Hard to swallow....

At its best, the human digestive tract functions a like a well-oiled machine: you put nutrition in at one end, the body extracts and processes what it needs as it passes through, and waste products are expelled at the other end.

Quite why anyone would want to take some of those waste products and recycle them through their system is a mystery to me, but the health minister in Cameroon has found it necessary to ban the inhabitants of that country from drinking urine because of the long-term risks to health. Cameroon has apparently seen an upsurge of interest in 'urinotherapy', with advocates claiming that it can cure a range of ailments, from haemorrhoids to baldness, and ulcers to infertility. It has even been said to slow down the progress of snake venom.

The reason for its popularity is not clear: some claim it has always been part of Cameroon's traditional medicine, while others attribute the fashion to a book on 'urinotherapy' published in Switzerland that has become a best seller.

But health minister Urbain Olanguena Awono said: ' Given the risks of toxicity associated in the short, medium and long term with ingesting urine, the health ministry advises against the consumption of urine and invites those who promote the practice to cease doing so forthwith or risk prosecution.'

Further investigation, however, reveals that the practice of drinking urine - both your own and other people's - is almost as old as man himself and prevalent across the globe from the Far East to Yorkshire in the UK and from Switzerland to Barbados. There are case histories of it having been used in the American Civil War to cure severe cases of scurvy, the subjects having first partaken of the pitch from turpentine trees in their prison compound and leaving their urine to stand 'until it began to sour', then taking a 'good swallow' several times a day.

Ice and a slice, anyone?