BiancaNogrady.com

Waste Not - a film by the Total Environment Centre

2011-04-11T17:44:00.003+10:00

We lived in a world of waste. Vast amounts of limited resources are discarded into landfill each day, representing a loss that can never be recouped. But what if all this waste could instead be turned into opportunity? In its brilliant documentary Waste Not, the Total Environment Centre explores what we waste, how we waste it, and what people are doing about it. Featuring interviews with people such as Sustainable House author Michael Mobbs, Tetsuya head chef Luke Powell and The Sixth Wave co-authors Bianca Nogrady and James Bradfield Moody, Waste Not has already won awards at short film festivals and was launched on April 7 2011 by Sydney Lord Mayor Clover Moore. The trailer for Waste Not can be seen here.

Speech at the Innovative Industries Conference 2010, Caloundra

2010-09-18T09:37:00.004+10:00

I had the honour of giving a presentation at the recent 2010 Innovative Industries Conference on the Sunshine coast, talking about the sixth wave of innovation and how to succeed in a resource-limited world.

The conference is a fantastic think-tank opportunity for small to medium enterprise. Speakers covered a range of important subjects including marketing, attracting business opportunities, creating cultures for innovation, and innovating in a resource-limited world.

For more information, visit the conference website at www.innovativeindustriesconference.com.au.

Insurance companies: unlikely planet saviours

2010-07-05T14:19:00.005+10:00

From ABC Environment, 5 July 2010:

Insurance companies stand to lose a lot of money if the climate changes in unpredictable ways so they have become partners in the push to save the globe.

EVEN ON THE ALREADY enlarged scale of renewable energy projects, DESERTEC is ambitious. It aims to build more than 16,000 square kilometres of solar thermal and wind power plants in the sun-drenched deserts of North Africa and the Middle East. It would meet most of the power needs of those regions and supply at least 15 per cent of Europe's electricity by 2050, backed by an enormous high-voltage DC grid. The cost? A cool 400 billion Euros.

The money has to come from somewhere, and the DESERTEC project, initiated by the environmental think tank, the Club of Rome, is backed by a consortium of some of the world's most powerful blue chip companies, led by reinsurance giant Munich Re.

It may come as a surprise to see an insurance company at the head of list, given how notoriously tight-fisted the insurance industry is. But what's even more surprising is that Munich Re is not alone in sinking staggering amounts of money into a vision of a sustainable future. All around the world, including Australia, the insurance industry is doing what few other industries, and even fewer governments are prepared to do - putting their money where their environmental mouth is. Read more.

Waste to wonderful

2010-06-21T21:07:00.004+10:00

From ABC Environment, 21 June 2010:

Under our noses, our bottoms, in our garbage bins, on our streets and in our landfills is waste. Lots of it. But for some very lateral-thinking entrepreneurs, finding the waste, meant finding an opportunity to make money. The 10 ideas that follow are no simple cash-a-can exchange scheme, however. They are some of the oddest uses for waste you're likely to hear. Read more.

How to be a successful freelancer

2010-06-13T20:47:00.003+10:00

Interested in getting into the wonderful world of freelance journalism? Founder of the Sydney Writers Centre Valerie Khoo and Bianca Nogrady recently gave a talk to the NSW branch of the Australian Science Communicators about how to be a successful freelance journalist.

Bianca's top five tips on how to succeed in freelancing are:

1. Use your networks and contacts

2. Find good stories and pitch them to the right publications

3. Write good, comprehensive pitches

4. Make your editor's life easy

5. Keep up-to-date on your areas of interest

Find out more here.

What would nature do?

