Category: Health

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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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…)

Will the Great Lockdown’s epitaph be ‘The Greatest Mistake in History’? (more…)

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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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…)

Patents and related intellectual property rights can present formidable barriers to procuring medicines, vaccines, diagnostic tests and medical devices.

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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…)

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…)

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…)

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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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…)

Indonesia’s second president General Soeharto had a fix-all to calm restless citizens demanding improvements. He’d pronounce a numbered plan. (more…)

As the COVID 19 infection curve flattens and we look forward to a potential easing of restrictions on the lives we once knew, it is appropriate to start contemplating what sort of world we want to create “on the other side”. (more…)

When we meet people walking towards us, have you noticed how anxious many look? Anxiety can be damaging to mental health. What can we do to help reduce damaging anxiety? (more…)

By the end of February 1919 the NSW government, by prompt and strict measures, had, in today’s parlance, ‘flattened the curve’. But the worst was still to come.

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For many of us, forced to work at home or to not work at all, the COVID-19 crisis has driven home the importance of mental health and how work interacts with our sense of wellbeing. (more…)

Global military spending continues to rise. Critical health goals could be achieved for a fraction of what we spend on wars. Focussing funding on health rather than military spending, globally and in Australia, would create more jobs, healthier communities, and budgetary savings. (more…)

COVID-19 is the worst pandemic Australia has faced since the visit of the ‘Spanish Lady’ just over a century ago. What lessons can we learn from that earlier experience?

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The privacy versus safety debate around coronavirus tracking and tracing technology examines the wrong dilemma. Choosing the right tracking solution is equally important. (more…)

The coronavirus presents us with a paradox: none of us want to catch it, but all of us wish we had recovered from it. It is only a matter of time before those who have had it will be given more freedoms than the rest. (more…)