Harry and Terry

Recently Warner Bros confirmed that the final Harry Potter film- The Deathly Hallows will be split in two parts and released something like 4-6 months apart. Good move in my view. It's a big book with a lot going on and many sub-plots to be tied together but also it is the big event of the entire range (obviously). So there'll be even more antisipation over the concluding half of the tale.


Elsewhere yesterday, top selling Disc World author Terry Pratchett announced his intention to donate £500,000 ($1m) to Alzheimer's charity for research. Having been recently diagnosed himself, Pratchett used an event at the Alzheimer's Research Trust annual conference to highlight the poor state of funding for treatment and research.


The author was diagnosed late last year with early-onset dementia. There are 15,000 people in the UK with this form, which strikes the under 65's. Stangely the NHS has said that at 59 Pratchett is too young to receive the drug Aricept free of charge, so he must fund his own treatment. In total, an estimated 700,000 people in the UK have Alzheimer's. Although this figure could well be higher- in an earlier radio interview the author had said that often people just describe "having a Senior Moment."

At the conference he is reported as saying "I've given up my driving licence because I didn't feel confident driving. And if I've got something inside out, it's a little bit puzzling getting it the right way round again." Later saying "The curious thing is that writing goes on, although the typing doesn't."

Pratchett said in his speech (that was widely reported on UK TV and radio) that "It is a shock to find out that funding for Alzheimer's research is just 3% of that to find cancer cures." The Alzheimer's Research Trust says that just £11 per patient is spent annually on research into the disease, compared with £289 for each cancer patient.

Makes you stop and think doesn't it?

Read the full story at:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/7291315.stm