2010-05-22T10:29:00.007+10:00

From ABC Science Online, 20 May 2010:
It's a simple question, and one we're going to be asking ourselves more and more over the coming years. Why? Because that simple question is going to save the planet.
Humanity has made spectacular technological progress over the last couple of centuries. We are healthier, wealthier, more mobile, better educated, more interconnected and more comfortable than ever before thanks to innovations ranging from cars to computers and MRIs to mobile phones. But there's one field in which we still perform abysmally —resource efficiency.
We waste an appalling amount of resources such as oil, energy and fresh water. Our cars waste around 85 per cent of the energy put into them, transmission losses from the power grid are as high as 10 per cent and our industrial processes generate huge amounts of waste such as pollution and heat. After more than two centuries of rampant, unsustainable resource consumption, we are now facing the very real possibility that some of those resources are going to run out, or at least become prohibitively expensive to extract.
The solutions are to be found in the same place we plunder. Nature has been playing the sustainability game for around 3.8 billion years, and has become extremely good at it. The natural world is balanced, efficient, resilient and responsive. It has to be because, as Charles Darwin so elegantly explained, only the fittest — those best suited to their environment — survive to pass on their genetic material.
A creature that lives beyond its means, that is dependent on resources transported from far away, that relies on combustion for energy, that discards much of what it uses and which pollutes its environment can hardly be described as well suited to the environment.
In contrast, in the natural environment, nothing is wasted. It's a closed-loop system where the outputs of one process eventually become the inputs of other processes. Nature uses only what it needs, and recycles everything.
And so, as we stare down the barrel of dwindling resources, an increasingly polluted environment and climate change, many are looking to Nature for inspiration. Read more.

The Sixth Wave of innovation

2010-05-04T12:55:00.001+10:00

From ABC Environment, 4 April 2010:
If we were in an action movie right now, we'd be thinking, "How can the hero possibly escape from this, kill the baddie, win the girl and save the planet?"
The global financial crisis has sent shockwaves through the world's economies the likes of which have not been experienced since the Great Depression. Peak oil, diminishing fresh water supplies, global food shortages and dwindling resources hang over us like the Sword of Damocles; an avalanche of waste threatens to engulf us and climate change menaces us with future catastrophe.
But a hero may yet save the day. What if these factors were all pointing to, and part of, a much bigger picture - one which presents a far more optimistic and exciting view of the next thirty years of humankind? Read more.

The Sixth Wave book

2010-03-10T14:26:00.002+11:00

After nearly two years of work, The Sixth Wave book is finally in print. This is a collaboration with James Bradfield Moody, and explores the next wave of innovation - the sixth wave.
Since the Industrial Revolution, the tide of progress has ebbed and flowed: five distinct waves, each starting with disruptive new technologies and ending with a global depression, have transformed our industries, societies and economies almost beyond recognition. We are now on the cusp of another massive transformation – the sixth wave.
In this wave a spectacular boom in technology and powerful new markets will drive a shift away from resource dependence to a new way of life: resource efficiency. Waste will be a source of opportunity and nature a source of inspiration.
The Sixth Wave is a business book, a motivational book, a bold prediction and a roadmap to the future. It is for anyone interested in understanding how the next wave of innovation will change our lives, and how to succeed in a resource-limited world.
For more information, visit www.sixthwave.org.

Deep into the red

2009-07-01T15:53:00.003+10:00

From Scientific American, July 2009 (online May 8, 2009):
Mind control has been traditionally the realm of the hypnotist, but research in the field of fluorescent proteins is opening up the possibility of controlling cellular processes, gene activity and even behavior using nothing more than infrared light.
Fluorescent proteins, which are compounds that can absorb and then emit light, have become a powerful instrument in the cell biologist's toolkit—so powerful, in fact, that the discovery and development of green fluorescent proteins from jellyfish earned the 2008 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. These proteins have limitations, however: They need to be excited with the blue to orange part of the visible spectrum, at wavelengths of 495 to 570 nanometers. These wavelengths of light are too short to penetrate tissue very well, and so green fluorescent proteins are mainly used in test tube studies to watch cell division or to label certain cell types.
But one of the 2008 Nobelists, Roger Y. Tsien of the University of California, San Diego, and his U.C.S.D. colleagues report in today's issue of Science that they have developed a new fluorescent protein that could enable scientists to tag and visualize cellular activity as it happens inside a live animal. The protein, after absorbing light from the far-red part of the spectrum, shines in the near-infrared, at wavelengths of around 700 nanometers. Read more.

