In her article entitled "Led by Chris Fearne, the breast fascists up the ante" (TMIS, 31 August), Daphne Caruana Galizia saw fit to aim her poison pen at Malta's medical establishment. A few days later, on 18 September, she once again mobilized her resources to criticize people who rightly expressed outrage over the killing of storks and other protected bird ("A stork is not more important than 500 people", TMID, 18 September). 

What makes these two articles (and many others like them) especially pernicious is Ms Caruana Galizia's cunning device of masquerading her petty prejudices as wisdom. Her approach is not based on logic or truth but more on making fun of people with whom she disagrees or, worse, insulting them collectively to their face. Besides being based on flimsy premises, both these opinion pieces attacked people who were doing something inherently good. In the first instance she ignored scientific truth and attacked the medical establishment for proposing a positive health measure; in the second she poured scorn on people for expressing concern about a burning local problem and expressing their outrage at the killing of endangered species by hunters and poachers.

In her article on breastfeeding, Ms Caruana Galizia went into paroxysms of feminist self-righteousness over the planned introduction of a ban on advertising of infant milk formula with the object of encouraging mothers to breastfeed their infants during the first six months of life. Rather than any attempt at logical argument, she launched straight into an epic insultathon against medical and health staff who backed this measure. Such people, she screeched imperiously, are a bunch of "bossy-boots", "breastfeeding Nazis" and chauvinists. Female medical staff who supported this measure were compared to women who "stood about in morbid relish and spite" and watched, presumably in medieval times, other women "burned at the stake for witchcraft and sorcery". Encouraging mothers to breastfeed their infants, she screamed, was nothing less than "fundamentalism", a "mad campaign aimed at the control of women". Sinking into yet deeper paranoia, Ms Caruana Galizia told us, breathlessly, that the aim of these 'Nazis' was to hound and bully women into breastfeeding with a "freakish obsession" to "weld infants to their mother's teats". To crown this load of  disagreeable hysteria, Ms Caruana Galizia asserted ignorantly that this was "not about health but about misogyny" - when the entire object of encouraging mothers to breastfeed their infants is precisely that of safeguarding  the future health of their infants. Such serious bias and dangerous misinformation needs correcting with some factual details on the subject:

A ban on formula infant milk was recommended by the World Health Organisation (WHO) many years ago. It was adopted by many governments around the world. The reason for WHO's concern was that unduly aggressive promotion of infant milk formula by Big Industry had resulted in a significant decline of breastfeeding with consequent health disadvantages and more frequent disease in artificially fed infants. This ban assumed especial significance in less developed countries where, depending on the circumstances, artificially fed infants could be up to 25 times more likely to die of diarrhoea and four times more likely to die of pneumonia than a breastfed child. Such infants were also more subject to malnutrition when, as often happened, mothers used less powdered milk formula in feeds to save money. It is estimated that, over and above ill-health in growing infants, the use of formula milk is responsible, worldwide, for the death of at least one million babies each year. 

In plain language, an evidence-based health policy aimed at optimizing infants health by prohibiting promotion of artificial feeding of infants with formula milk has been fiercely rubbished by a columnist of a respected newspaper. Such bigoted misguided writing has potential for harm.  

In her other article of 18 September, "A stork is not more important than 500 people," Ms Caruana Galizia resorts to trying to make people feel guilty by expressing her astonishment that the news about the drowning of 500 Palestinian 'boat people' off Malta attracted few or no blog comments from internet readers while the story about a stork being shot elicited hundreds of comments. In this case, her tactic was to score cheap points by callously exploiting  a tragic but totally unrelated issue to deride people for expressing concern about a controversial local issue, the  slaughter of protected bird species by local hunters and poachers (and hunting in general), which has pitted two sections of the population against each other.

That the drowning of these 500 people, consequent on the unfolding turmoil in Eastern Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, is an abhorrent tragedy on an unimaginable scale elicited few or no website comments comes as no surprise. Of course we are all horrified by such events, but does  Ms Caruana Galizia expect us average mortals to engage on a subject of such enormity that even politicians and heads of states are at a loss what to do or what to say? Issues of great international significance as the circumstances surrounding this recent tragic loss of life are so staggering that one is left helpless and speechless. Does Ms Caruana Galizia really think that the average blogger can come up with solutions and change the world by commenting on the local blogosphere? Does she honestly think that Putin, Bashir Assad or other tin-pot dictators are going to gasp and shiver in their boots and mend their ways when they read our newspaper blogs? Does she think that, on account of this international issue of such tragic dimensions, we should ignore all else?

If Ms Caruana Galizia were true to herself,  then she should not have the bare-faced cheek to treat her readers with disdain and accuse them loftily of being "only capable of surface reasoning and frivolity" when she herself regularly churns out insulting bling trivialities. Exploiting such tragic events to intimidate readers and make them feel guilty places her exactly in the same category she incorrectly attributes to her readers, namely, that of herself belonging to "the silliest, stupidest and most shallow members of our society".

Dr George Debono

Sliema