Up to 100 nurses, lawyers, civil servants and other professional people are contacting Scotland’s national date-rape hotline every year to report being sexually assaulted after having their drinks spiked.

{mosimage}The group Crisis, which operates the country’s only dedicated drug-rape support service, says it is receiving an average of two calls a week, the overwhelming majority coming from professional women who claim they were drugged in wine bars.

The charity says Edinburgh, Aberdeen and Helensburgh are three particular hotspots.

Campaigners say the true scale of the crime is far higher, with some estimates putting the figure at as many as 1,300 victims a year. But police are sceptical about the claims, insisting the common denominator in the cases investigated is the large amount of alcohol drunk by the complainer.

Jane Cumming, from Crisis, the Scottish arm of national date-rape charity The Roofie Foundation, which launched the hotline in 2005, said: “The profile of victims has changed. The calls we are getting are definitely increasingly from the professional classes.

Scotland is “sleepwalking” into a diabetes epidemic that will cause hundreds of thousands of people to die young, experts warn today. Research from Edinburgh University reveals the number of people diagnosed with type-2 diabetes will soar by 60 per cent within the next ten years.

A nursing home manager who spent five years stealing cash from an elderly resident as she lay dying from cancer has escaped a jail sentence. Kerry Smith paid back the cash, despite her 79-year-old victim dying before she saw a penny.