Web diagnosis: healthy searching

2009-04-08T19:47:00.001+10:00

From the ABC Health and Wellbeing , 18 March 2009:
David's troubles began after a trip to the Middle East. It might have been the hefty dose of food poisoning he copped, or the fact he spent much of the trip lugging someone else's heavy luggage. Either way, it did not come as a huge surprise that he developed a pain in his abdomen when he came home.
He was referred to a couple of gastroenterologists who, after numerous, apparently inconclusive investigations, diagnosed him with irritable bowel syndrome and recommended some dietary interventions.
Unfortunately, the doctors were wrong, and David, a 33-year-old environmental lawyer, suffered two years of often excruciating pain because it didn't cross his mind that his doctors might have missed something.
In the end, an entry in a medical book caught his eye, prompting David to type 'hernia' into a search engine. "The symptoms matched it absolutely perfectly," he says. "I went to local GP in Sydney, described the symptoms and said 'I think I've got a hernia'." The GP agreed, performed a simple on-the-spot test and confirmed the diagnosis within 60 seconds. Why was such a simple diagnosis missed? David thinks it may have been because he was being investigated by gastroenterologists, and "to a guy with a hammer, everything looks like a nail".
David is one of millions of Australians who use the internet to find health information. We use it to try and diagnose ourselves (with varying degrees of success), to learn more about a new diagnosis, to make contact with people who share our conditions, to understand a symptom that may not initially be worth visiting a doctor for, or just to keep ourselves that little bit more informed about the state of our bodies. Read more.

United front tracks silent menace

2009-04-08T19:39:00.001+10:00

From The Australian, 4 April 2009:
THEY are called "silent angels", little girls with beautiful faces, touched by a random genetic mutation that has rendered them speechless and robbed them of their chance of a normal life.
Meredith Drakes is one of these silent angels. Now 21, she cannot speak or walk, is wheelchair-bound and dependent on her parents. Her only means of communication is her eyes and hands, which her mother, Astrid Drakes, says she puts to good use.
"She communicates things like her gratitude; she leans across, looks at your eyes, pats your arm," Astrid Drakes says.
At age two, Meredith was diagnosed with a rare and poorly understood condition called Rett syndrome. The diagnosis came only after her worried parents had been bounced from expert to expert, each with their own thoughts on what might be causing Meredith's strange symptoms and behaviours. Read more.

When push comes to scalpel

2009-03-07T14:26:00.001+11:00

From The Australian, 7 March 2009:
When a journalist from The New York Times asked British mountaineer George Mallory why he was planning to scale Mt Everest, the reply was simple: "Because it's there." I feel the same way about a drug-free childbirth.
When confronted with the opinion that because modern medicine has developed the pain-free, push-free labour, all women should fall over themselves in gratitude, I can't help but think of Mallory. Why do I aspire to a drug-free and hopefully intervention-free labour? Because I can.
There's more to it than the notion that simply because my female ancestors did it this way, I should too. My female ancestors were far likelier to die in childbirth because of a lack of basic sanitation or bleed to death because physicians of the day had limited surgical skills or knowledge. Their babies also were on the wrong side of the survival odds thanks to pathogens and complications.
I am eternally grateful to be pregnant and facing labour in this era, when I am confident my doctors will be able to fend off almost all the threats that in the not-so-distant past may have put my life, and that of my baby, at risk.
But I am a healthy, fit 33-year-old woman who has been lucky enough to have a pretty normal pregnancy so far.
I'm not quite in the right shape to scale Mt Everest, but I'm approaching labour with the same sense of expectation, excitement, trepidation and motivation. Read more.

