It’s usual, in the last column of the year, to look back on the stories that have caught my eye, that don’t seem to have attracted the attention of the general press. This month provided several.

For example, how many people know that a dreaded disease was consigned to history in more than 16 countries this year? It’s called filariasis, and the worm larva that causes it produces ‘elephantiasis’ – huge swellings of the legs and other body parts – that totally disables the person unfortunate enough to catch it.

It used to rage around the South Pacific islands and most of Africa. The South Pacific is now free of it, and so are Sri Lanka, Zanzibar and Togo.

That doesn’t sound like much, perhaps, but when you consider that only a few years ago it affected 120 million people worldwide, you get some idea of the massive success story. Much of the credit must go to the pharmaceutical companies who provided the drugs to kill the filaria – free of charge. One of them was the United Kingdom’s Glaxo Smith Kline. Why is it that the media never seem to give credit where it is due?

Closer to home, there is news about the treatment of irritable bowel syndrome – the commonest chronic disease in our society. More people suffer from it than from asthma or arthritis, yet we find it very difficult to treat satisfactorily. The symptoms include bloating, stomach cramps, diarrhoea and/or constipation, particularly after eating certain foods.

All sorts of remedies are recommended for it, which is usually a sign that none of them really work.

So I was pleased to read a review of dozens of clinical trials of treatments for irritable bowel that showed that what we are doing for our patients is at least better than placebo.

It seems patients with it get the most relief from three types of treatment – bulk laxatives, such as ispaghula; drugs that reduce spasm; and (best of all) peppermint oil. I’ve always favoured peppermint myself, so I’m happy that it seems to have come out top of the list.

While on the subject of old-fashioned remedies that seem to work, I’d add two more. One is ginger for stomach upsets and nausea. That comes from an Indian doctor friend who swears by it. Since I advised patients to use it, I’ve been impressed.

Liquorice, too, is a good settler of stomach irritation, but it comes with a caution. Taking it regularly can raise your blood pressure in people sensitive to that effect. So don’t try to self-treat with liquorice without asking your doctor’s advice first.

Common sense was the main theme of the next story. That was about nut allergy. Nicholas Christakis, an American doctor, reported on how it has gone completely nuts in his country. Schools there are terrified that a single nut might come into contact with allergic children, so much so that a bus had to be evacuated and cleaned because a single peanut was dropped on the floor.

He points out that the bus was full of ten-year olds who wouldn’t have eaten it in any case, and that the fear of nuts in his country could now be classified as epidemic hysteria, provoking anxiety in children who now imagine that there is a deadly danger in a simple snack in a kindergarten.

He adds the point I made in this column some months ago, that wholesale avoidance of nuts adds to the problem of nut allergy by producing children who, having never been exposed to nuts when younger, are actually becoming sensitive to them later. In fact the fear of nuts is actually adding to the ‘epidemic’ of nut allergic people.

One last report really disturbed me. It was about a 59-year old woman in Holland who was given euthanasia for her chronic lung disease. She wasn’t offered a lung transplant because she smoked (she smoked a last cigarette on the day she was legally ‘euthanased’), yet lung transplants do cure this disease.

Here is a final quote from her sister: “On the morning that euthanasia was carried out we went for her last cigarette together. It hurt me to see how much effort it took to smoke just a little bit of this cigarette”.

How can I comment further?