It’s Friday, the 13th, so maybe I shouldn’t be surprised to see how the press hell seems to be breaking lose! Today the main news seem to be findings of the reasearch conducted by the British Medical Journal – its main conclusion is that body piercing becomes more and more popular and along popularity come health risks and expenses related to treating various infections caused by body piercings, done both DIY way and in dodgy piercing shops: several interesting links!
The links above, and many other articles on the subject published today (like this one providing some data from the US), juggle with numbers and statistics showing how popular body piercing became in the UK. Just for balance’s sake, here’s an article presenting the data from Germany: marked forever and a very general article on the subject from Argentina (this one’s in Spanish).
Another approach is to just laugh it off: Body piercing research omits historical origins!
I finally got rid of the tremendous backlog of the links from the weekend, so I’m going to be more proactive with the newsfeed.
Aniareads Weblog 
That British Medical Journal research I thought was very interesting, estimating that 1 in 10 people in England now have non-ear body piercings. It’s good that they concluded for calling for better education over the health risks and treatment, although it might have been useful had they said how the 1% of piercings which go wrong seriously enough to require a stay in hospital compares with the comparable figures for other accidental skin cuts, wounds and infections.