What’s the first ad you think of when someone says alcohol? Perhaps it is Carlton Draught’s ‘This is a big ad’, or the Canadian Club ‘Over beer?’ series. Chances are, it’s an amusing commercial that comes to mind.
Category: Health
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Death of the critical friend in South Australia
Organisations advocating on behalf of those who otherwise have little say in the decisions which effect their lives can be seen as critical friends of government. They appear to be a threatened species – and we should be alarmed.
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Monty Python and the quest for herd immunity
Like the Holy Grail, ‘herd immunity’ often seems to involve miraculous powers, and its advocacy to contain the Covid-19 pandemic has far more to do with faith than evidence. (more…)
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Australia’s COVID-19 response Part 2: The four successes and four failures
Australia’s response to coronavirus to date has been among the most successful in the world. After an exponential increase that peaked at more than 400 cases a day in late March, daily cases declined to about 20 a month later, with some states recording several successive days or weeks with no new cases. At the same time, rapid growth in infections in almost every other comparable country threatened to overwhelm their health systems.
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Health inequalities: plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose
‘The poorest Australians are twice as likely to die before age 75 as the richest, and the gap is widening. People living in socially disadvantaged areas and outside major cities are much more likely to die prematurely, our new research shows. The study […] reveals this gap has widened significantly in recent years, largely because premature death rates among the least advantaged Australians have stopped improving.’
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Australia’s COVID-19 response Part 1 of 2: the story so far
Australia’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic has been remarkably successful. After an exponential increase that peaked at more than 400 cases a day in late March, daily cases declined to almost zero a month later. (more…)
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Malcolm Turnbull’s ‘political kryptonite’ lesson: Resistance to Big Pharma’s greed can succeed
Australia’s response to US pharmaceutical industry influence in the Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations holds valuable lessons for the coronavirus crisis. (more…)
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PETER BROOKS, STEPHEN DUCKETT and BRIAN OLDENBURG. Telehealth and digital health navigators – a bright future.
Telehealth is not new in Australia but Covid -19 and the new Medicare item numbers have stimulated its rapid adoption across the country. It is clear patients like it. They do not need to expose themselves to potentially dangerous environments such as hospitals and clinics. It saves them time whether in rural or urban environments and it delivers care – and patient education, in their own environment. (more…)
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RAY MOYNIHAN. Many of the world’s most influential medical leaders too cosy with pharma.
A new study of powerful medical leaders in the US finds around three-quarters have financial relationships with drug companies – with some doctors accepting millions. The study could not have been done in Australia, where many doctor-drug company payments remain in the dark.
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JOHN ASHTON. The UK with the world’s second worst response to COVID-19.
The UK response to COVID-19 has been marred by bad decisions in the face of an impending crisis, built on a decade of inadequate resources, planning and organisational preparedness to make the UK second only to the USA in terms of deaths from the virus.
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IAN WEBSTER. The UK and COVID-19; lessons for the UK and some for Australia
It is with bewilderment and concern we watch as COVID-19 overwhelms the UK’s health and social systems. There are lessons to be learnt for Australia, too.
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Lockdown mea culpa: Norway sets an example
On 5 May, the Norwegian Institute of Public Health published an important report on Norway’s experience of dealing with the Coronavirus crisis. The text that follows is a verbatim extract of the equivalent of the executive summary from the report, using Google translation.
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GEORGE BROWNING. Australia’s two personalities-pandemic and climate change
In recent domestic policy and international engagement Australia is demonstrating two contrasting personalities. One is demonstrated through our response to COVID 19 and the other through our troubled inability to form responsible climate and energy policy. Why do we have two personalities? (more…)
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Let’s learn from this pandemic to be better prepared for the really big one
On 26 May, Chief Medical Officer Brendan Murphy said if Australia’s mortality rate matched the UK’s, we’d have had 14,000 Covid-19 deaths. This is just tautological rubbish. It would be just as true and equally pointless to say if Australia’s mortality rate matched Vietnam’s, we’d have zero deaths.
