Plaques, fatal heart disease and coronary heart disease are not the same thing. The latter refers to deaths due to disease of the coronary arteries circling the heart; the former would refer to deaths due to disease of all parts of the heart but I think the writer meant `fatal cardiovascular disease' which is the phrase used in the BMJ paper and which refers to the heart and blood vessels in general (`fatal heart disease' doesn't appear in the paper).
Whippy, the study wasn't intended to look at the issues raised by your questions. It was a retrospective study of electronic health records covering primary care, hospital admissions, and mortality in 1997-2010. It's strength is the number of participants, nearly 2 million. The authors admit some weaknesses in the study but they would have been difficult if not impossible to avoid. No study can be perfect.
I don't want to throw cold water on the results - I like a glass of wine too! But I fear that the public now has an incorrect interpretation of the phrase `moderate drinking'. Most people under-estimate how many units of alcohol they drink, often thinking that a glass is one unit. That misconception comes from the origin of the `unit of alcohol'. Back in the days of weaker wines one unit was based on the amount of alcohol in one 125ml glass of German wine of 8.5% alcohol strength. Yes, 8.5%, and most wines are now at least 13% alcohol (50% more). And most wine glasses are a lot more than 125ml. Bars, pubs and restaurants now have a `small' serving of 175ml (40% increase) or `large' of 250ml (100% increase and a third of a bottle of wine). So most glasses of wine would now have the following number of units of alcohol: 125ml with 1.5 units, 175ml with 2.1 units, 250ml with 3 units, and a bottle has 9 units in total.
So the bottom line is: you can enjoy your wine and stay within the safe limits!
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This is great news from British scientists...
`British scientists in world-first TB breakthrough'
LINK
"British scientists have made a world-first breakthrough in the diagnosis of tuberculosis. Researchers in Oxford and Birmingham say they can isolate different strains of the disease using a process called genome sequencing. It means patients who may have waited months to get the right drugs can now be diagnosed in just a few days - so they have a greater chance of recovery. Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt said the breakthrough "will save lives". Cases of TB in the UK have begun falling recently, but England still has one of the highest rates in Europe. The scientists who made the discovery say genome sequencing allows them to identify the DNA of different samples in little more than a week."
(One of the researchers told the Today programme this morning that they'd soon be able to do the diagnosis in hours.)
I also get the pills delivered free of charge to my door by the pharmacy.
