H5N1 Turkey: the meat may be safe once cooked ...

... but what about the blood that drips off the meat when unwrapped from its packaging? Or the blood left on the chopping board that then goes into the washing-up bowl? Or the blood wiped up by the kitchen cloth?

The H5N1 virus is apparently killed by exposure to 70 degrees C for just one second. That does make it unlikely that cooked meat would infect humans.

But to believe that blood of infected turkeys is OK to handle in a domestic kitchen? That seems like blind optimism.

Is silence on this a result of lack of foresight, or a wish to "maintain public confidence" whatever the actual risk?

Postscript - the Food Standards Agency website has a wonderful example of how to hide a scary message in soothing prose:

"Our long standing advice is that you should always wash your hands after handling raw poultry meat and eggs to avoid contamination from any bugs. In countries where avian flu is present in poultry, this will also help prevent contamination with the virus."

Thank heavens they aren't responsible for giving Road Safety advice. They'd come up with something like: "Our long standing advice is always to open your eyes before crossing a road. On roads with traffic, this will help prevent injury." Most people would expect to hear something more like: "Roads are dangerous, and you can get killed if you try to cross the road with your eyes closed".

The dangers of parking at Liverpool Airport

Liverpool airport tried to hit me for a £10 admin fee when their system took an erroneous payment from me.

Airport parking has become another example of the "book ahead or pay a penalty" culture.

Book ahead to park at Liverpool Airport, and you will pay usefully less than if you just show up unbooked. But where other airports seem to have a robust system for handling advance bookings, the Liverpool system has a big flaw in it: beware.

Having booked, you don't get a voucher - just a booking reference. The instructions (at least when I parked there in October 2006) were to note the number to quote if necessary, but that this would probably not be needed, as their system would identify me on exit from my Credit Card number.

Because the advance-booker has no ticket of any kind, the system relies on your inserting the same credit card as you booked with into the exit machine. There was no help button I could find, and the area is badly lit.

In my case, I put in my wife's Credit Card by mistake - but I could as easily have misremembered which of my credit cards I had used originally, or I could even have had a new credit card number issued by my bank. In any of these cases, inserting the credit card into the exit machine does not ask you to confirm that you want to pay as an unbooked customer. It simply helps itself to your funds (no PIN required) and tells you it has done so.

Call the airport, and you learn that they will only refund part of the erroneous payment - they want to keep £10 for Admin Costs. Amazed by the bare-faced greed of this, I checked with the head of Marketing at Peel Holdings as to whether this was really right - he bounced me straight back to the airport, who insisted that they were going to keep £10.

I disputed the transaction with my Credit Card company - I pointed out that I had inserted the card for the purpose of indentification and not for the purpose of authorising a payment. After a lot of form-filling and a two-month wait, I got the full refund.

But it shouldn't be like this. If Peel Holdings install a system that uses credit cards ambiguously (the card has to be inserted into the same slot whether for indentification or for payment, and the system does not ask the user which they intend) - then the very least they need to do is to refund fully and promptly when a payment is taken wrongly.

Their conduct with me suggests that they are more concerned with extracting every penny they can mug from their users than with any concept of decent behaviour.

Advertising Standards Agency - not really keen on complaints

The Advertising Standards Authority should encourage whistleblowing against dishonest advertising. Every time a consumer finds that an advert has misled them, they are going to pay less attention to similar ads - and that will hit honest advertisers as much as it will hit the cheats.

But try complaining to Advertising Standards and you find:

• Their online form is designed by a pedant or an idiot. Tell them that you are complaining about Direct Mail, and it demands that you tell them where you saw it. In the kitchen? Living Room? On the train opening my mail just as I went through Haywards Heath? What does it matter? This is a stupid question to ask about Direct Mail, and the person who speicified that the webform should demand an answer for such a meaningless combineation needs a bit of re-education.
  
• You are required to send them a copy of Direct Mail materials (sensible enough) - but if you choose to scan the document (which will be the most convenient option for many complainants), the system has a fixed limit of three documents. The direct mail item I scanned was larger than A4, and double-sided. That makes four scan documents. Not allowed
• If you try sending a large document (I resorted to zipping my four documents into a single file), their system times out and you lose all the information you have typed in. (This happened twice, with Firefox and with Opera browsers).
• There is a "send us the item by post" option, but it is an ordinary mailing address - which adds the hurdle of getting the item into the post, and finding a stamp. If they had the wit (or generosity) to offer a Freepost address, fewer people would decide not to bother, or not get round to sending the offending item.

So, a pretty pathetic experience. Is the ASA a bit of a fig-leaf?