John Ashton, a distinguished and respected public health leader, has been a vigorously active President of the UK's Faculty of Public Health (FPH) for the past year. You might therefore have been surprised to read this statement issued by the Faculty last week: "FPH apologises unreservedly for the comments of our President, Professor John Ashton, made during a Twitter exchange on Saturday 6 Sept. Professor Ashton used inappropriate and offensive language, which unnecessarily personalised a public health issue, and we do not condone its use. An investigation is currently underway into the matter...". If you read the tweets referred to by the Faculty, they do seem extreme, even for the uninhibited medium of Twitter and even for John Ashton himself, whose style is refreshingly direct. The subject that precipitated this unfortunate situation was e-cigarettes.
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