The Pharmaceutical Journal
Vol 279 No 7477 p540
10 November 2007

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Is menhaden the most important fish?

Do you have any Mandarin?

Never judge a book by its cover

Is menhaden the most important fish?

A lot has been said and written about over-fishing around the world and of the need to encourage diners to switch to species of fish that are more sustainable. Some species are being renamed to make them sound more palatable.

For example, the humble pilchard is now the Cornish sardine, while the slimehead has been renamed the orange roughy. One leading retailer has seen sales of the Torbay sole increase dramatically since changing its name from the witch fish.

Some victims of over-fishing do not appear on menus at all, such as the menhaden, a group of oily, herring-like fish of the genus Brevoortia, found off the Atlantic and Gulf coasts of North America. They are not used for human consumption as they die quickly and spoil rapidly, as well as being extremely bony. It has, however, been described as the most important fish in the sea, and the range of its uses is impressive indeed.

Menhaden have been fished since colonial times, when they were used as a fertiliser: in fact their native American name means “fertiliser”, and the Indians planted a handful of fish remains in each planting hole with their maize seeds, knowing that they increased the crop yield.

It is used as a feed additive for poultry and pigs. In dairy cows, it provides a source of long chain fatty acids which are taken up by the reproductive tissues of the lactating cow, resulting in improved conception rates and increased milk yield. The menhaden is also important as a link in the food chain, feeding upon phytoplankton, thus having a direct action on water quality, removing huge amounts of nitrogen.

It in turn provides food for seabirds and mammals and, importantly in North America, for larger fish that are fished for recreationally. The most recent, and now one of the major uses, for the menhaden, is as a source of omega-3 and omega-6 fish oils in the multimillion nutritional supplement industry.

They form huge schools, which are easily visible from the air, and factory ships employ spotter planes to locate the fish, which are then encircled by the ship’s gigantic net and pumped into the refrigerated hold, before being transported to the company’s processing plant ashore.

Pressure groups have called for a temporary ban on menhaden fishing in certain areas to assess the situation, but government scientists and representatives of the fishing industry say that their evidence suggests that spawning stocks are healthy, and that any such ban would be pointless.

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Do you have any Mandarin?

At school I became reasonably fluent in French and German and was advised to take Latin as minority subject as it might have been useful in the study of pharmacy. (I ignored the advice and my pharmacy career did not suffer.)

However, there is a world of difference between being reasonably fluent in a language, and being able to cope in a foreign country with the speech of native speakers, having to deal with the speed, accents, and abbreviations used.

It amazed me, therefore, upon entering university, how foreign nationals from Hong Kong and Malaysia coped not only with native speakers of English, but managed to study a subject to degree level in a foreign language.

I was reminded of the above recently when I read that the Chinese government in Beijing, in the form of Hanan, the equivalent of the British Council, is sponsoring five British schools to the tune of £3,000 for the teaching of Mandarin Chinese and the promotion of Chinese culture.

One of the barriers to improving the take-up of Mandarin in schools in the past has been the fact that the GCSE was designed for those pupils speaking it as a first language. However, the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority is now redrafting the syllabus so that it can be learnt as a foreign language, in the same way as French and German.

Spoken Chinese is, apparently, rather easy to learn, placing emphasis upon tones, of which there are four, and one merely has to memorise what sound each word has. There is no grammar as such, and verb tenses are changed by adding a small participle, thus avoiding the complications of French and German.

Written Chinese is, alas, not easy and nearly two thousand characters are required to read the average headline in a newspaper.

With China currently having a booming economy and enjoying increasing foreign investment, the time may not be far off when my experiences as an undergraduate are reversed, and British students may be a common sight in the ivory towers of Chinese academia.

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Never judge a book by its cover

Literary columnist Katy Guest, in a recent article on the Man Booker Prize long list, drew comparisons not only on the style and content of the various works, but also on the cover designs. It may seem futile to think that cover design could have any bearing upon the outcome of the prize itself, yet publishers go to great lengths and expense to ensure that the covers of their publications are striking to the eye and, more importantly, memorable.

In a book published in September called ‘Seven Hundred Penguins’, Penguin asked its staff to submit nominations for their favourite Penguin cover design, and included the top 700 in the above volume. They range from the familiar three-bar design, to the sublime and ridiculous, including the 1974 Pelican book, ‘Alcoholism’, featuring a giant pink elephant dancing across a white stage.

It has always intrigued me why drug manufacturers pay designers to provide eye-catching box designs for their prescription products. At least the design of a book cover is making an appeal to those most able to influence sales, ie, the paying customer.

The people that influence drug sales, as the companies well know, are GPs who, as pharmacists are fully aware, have little or no idea as to the pack size and form of the product, let alone the pretty designs on the box.

Another problem with this situation is that it would appear that some designers have never been anywhere near a dispensary, with glaring omissions in information; sometimes even the product name does not appear on the end panel of the box, so as to be visible when stored on the shelf.

Then we have boxes large enough to hold 500g of luxury chocolates, let alone 28 tablets. There is also the periodic design update deemed necessary, for whose benefit no one is sure, to make the product’s appearance that bit snappier and up to date.

Perhaps we should employ Penguin in this field. A plain design with different coloured boxes for different strengths and a bold headline in simple type. What could be easier?

Who knows, in 10 years’ time, might there be a best seller entitled ‘One Hundred Best Furosemide Boxes’?

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