind this story.
Before millions of us board aircraft every year and breathe cabin air for hours at a time, we deserve a clear answer to a very simple question.
WHAT EXACTLY ARE WE BREATHING?
Sources:
@AerotoxicAssoc (Aerotoxic Association)
@BALPApilots (British Airline Pilots Association)
@forthepeople (Morgan & Morgan) gcaqe org (Global Cabin Air Quality Executive)
@BBCPanorama covered it in 2008 with a full documentary titled Something in the Air.
@heraldtweets
@WSJ
@FlightGlobal
@TheCanaryUK
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@TMZ @thevivafrei
#BreastHealth @NHSLHI
☀️ Grateful for my routine mammogram this morn!
Offered every 3yrs to women aged 50-70
Prevents around 1,300 UK deaths each yr, and well worth the slight discomfort to find cancer early - before you can see or feel it
Info👇share.google/ZqMCjWTFuPpXZcO…
Stephanie Callaghan retweeted
🏥 We're proud to be ranked the highest-rated NHS hospital in the UK based on Google reviews.
With an average rating of 4.71 star, this recognition reflects the experiences of our patients and the dedication of colleagues across NHS Golden Jubilee.
Thank you Team Golden Jubilee💙
Always good to hear Murdo argue the value Scotland brings to England....🏴
#IndependenceIsNormal
Stephanie Callaghan retweeted
Marion Donovan cut up her shower curtain in 1946 because her baby kept soaking through everything.
The only waterproof option then was rubber pants, which gave babies rashes and pinched their legs. She sat at her sewing machine and made a cover out of vinyl instead, then improved it with surplus parachute cloth so the skin could breathe. She replaced the safety pins with snaps.
She called it the Boater, because it kept a baby afloat. Then she took it to every large manufacturer in the country. Her own account of what they said, in a television interview years later, was that they did not need it, because no woman had ever asked them for such a thing and mothers were perfectly happy buying the rubber pants.
So she manufactured it herself. It went on sale at Saks Fifth Avenue in 1949 and sold immediately, passing a million and a quarter by 1950. She patented it in 1951 and sold the company for a million dollars, roughly nine million in today's money.
Her next idea was a fully disposable diaper made of absorbent paper. The paper companies laughed and called it unnecessary and impractical. Pampers arrived a decade later, and roughly 95 percent of American babies now wear one.
She went back to school after that. She had always wanted to be an architect, and she took a degree at Yale in 1958, one of three women in her class. She designed her own house at 63.
Twenty patents over her life. All of it started with a shower curtain and a sewing machine.
invent.org/inductees/marion-…
Stephanie Callaghan retweeted
Nobody washed wool, and that is the part that sounds wrong now.
The jumper hung out for a morning and came back in. The blankets came off the bed in May, went over the line in the sun for a day, and sat in the airing cupboard until October, and plenty of them went ten years without ever meeting water. A gansey went out on a boat for a fortnight and was hung on a nail.
Say that in 2026 and people look at you.
Wool takes moisture into the core of the fibre instead of leaving it on the surface, about a third of its own weight before it even feels damp, and the keratin locks up the compounds that make a smell and declines to hand them back. Bacteria need water sitting on a surface. There isn't one. Hang it in cold air overnight and everything leaves.
Polyester does the reverse on every count. It pushes water away and it loves oil, so your own grease sits on the outside of the fibre with the bacteria on top of it. That is why a gym top stinks after forty minutes, and stinks again coming out of a hot wash, and why the sports trade now sells you an antibacterial treatment to fix a problem it caused by choosing the fibre.
Babies slept in wool, under wool, in a freezing bedroom, with not a gram of flame retardant in the room. Wool needs a far higher temperature to catch than any synthetic, it will not melt onto skin, and it has a habit of smothering itself. In 1972 America made flame resistance a legal requirement in children's sleepwear. The industry did not switch to wool. It kept the cheap synthetic and sprayed it with a chemical called Tris, and five years later Tris came off children's pyjamas over concerns it caused cancer.
The safe option was standing on a hillside the whole time, growing itself back every summer.
This is the fibre the country was built on. By the eighteenth century woollen cloth was over half of everything Britain sold abroad, and the Speaker of the House of Lords still sits on a sack of it, put there in the fourteenth century so Parliament could not forget where the money came from.
