Interesting Facts

17th May 1521 – Edward Stafford, 3rd Duke of Buckingham, was executed for treason. 1536 – George Boleyn, Viscount Rochford and four other men were executed for treason. 1590 – Anne of Denmark was crowned Queen of Scotland. 1792 – The New York Stock Exchange was formed. 1814 – The Constitution of Norway was signed and Danish Crown Prince Christian Frederik elected King of Norway by the Norwegian Constituent Assembly. 1974 – Thirty-three people were killed by terrorist bombings in Dublin and Monaghan, Ireland. 1978 - Charlie Chaplin's stolen body was found. 1984 – Prince Charles called the proposed addition to the National Gallery, London, a "monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much-loved and elegant friend," sparking controversies on the proper role of the Royal Family and the course of modern architecture. 1992 – The WHO (World Health Organisation) took homosexuality out of its list of mental illnesses. 1994 - The U.N. Security Council approved sendi...

7th April 1795 – France adopted the metre as the basic measure of length. 1827 – John Walker, an English chemist, sold the first friction match. 1947 – Henry Ford, the American automobile manufacturer and industrialist died. 1948 – The World Health Organization was established by the United Nations. 1994 – The massacre of Tutsis began in Kigali, Rwanda.

The WHO (World Health Organisation) has new rules for avoiding offensive names for new diseases. (The new guidelines are aimed at removing the stigma that can be inflicted by diseases that use the names of people, places, and animals. The new guidelines called “The Naming of New Human Infectious Diseases” would discourage names like Spanish flu, German measles, Ebola, swine flu , bird flu, Rift Valley Fever, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, monkey pox, and MERS (Middle East respiratory syndrome), and encourage the use of more neutral, generic terms, such as severe respiratory disease or novel neurologic syndrome. Under the new guidelines, Marburg disease (named after a city in Germany) might have been called filovirus-associated haemorrhagic fever, while Ebola (named after a river) might have been filovirus-associated haemorrhagic fever.) Source

According to a report by the WHO (World Health Organisation) 74% of men and 64% of women in the UK will be overweight by 2030. ( That's almost three-quarters of men and two-thirds of women in the UK are on their way to being overweight within 15 years. Medically speaking, b eing “overweight” is defined as having a BMI ( Body Mass Index ) of between 25 and 29.9.  Being  “obese” is defined by a BMI of 30 and above. Worryingly  other European countries are facing growing obesity problems including Greece, Spain, Austria, the Czech Republic and even Sweden.   The only European country to escape is the Netherlands.  Must be all those bikes.) Source

The black death, still kills 2,000 people a year. (It's caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, a plague that is primarily a disease of wild rodents and is spread by their fleas. It is one of the "oldest identifiable diseases known to man", according to the World Health Organization (WHO), and believe it or not, it has never been wiped out. Luckily nowadays, almost all cases are curable if diagnosed in time.)