The Boy Who Cried “Wolf” is one of the oldest tales in Western culture, dating back at least to Aesop.

The shepherd’s repeated hoax cries so inured his fellows that when, in due course, a wolf actually came, his call for help was ignored. His false warnings had built up their resistance.

There is a parallel in the response to swine flu. Tamiflu ameliorates the effects of flu; in the absence of any other remedy – and prompted by the political need to be seen to do “something” - it has been made rather freely available by the NHS.  Effectively, there has been Tamiflu on demand.

Moreover, science writers in respected newspapers have said, basically: “Take Tamiflu if you feel bad, it can’t hurt.”

Anyone with the slightest grasp of evolutionary biology knows this couldn’t be so. The over-prescription and mis-prescription of antibiotics, fuelled by insistent patients bullying their GPs, has led to the emergence of antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

The only surprise about the appearance of strains of the influenza virus that produced symptoms resistant to the ameliorative effects of Tamiflu was how little time it took.

Illnesses resistant to antibiotics and antivirals potentially put in danger even...

Every time I read about an alleged “war on Christmas”, I think of my mother, who’s been fighting on one front in that battle for a long time.

Even now, she’s making sure that she sends no card with a nativity scene or any other religious subject, and that any postage stamp she uses only bears a secular image. “Season’s greetings” as a message? Yes, please, that’s what she prefers.

Atheist lefty? Hardly. She is Christian of a most fundamentalist stripe and politically conservative on most issues.

What she illustrates, though, is that there is a strand of Christian belief that holds that Christmas should be celebrated only as a secular holiday and not as a religious one.

The argument, articulately outlined here by Ferrell Jenkins, rests on the Biblical evidence that Jesus may not have been born in December and on the pagan and secular roots of some Christmas traditions. None of this is breaking news to Biblical scholars, and many people will not accept his premise of strict adherence to scriptural authority.

If it were more widely known, however, it could take some of the heat out of the annual “war on...