Terylene was invented in Accrington in 1941. Acrylic followed in the fifties. Then in 1979 an American mill knitted polyester into something fluffy and called it fleece, which is the cheekiest act of naming in the history of cloth.
By 2022 a British fleece was worth under 75p a kilo and the farmer saw about 26p of it. Shearing costs him roughly £1.50 a sheep, and he has to do it whether anyone wants the wool or not, because an unshorn sheep gets flystrike and dies badly. He pays to take the coat off and then cannot give it away. Farmers have been photographed burning a thousand fleeces in a heap, because the bonfire is cheaper than the lorry to the depot.
Every wash of the stuff that replaced it sends hundreds of thousands of plastic fibres down the drain, through the treatment works, into the water, into the fish, back round to you.
The fibre that never needed washing lost to the fibre that has to be washed constantly and poisons the water every time it is.
The flocks are there, the graders are there, the mills are still turning. The only thing missing is demand, and you are holding a piece of that.
Old wool blankets sit in every charity shop in the country for about a fiver, and the old ones are the good ones. Buy two, and put them on the bed in October.
Then leave the jumper unwashed, hang it out the window overnight in the frost, and put your face in it in the morning.
Stephanie Callaghan retweeted
Glasgow deserves better than periodic ritual condemnation.
If I hadn’t spent real time in Glasgow; walking those streets at 3am feeling safer than in most European cities; I might have swallowed the latest BBC framing wholesale.
But I have been there. I’ve seen the city at night, felt its pulse, and known its people. So when pieces like this reduce Glasgow to drugs, violence and racism, it lands as something more than journalism. It feels like a selective, recurring campaign that shows little regard for the community it claims to examine.
Every city has problems that demand honest attention and real solutions. Pretending otherwise helps no one. Glasgow is no exception. But painting an entire city and its people through the darkest lens available, while treating occasional disorder as defining character, is not balance. It is disregard.
Glaswegians have long punched above their weight. The “People Make Glasgow” ethos is not empty branding; it is lived reality.
Problems exist and should be confronted without denial. But reducing a complex, resilient city to a weekly dossier of its worst moments, while soft-pedalling the everyday dignity, creativity and solidarity of its people, is not serious analysis. It is a narrative that erodes more than it illuminates. Again, Glasgow deserves better than periodic ritual condemnation.
| #Glasgow #Scotland #PeopleMakeGlasgow
Drugs, violence and racism: A week in Glasgow city centre bbc.in/4x7oNWm
Stephanie Callaghan retweeted
The perfect ending to a historic Games 🏴✨
Reuben Ward has been named Team Scotland's Closing Ceremony flag bearer after making history as the first Scottish male gymnast to win Commonwealth All-Around gold.
A moment he'll never forget. A Games we'll never forget 💙
Stephanie Callaghan retweeted
WORLD RECORD HOLDER AND NOW COMMONWEALTH CHAMPION! 🔥
Josh Kerr wins in front of a home crowd at The EDF Scotstoun Stadium 🏴🐐
#Glasgow2026
🥇🏴@joshk97 👏👏👏
Congratulations! Another fantastic Performance 🏃♂️
A timeless painting that perfectly captures the emotions of both parent and child. lnstantly recognisable, despite the different culture and era.
Such a torrid mix of conflicting emotions to watch the child we've loved and nurtured step into their independence, as we once did 🥲
This is one of the most beloved paintings in America, and it puts its finger on something we all pass through, first as the child, and one day as the parent left behind...
The painting is Breaking Home Ties, by Norman Rockwell, on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post in 1954. A father and his teenage son sit side by side on the running board of a battered farm truck, waiting at a railway stop. A single track runs along the bottom of the picture. A ticket pokes from the boy's pocket. His suitcase is stacked with schoolbooks and wears a "State U" pennant. The train is coming to carry him off to college, away from home, for the first time in his life.
Everything is in the way they sit.
The son sits upright, scrubbed and dressed in his best, eyes fixed on the horizon, on the track, on the future rushing toward him. He is already half gone. For him that train is the beginning of everything.