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JEFF KILDEA. How many Australians died of Spanish Flu? Take your pick
The advent of Covid-19 following on so closely from the centenary of Spanish influenza has led to a renewed interest in that last great pandemic. Yet, more than 100 years after the event, there is still a wide discrepancy in the estimates of how many it killed. (more…)
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JOHN CARLIN. Discrimination and Inequality
The Covid-19 virus discriminates against the old. The young are hardly affected. The lockdowns around the world required everyone to live in a cage, young and old. Now that the restrictions are being relaxed, it is inevitable that governments are going to have to discriminate in the same way the virus does – against the old who will be the ones who need the confinement to protect their health, not the young who need jobs and a future. (more…)
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The rise and fall of coronavirus modelling
Will the Great Lockdown’s epitaph be ‘The Greatest Mistake in History’? (more…)
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LESLEY RUSSELL. The Next Community Pharmacy Agreement
In normal, pre-coronavirus pandemic times, we would have expected to see the details and funding for the 7th Community Pharmacy Agreement announced in the May federal budget. But the new agreement, expected to cost some $20 billion over five years, is being negotiated behind closed doors and out of public view.
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ROY HARVEY. The Anzac spirit and the future of health policy
The policies adopted by the Australian governments to fight the Covid-19 crisis are the opposite of the policies that the Coalition Government has pursued for the past 70 years. (more…)
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IAN HICKIE and STEPHEN DUCKETT. Mobilise private resources to cope with the COVID-19 mental health wave
The public-private divide in Australia’s health system disappeared early in the Coronavirus pandemic when all states signed contracts with private hospitals to ensure private beds were available to meet the anticipated tsunami of hospital demand. The same ‘can do’ approach is now urgently required to respond to the second COVID-19 curve, namely the predicted increase in mental ill-health, self-harm, and suicide. (more…)
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DEBORAH GLEESON & DAVID LEGG. Three simple things Australia should do to secure access to treatments, vaccines, tests and devices during the coronavirus crisis (The Conversation 21.4.20)
Patents and related intellectual property rights can present formidable barriers to procuring medicines, vaccines, diagnostic tests and medical devices.
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JOHN WARD. Residential aged care in Covid and beyond
Residential aged care was already struggling before Covid, the arrival of which threatens to collapse the industry. It is surely time to redesign aged care to meet the needs of future generations. (more…)
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Political ambition demands we play the Covid ‘Blame Game’ while Rome still burns
President Donald J Trump claims that carelessness in the Wuhan Institute for Virology saw the Covid-19 virus, which, he insists, was being grown in the Institute, escape, resulting in a disastrous pandemic. (more…)
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CAVAN HOGUE. Science, not politics, must drive an independent and comprehensive Coronavirus inquiry
The whole question of lessons to be learned to help prepare for future pandemics is caught up in international politics and it will be hard for science to defeat politics. We need to examine who handled it well and who not, but this will point the finger at some countries which prefer to do the finger pointing. (more…)
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DAVID FIDLER. The dangerous COVID-19 quest for WHO reform (EAF 10.5.20)
The COVID-19 pandemic has created a health and a political crisis. Political tensions threaten to damage the global fight against the coronavirus. (more…)
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KEN HARVEY. Formal response from the TGA
Dr Ken Harvey has provided the following formal response from the TGA as an update to his article (Pearls and Irritations, 7 May, https://publish.pearlsandirritations.com/ken-harvey-tga-fails-to-act-on-palmers-hydroxychloroquine-advertisements/) (more…)
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IAN WEBSTER: Public health and the nanny state.
Behind our backs, public health became the poor cousin of biomedicine and was dismissed as ‘drains and sewerage’. How wrong we were!
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HAL SWERISSEN. The New Normal: how we’ll live with Covid-19
The Covid-19 restrictions are painful, but they have worked. Some restrictions will soon be lifted. But what will the ‘new normal’ look like? (more…)
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JACK WATERFORD. Digesting the cases being missed
As we cautiously begin to lift the lockdown, if we don’t know who the silent carriers are, how can they play an active role in keeping the community safe? (more…)
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JACK WATERFORD. Asymptomatic Covid cases will give us our next waves
As the Prime Minister and Premiers look to relax COVID-19 restrictions, we still need to be wary of the significant proportion of asymptomatic cases. (more…)