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Local health professionals say they first heard of the story when they read about in the tabloids. Meanwhile, other sources claim the initial tip-off to the Army came from a newspaper in the first place, leading to fears that the entire saga has been media-manufactured.Having been named, Ms Griffiths, by now signed up exclusively to The Sun newspaper, decided to take an HIV test to end the rumours “I’m getting sick of it,” she said at the time. Ms Clarke, meanwhile, refused to be pressured into taking a test and has since fled her Colburn home.”I feel so happy even though I believed in myself at the beginning,” said Ms Griffiths after her results. “I have been to hell and back these last few days and I feel angry at the way I have been treated I want the army to know that I am negative I have got nothing and I want the world to know it. I want the press to repeat this and clear my name.”Ms Griffiths’ solicitor, John McArdle, said he was demanding an apology from the Army and an acceptance from Colonel Donaldson that Ms Griffiths does not have the HIV virus. The Army said it never knew or speculated on the identity of the “females” involved.Colonel Donaldson said the young soldiers had to be warned as a duty of care.The Army has refused to disclose how many soldiers have been tested for HIV or if any have the virus, saying the information is confidential. For Ms Griffiths and Ms Clarke, confidentiality was never an option..

John Chetwynd, an accountant, threw himself and his baby son from cliffs at Beachy Head after assaulting his wife. “The reason he should do this does not come readily,” David Wadman, the East Sussex coroner, said at an inquest into the deaths last week.
Yet the case is not as unusual as it might seem. Every six to eight weeks a man or a woman – usually a man – kills their partner or their children and then themself.Ian Lazenby, from Humberside, killed his three daughters and himself after his wife left him because of his violence. In London, Jose Pimenta pushed his two young sons off a fourth-floor balcony and then jumped off after his estranged wife told him she had begun a new relationship. In Dorset, Mark Bradley killed himself and his two children in his fume-filled car after murdering their mother. She had told him she had had an affair and wanted a separation.Dr Chris Milroy, a forensic pathologist at the University of Sheffield’s medico-legal centre, who has made a study of these parent-child killings said: “Murder-suicide crosses socio-economic groups – we even had a coroner who killed his wife with a Waterford cut-glass decanter.”But nearly all the assailants are men.

“Men are usually the perpetrators of violence, anyway, but it’s higher with murder-suicide. The man usually kills his wife because there’s been a breakdown in the relationship and he does it out of jealousy. When they kill children, it is usually revenge – ‘If I can’t have them, you can’t have them’.”But there are other reasons. In some cases, the perpetrator is mentally ill, in others there are financial problems.When women kill, Dr Milroy said, it is often because they feel that their children’s lives have been destroyed. In December 1995, Elaine Smith drove into a river with her son Christopher, seven, and daughter Clare, three, strapped in the back of the car after her husband said he wanted a divorce and was going to spend Christmas with his lover.Dr Milroy’s interest in murder-suicide was provoked when he encountered three similar cases in a week.Research showed the same phenomenon occurred elsewhere although in Australia, for instance, murder-suicide occurs twice as often.One of the differences between British murder rates and the rest of the world’s is the general absence of guns, Dr Milroy said.With about 700 unlawful killings a year, it works out at 13 for every million of the population The rate in America is 10 times that. Although Switzerland is generally law-abiding, for example, when people murder they use guns.Yet 40 per cent of murder-suicides in Britain use guns compared with 10 per cent of murder cases overall.

Curiously, although the murder rate in Britain has doubled since 1960, the number of people who commit suicide after killing has remained fairly constant.Dr Milroy said it was difficult to say whether there was anything that could be done to prevent the murder-suicides.Sarah Heatley, whose estranged husband killed their two children then himself, believes greater care should be taken in assessing whether men who show disturbed or violent tendencies should be given access to their children.And Scottish women’s groups lobbied last year for a special inclusion in the Children’s Act barring fathers with a history of domestic abuse from unsupervised contact with their children pending an investigation.But Dr Milroy said: “If there are 100,000 marriage breakups a year and seven men kill their children, how do you put that into the equation? How are you going to go about assessing every man to say whether they are dangerous or not?”He added: “But you could argue that if it’s a one in 600 million chance of contracting CJD from beef on the bone, the risk of a man killing his children is statistically higher.”. Now, at last, scientists can tell us why Rudolf’s nose glows in the dark, lighting the way for Santa’s sleigh He’s radioactive. So, it appears, are all the rest of St Nicholas’s steeds and possibly the old man himself. For research by Norwegian and Danish scientists has shown that the world’s reindeer are “hot” and are contaminating their owners and minders.
The radiation comes from the 500 atomic bomb tests carried out in the atmosphere by the nuclear nations in the 1950s and 1960s.

Long-lived isotopes in the fall out – including Caesium 137 and Strontium 90 – have built up in Arctic lichens, which are particularly good at accumulating them.The reindeer eat the lichens, their staple diet, and concentrate the isotopes in their bodies. Animals are affected all over the Arctic, with the most radioactive reindeer in Canada, Alaska and Siberia’s Taimyr Peninsula.Enormous amounts of reindeer meat – some 14,000 tonnes – are eaten in the Arctic each year. Research at the Danish Riso National Laboratory has found that reindeer herders, who consume a lot of the meat, take in 300 times more radiation each year than the average Briton. Norway’s Radiation Protection Authority estimates that hundreds of them have died of cancer as a result.Meanwhile reindeer are emerging as one of the greatest environmental threats to the Norwegian Arctic. Over-grazing and trampling is causing more damage to the fragile tundra than some of the world’s most seriously polluting factories.Over the last 40 years the number of reindeer in the Norwegian Arctic have doubled, reaching 20 animals per square kilometre, a very high density.Research by the Norwegian and Finnish geological surveys and Russia’s Kola Science Centre have found that 75 per cent of the moss in the Norwegian Arctic and 85 per cent of lichen have been “severely damaged” by reindeer. Three-quarters of the area is suffering from soil erosion.By contrast, two of the world’s most polluting factories – nickel smelters in Russia’s Kola peninsula – have only damaged about 10 per cent of the moss and 14 per cent of the lichen in the area.Even the Saami people, who own most of the reindeer, admit that they may be causing problems. Lars-Anders Baer, vice-president of their council, told a conference on the Arctic environment this year: “We don’t know how many reindeer the northern part of Norway can take.”.