His father sits beside him in worn work clothes and scuffed boots, looking the other way, down the line, as if he cannot bear to watch it arrive. The same train means the opposite thing to him. For the son it is the start of a life. For the father it is the day the house grows quieter, the chair at the table sits empty, and the person he built his world around walks out into a life that no longer has him at its centre.
Look at his hands. He is holding two hats. His own battered one, and resting on top of it, his son's crisp new one, held carefully together, because it is the last small thing he can still do for the boy...
And then the dog, its head laid in the son's lap, gazing up, refusing to look away. Rockwell knew exactly what that was for: "The father couldn't show how he felt about the boy's leaving," he said. "The dog did."
It has moved people for 70 years because every leaving is a beginning for one person and an ending for another. The child steps out into the world, as they should. And someone stays behind, watching them go, and loving them enough to let them go anyway...
Stephanie Callaghan retweeted
Sex at birth is now a mandatory data item in the NHS core information standard standards.nhs.uk/published-s…
This is an important step forward for patient safety and care.
Stephanie Callaghan retweeted
Packing thousand of straws together creates a low-tech pixel screen for objects.
Each straw acts as an independent light pathway, perfectly mimicking exactly
how data channels work.
Stephanie Callaghan retweeted
For the fiftieth time SNP government works respectfully with a health union to avert strike action and loss of life 'setting it apart' from other UK nations talkingupscotlandtwo.com/202…
Stephanie Callaghan retweeted
Woman of the Day biologist and geneticist Nettie Stevens, born in OTD in 1861 in Vermont, discovered the chromosomes we now know as X and Y, and published a research paper in 1905 establishing that XX chromosomes = female and XY = male.
Unusually for those times, her father was keen for his daughters to have a good education. Nettie thrived at school, worked hard, was always top of her class. After a spell as a teacher, she enrolled at a teachers’ college in Westfield, Massachusetts, completed the four year course in half the time, and achieved perfect grades in algebra, chemistry and geometry.
Teaching then was one of the very few professions open to women and she returned to it in 1884, but science still called to her. She once told a student, "How could you think your questions would bother me? They never will, so long as I keep my enthusiasm for biology; and that, I hope will be as long as I live."
Nettie saved hard and secured a place at Stanford University in 1896, majoring in physiology, and graduating with a bachelor’s degree in 1899. Her summers were spent at Stanford’s Hopkins Seaside Laboratory, studying the microscopic anatomy of organisms (histology) and cells (cytology). In 1900, she earned a master’s degree at Stanford with her thesis Studies on Ciliate Infusoria and had discovered two new species of single-celled organisms.
Early in 1901 and at the age of 39, Nettie began working for a doctorate in cytology at Bryn Mawr. By then, Mendel’s Laws of Inheritance had established that an offspring inherits equal numbers of chromosomes from each of its parents — observable by microscope — but nobody knew how sex was determined.
Most scientists then believed sex was not decided at conception but by non-biological factors such as temperature or nutrition acting on a fertilised egg. Fast forward about a century or more and we have a new cohort of supposedly intelligent people still trying to argue that sex is determined by feelings or clothing or hair slides, despite the vast body of wholly conclusive evidence.
Nettie applied for funding for her Ph.D, saying, “I am especially interested in the histological side of the problems in heredity connected with Mendel’s Law, and I know that there is need of a great deal of painstaking work along that line.”
She was granted $1000 (£80k in today’s sterling) and topped that up with a further $1000 when she was awarded the Ellen Richards Prize in 1905 for the best scientific paper written by a woman. At this stage, she still hadn’t made her breakthrough discovery but so meticulous was she that she had refashioned her microscope to get a clearer image of her research material.
Despite being excluded from scientific dialogue, talks and seminars — you know the reason why — Nettie was ready in 1905. She published a series of papers demonstrating that sex is determined by the chromosomes you inherit from your parents.
“We find that the evidence is overwhelmingly on the side of the view that sex is determined in the egg; but to the question of how sex is determined in the egg, no thoroughly convincing answer has yet been given”.
“Since the male somatic cells have 19 large and 1 small chromosome, while the female somatic cells have 20 large ones, it seems certain that an egg fertilised by a spermatozoon which contains the small chromosome must produce a male, while one fertilised by a spermatozoon and containing 20 chromosomes of equal size must produce a female.”
