TO FEATURE a woman of 5ft 9in who weighs 11st 7lb in an article about 'fatness' ('We're happy to be the fat of the land', 21 November) only perpetuates the view that 'normal' (whatever that is) sized women are overweight.

Sir: You illustrate an article reporting Virginia Bottomley's injunctions about the increasing prevalence of obesity in the UK with a picture of 'a typically high- cholesterol meal' (16 November). But eating cholesterol-rich foods, unless done to great excess, has very little to do with being overweight.

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Sir: I cannot disagree with the conclusions reached by Henry Paul (Letters, 11 October) that tobacco advertising should be banned and that taxes on cigarettes should be increased. However, his misleading statements about the health hazards of smoking cannot be allowed to pass.

AS SHOWN by the 46-stone Glamorgan couple banned as foster parents by their local council on grounds of obesity, seriously overweight people face many difficulties. Those who live in Western society are battered daily by images intended to convey an ideal stereotype. The message of the media, and of advertising in particular, is that all rational, healthy, normal and right- thinking people should strive to conform to these ideals. Women should be slim yet curvaceous; men tallish, muscular and, yes, slim - though since less of their body is generally on view, they will be less severely judged.

THE traveller to the former Soviet Union faces many hazards besides black-marketeers, bureaucrats and bandits. As infrastructure crumbles, there has been a resurgence of disease in Russia and the republics. Fears were raised this week about malaria in Moscow, where there has been a sharp increase in the number of female anopheles mosquitoes, which spread the disease. They are reportedly breeding prolifically in reservoirs around the capital.

EATING disorders are flavour of the month. The public is transfixed by the spectre of anorexia and bulimia, illnesses most people regard with horrified fascination from a safe distance. By contrast, the common or garden disorder - compulsive eating - is largely ignored. Yet most women are affected by it at some time in their lives.

The course of true love never did run smooth. Over at the Coliseum right now it's a positive health hazard. Remember what curiosity did for Judith in Bluebeard's Castle? David Alden's crimson production is back, its potency redoubled under the forceful and poetic musical direction of Adam Fischer. And it has a new and seemingly unlikely bedfellow in The Duel of Tancredi and Clorinda. Monteverdi's tiny opera is a moment lifted from Torquato Tasso's epic poem Jerusalem Delivered and frozen, isolated in time. At the first performance Monteverdi prefaced it with a selection of madrigals: Alden and music director, Harry Bicket, have done the same. 'Snuff Madrigals', Alden has called them - an apt description, for they are a prelude to death. They give the star- crossed lovers a past and a future, an emotional context; they establish relationship, motivations; they almost - it has to be said - overwhelm the opera proper.

GREENPEACE was yesterday accused of needlessly frightening Shetland islanders about long-term health hazards that might be caused by the oil spillage from the tanker Braer.

CARL PREAN and Matthew Syed both produced outstanding victories over Jean-Philippe Gatien, the Olympic silver medallist and English Open champion, as England scored a 4-1 victory over France last night at Grantham in the first international in this country since the glue ban.

The Department of Trade and Industry is to investigate allegations of health hazards to children playing computer games, following reports that two boys in Cardiff had epileptic fits while playing them. Nintendo and Sega, the market leaders, warn players to take regular breaks, advice echoed by doctors. The DTI will speak to the companies and to organisations in the US, where the problem had also arisen.

A REPORT on the dangers of glue-sniffing and of passive inhaling of toxic substances has brought an immediate ban by the International Table Tennis Federation on harmful adhesives used by competitors on their bats, writes James Leigh.

Residents of Gravesend in Kent were told to stay indoors yesterday afternoon when a lorry shed a load of 1,000 litres of potassium cyanide, a 'highly toxic' chemical, outside the town's police station. The spillage happened as the lorry swerved to avoid another

THE GOVERNMENT could be sued over the condition in which it has left Alexander Fleming House, the former headquarters of the Department of Health and Social Security, at Elephant and Castle, south London.