Mission & Justice

28/8/08

The apology to indigenous people and new efforts to close the nation’s yawning health gap have won Australia praise in a major international report which aims to redesign world health. The WHO report has highlighted Australia’s poorest health statistic - the 17-year gap in life expectancy between Aboriginal men and other males - while at the same time giving a global endorsement to new initiatives under federal Labor. The top-level commission praised the February apology to the stolen generation as a good example of a government “recognising the unique history of colonisation on indigenous peoples and the need for special measures”.

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29/8/08

Most Australians would support clinical trials of cannabis for medical use, a new survey has found. More than 23,000 people over the age of 12 were quizzed about their personal use and attitudes to drugs for the 2007 National Drug Strategy Household Survey by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW). Almost 50 per cent of respondents said they would support regulated heroin injecting rooms. The nationwide survey found overwhelming support for legalising cannabis for medical reasons, backed by nearly 70 per cent, while approval of clinical trials for cannabis approached 75 per cent.

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Leslie Cannold; 24/8/08

They’ve done it again. For the third time scientists have found evidence that the contraceptive pill maybe inhibiting women’s capacity to conceive - in more ways than one. Worse, it may be playing havoc with their love lives. The most recent findings, in this month’s Proceedings Of The Royal Society, show that women who take the pill have an altered sense of smell. Specifically, they delight in the scents of men who have a similar - rather than complementary - immune system.

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Rhys Blakely; 21/8/08

The death of 49 babies used to test experimental drugs at one of India’s top hospitals has raised concerns that ethical standards are being compromised as the country becomes the world’s leading destination for clinical trials on human beings. The deaths occurred over a period of 30 months at the Delhi-based All India Institute of Medical Sciences, an elite medical college and public hospital renowned for providing low-cost treatment to the poor.  The dead babies were part of a pool of 4142 infants used in 42 clinical trials - one of the final stages of drug development - at AIIMS since January 2006, many for Western companies. Of the children used in the trials, 2728 were under a year old.

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Editorial; 20/8/08

If the report from Lae yesterday is true – and there seems no reason to doubt it – we can only react in disgust at what appears to be a situation straight out of medieval Europe. The National carried a story of “dead babies and animals, and waste water from the Angau Memorial Hospital morgue … meandering their way down the storm water drains in Lae to the beach”. To this appalling collection of waste is added household refuse, oil slicks from Lae’s maritime role and human waste form the many villagers who use the coastal verges as a convenient latrine. Is there any wonder that Papua New Guinea’s child mortality rate is the worst in the South Pacific?

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Natasha Robinson; 16/8/08

It was a Thursday morning in a suburban Darwin child protection office and Sarah Deery had raised the alarm. The young Irish-born child protection worker had just finished writing up her report of a disturbing visit the previous day to the home of foster carer Denise Reynolds. In the report, Deery documented the obvious distress of a 12-year-child, who had been lying weeping on the kitchen floor of the foster home, later to stagger down the hallway to the bathroom, unsteady on her feet and gripping the walls for support. As Deery’s report landed on the desks of bureaucrats in the Northern Territory’s Department of Family and Community Services on July 12 last year, the child, Deborah Melville, was being carried into the backyard of her foster home in the Palmerston suburb of Woodroffe, outside of Darwin. There she was propped up by a trailer in the dirt. By day’s end, she was dead.

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8/8/08; http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1009368.html

The ultra-Orthodox community has come up with a response to the growing popularity of Israel’s organ-donor cards, also known as Adi cards. The community has issued a new card called a “life card,” which expresses its holders’ wish not to donate organs. The new card states: “I do not give my permission to take from me, not in life or in death, any organ or part of my body for any purpose.” The initiative came after the organ-donor law regulating organ donations in compliance with Jewish law in cases of brain and respiratory death, was approved by the Knesset in March. Sources within the ultra-Orthodox community told Army Radio on Wednesday that organ donation cards were actually a “way of stealing organs from helpless people.”

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4/8/08

Trafficking in body parts has become a global crisis that needs to be combatted in the strongest possible ways. Poverty forces people to sell their kidneys, in particular, to save the lives of richer people, often at the expense of their own lives. Here in Jordan the problem has become more noticeable after the Kidney Society recently disclosed that no less than 35 Jordanians died during the past three years because they traded their kidneys for much needed money. Mohammad Ghneimat, the president of the society, also revealed that 130 Jordanians had undertaken the procedure to alleviate their dire economic conditions. This is despite the fact that the donation or selling and trading of organs for profit is strictly banned in the Kingdom, with traffickers and brokers facing up to five years in jail and a JD20,000 fine. Stricter laws need to be adopted, therefore, to combat the trade in body parts and much harsher penalties imposed on all those who lure poor people into selling their organs.

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Nuha Adlan; 4/8/08

Qasim Al-Enizy is a devoted administrative assistant at King Fahd Medical City, but what he really wants is a job that matches his education: The job of an accountant. The problem is Al-Enizy is bound to his wheelchair. “I am an accountancy graduate, but I was told that working as an accountant needs mobility,” he said. “I tried looking for jobs in other places. I pass all qualification tests, but when it comes to recruiting they raise the issue of their inability to make their workplace accessible to the disabled.”He said he wanted to go to university to gain a more advanced degree, but he can’t afford to hire somebody to help him navigate the streets of Riyadh, which is not the easiest place to get around if you use wheelchairs as a substitute for walking shoes.

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4/8/08

British defence chiefs have admitted that servicemen were exposed to dangerous radiation levels during nuclear tests in Australia and the South Pacific in the 1950s. The dramatic admission, made after years of denials, features in papers filed with the High Court in London by Ministry of Defence lawyers. The Sunday Mirror newspaper said the court papers reveal that the Ministry of Defence now believes that nuclear tests were responsible for the deaths of some British servicemen. However, the ministry insists that only 159 men were affected out of the 20,000 who were present. About 800 former servicemen from Britain, New Zealand and Fiji earlier this year launched a multimillion-dollar lawsuit against the ministry, claiming they had been exposed to dangerous levels of radiation during tests at sites including Maralinga in South Australia and Christmas Island.

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