The Matilda Effect took over. Edmund Wilson, who had been working on the same line of research (he had ignored eggs as “too fatty” for his methods and examined only sperm) was credited with Nettie’s discovery *after* changing his own research paper to incorporate her findings.
He did grudgingly acknowledge her work. In a footnote. That’s where you can still find the history of women: in footnotes.
A second man, Thomas Hunt Morgan, was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1933 "for his discoveries concerning the role played by the chromosome in heredity" and admitted that Nettie had "a share in a discovery of importance”, but not until after her death.
Nettie died in 1912 of breast cancer, aged 50, just before she could take up a research professorship.
In a word, 'accountability'
Move the bullied child away from other children?
Send the bullied child to the wellbeing room?
Kids bully for a reason, so deal with that explicitly, DO NOT further isolate the bullied child to accommodate a bully.
Take the bully out of circulation.
What you’re witnessing here on this video is two girls that have been bullying the teenage girl that lives in this house . They recently went to her home where her mother is having another baby,and is due in two weeks. They threw a firecracker into the window of the new nursery that she had just decorated with all of the furnishings that she received from the baby shower.. The whole room went up in flames. Everything is in ashes, luckily the rest of the house wasn’t too damaged. This is what parents are raising out there and sending out into the world. Hopefully these two degenerates will get their day in court, and will be punished to the fullest extent that they can be, and I think their parents should be held accountable as well ..just my opinion!!
Stephanie Callaghan retweeted
@rcpch_president helped put clinical governance back at the centre of clinical practice through her report. I am afraid the puberty blocker trial is a huge mistake. It risks taking us straight back to the problems that led to the closure of GIDS.
I was repeatedly told to trust the research team. Yet the original study protocol proposed following children for only two years. That reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of the problem.
This is not like treating an infection and seeing whether the symptoms improve. Gender distress is a developmental issue that unfolds as a child moves through the physiological, psychological and social changes involved in growing up. If you intervene in that process, you inevitably affect the way the story unfolds. The consequences of such interventions are unlikely to be fully understood within a two-year follow-up period. Some of the most important questions only emerge later, as the individual reaches adulthood and reflects on relationships, fertility, family life, identity, and the opportunities that were opened or foreclosed along the way.
@SueEvansProtect and I have received countless letters from parents worried that their neurodiverse child has become caught up in a belief that transition will solve underlying difficulties. Many describe what @Hilary_Cass called diagnostic overshadowing, where every problem becomes understood through the lens of gender identity while other important factors are neglected.
The result is often a painful split between vulnerable children, worried parents and professionals committed to an affirmation approach. Families can find themselves pulled apart at precisely the moment they most need help to think together. Other families may support transition without fully understanding the potential harms, trade-offs and losses involved.
@WesselyS why are we not waiting for the long-term outcomes of the children already treated at GIDS before exposing another generation to the same intervention?
Psychiatry has a history of making well-intentioned interventions that later proved to be mistaken and, in some cases, damaging. That history should make us cautious. If puberty blockers alter the course of development, why are we proceeding with a new trial before we know what happened to the children who received them previously?
@KemiBadenoch @BritPsyCouncil @UKCP_Updates @rcpsych @theRCN
Stephanie Callaghan retweeted
Lovely. 🏴
The Boston Globe has dedicated a full page in today's edition to the Tartan Army 🏴 🇺🇸
The letter in Boston's largest newspaper reads: "Dear Tartan Army,
"You came for the World Cup, but gave us something more.
"For a week, you turned train stations into singalongs, Fenway into a football ground, and an ordinary June into something we'll be talking about for years.
"Boston has hosted championships, parades, and celebrations of every kind. But we've never hosted guests quite like you all.
"Thank you for the laughter, the bagpipes and the memories. The World Cup will move on. So will the songs, but we'll never forget the joy you brought to our city."
𝘐𝘯 𝘱𝘢𝘳𝘵𝘯𝘦𝘳𝘴𝘩𝘪𝘱 𝘸𝘪𝘵𝘩 @SPARScotland
𝘐𝘔𝘈𝘎𝘌: 𝘕𝘦𝘸𝘴𝘲𝘶𝘦𝘴𝘵
