Doctor and activist
25/04/2020
Giving Out Money is not easy. Many are worried about big charities- how much actually gets to the people who need it? The government has not managed to give out the Bushfire relief money and it seem that neither has the Red Cross. Now they are promising help for the Corona Virus epidemic- do they […]
25/04/2020
US Sanctions will worsen virus effects in South America. The US does not like the Bolivarian Government of Venezuela. The fact that it is called after Simon Bolivar, who achieved independence of many South American countries gives away the orientation of the government, and is a Socialist government, which nationalised the Oil company and has […]
25/04/2020
25 March 2020 The trial of Witness K, the whistleblower who told of Australia’s bugging of the East Timorese Cabinet room during the maritime border negotiations has been going on in secret in Canberra. What has Australia come to? This is what we heard Russia did during the Cold War. The government does dirty deals […]
25/04/2020
24 March 2020 I am bombarded by posts warning of the dangers of 5G transmission towers. There were similar dire warnings when microwave ovens came out, so I was inclined to dismiss this, but decided that I should read up. This is the result. We need to put all this into its theoretical framework. Electromagnetic […]
25/04/2020
24 April 2020 It is ANZAC Day again and we are urged as always, ‘Lest We Forget’. It is right and proper to remember the heroism and sacrifice of our troops, and to reflect that we are lucky to have lived our lives without having to risk them in battle. But the distorted perspective of […]
22/04/2020
22 April 2020 Ansett Airlines collapsed in 2002 and nearly took Air NZ, its owner with it. It had 40% of the market at that time. It had had subsidies, but continued to lose money. Virgin Blue, a cheap carrier had just come into the market and may have gone broke had Ansett not collapsed […]
22/04/2020
22 April 2020 The COVID-19 crisis highlights the failure of market mechanisms. The lack of good health care in the USA will highlight how private medicine simply does not deliver the health care people need. The same can be said in Australia, though we still had a bit more public system to build on. But […]
12/04/2020
12 April 2020
Prof John Ashton CBE, Ex-President of UK Faculty of Public Health is extremely critical of the Johnson government’s management of the corona virus epidemic. He says that the idea of herd immunity was an absurd one and amounted to an unlikely theory being preferred to information that had come from overseas, including China, which had initially covered up but once the WHO had come in were forthcoming of their experience in managing the epidemic.
The current problems include lack of PPE (Personal Protective Equipment), ventilators and even oxygen are because of the lack of recognising the seriousness of the problem and failure to order equipment and to prepare.
He urges more attention to cleaners and porters who are as important as doctors in nurses in the spread of virus in a hospital environment, but the class system, which lessens their importance, has meant that they have not had enough attention to their PPE and this will lead to spread.
The other aspect is Private Public Partnerships, which have seen the creeping privatisation of health in Britain. He makes the point that there are no longer Community Nurses to trace contacts of the corona virus in the community as private corporations only do what is in their contracts, and are only of peripheral use in a pandemic. He wants a fundamental re-think of the privatisation of health, and a real investigation of who made what decisions when, not merely the outcome of awards to people who were high in the hierarchy, however incompetent their decisions.
Many countries have had health systems inappropriately evolved to deal with an infectious disease pandemic. How well countries have done is measure of the flexibility and responsiveness of their political systems as well as their health systems. His view is the UK has not done well.
We all need to look at our governments in the light of how well they responded to this challenge. The danger is that initial dilatoriness will then be replaced by authoritarianism, imposed on people while they are frightened.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBm7LCeOzHU&feature=emb_rel_end
02/04/2020
2 April 2020 This is now a current question because of a French trial. When a new disease comes there is a rush to test existing substances to see if they work. When AIDS arrived, many drugs were tested. One drug, acyclovir was found to help. Acyclovir had been developed as an anti-leukaemia drug but […]