Sun, surf and sutures

2009-03-04T15:10:00.002+11:00

From Australian Doctor, 3 March 2009:
IT should have been a routine operation: a knee arthroplasty for an elderly man that would have cost about $15,000 and kept the patient off his feet for perhaps a few weeks. There would have been some small risks of complications, but in a high- standard health care environ ment such as Australia, it should have been simple.
But the patient — perhaps frustrated by the prospect of being put on a waiting list or unwilling to face the full cost of undergoing the procedure at a private facility — decided to travel to India for the operation. It was a decision both he, and his doctors, would come to regret.
Instead of enjoying a quick trip up the waiting lists, spending just $8600 on his procedure and getting a holiday in exotic India, the patient developed a post-oper ative infection with Mycobacterium fortuitum. Four operations, countless doses of antibiotics and $140,000 later, the sad story of this otherwise straightforward procedure came to a close.
Toowoomba orthopaedic surgeon Dr Anthony Wilson was one of those charged with the unenviable task of cleaning up the mess — a task made even more frustrating given the patient was originally his.
“People take it upon themselves to go overseas, but the problem is if they have com plications,” Dr Wilson says. “We’re stuck with it and we don’t know what they did, what antibiotics they used; we’re completely in the dark about how to treat this person.”
It’s not the first case of medical tourism gone wrong, and it certainly won’t be the last. As more countries, including Australia, realise the dollar potential of touting their medical services to overseas clients; as more individuals decide they can get their procedure done cheaper, faster or better in another country; and as international travel becomes ever easier and cheaper, medical tourism is on the rise. Read more.

Screening for fragile X sidelined

2009-02-23T08:59:00.004+11:00

From The Australian, 21 February 2009:
Emerging into the cold, harsh light of the delivery room can hardly be a pleasant experience for newborns. And to add insult to injury, just as they are adapting to this new world a baby's delicate, soft heel is assaulted with a needle and several drops of blood are drawn.
It's only a brief torment, and one that has the potential to save that baby's life. Those few drops of blood are used to diagnose a range of diseases, where early diagnosis and intervention can make a huge difference to that child's quality of life. Newborn screening has saved countless children from the worst ravages of conditions such as phenylketonuria -- a genetic disorder that can damage brain development but which can be minimised with dietary changes if caught early.
But this screening is far from comprehensive. One disorder not currently on the testing list is fragile X syndrome -- something that researchers from Australia and the US are now working to change.
Fragile X syndrome is the most common cause of inherited intellectual disability, even though it affects only about one in 3600 males and between one in 4000 and one in 6000 females. It's caused by a genetic abnormality on the X chromosome, where a single sequence of three DNA base pairs is repeated far too many times, with devastating consequences. Read more.

A bug for a bug for a bug

2009-02-17T16:03:00.002+11:00

From Scientific American, March 2009:
Even in the teeming and varied world of bacteria, Wolbachia is something of a standout. Within its insect host, the bacterium acts as a gender-bending, egg-killing, DNA-hijacking parasite that is passed down from one generation to the next via the female to her eggs. Hosted by at least one fifth of all insect species, it is possibly the most prolific parasite on earth. But now Wolbachia itself is being hijacked, to help humans gain the upper hand in the long-running war against mosquito-borne diseases. Read more.

Gut bacteria reveals human migration

2009-01-24T09:44:00.002+11:00

From ABC Science, News in Science, 23 January 2009:
A bacterial parasite known to cause stomach ulcers is shedding new light on ancient patterns of human migration across the Pacific region, according to an international study.
In the latest edition of Science, researchers report that their study of the distribution of Helicobacter pylori genotypes has given further weight to the theory that Australia was first populated around 30,000 years ago.
H. pylori is particularly useful for studying the movement of human populations because it is extremely widespread, and is transmitted from mother to child.
Co-author Professor Barry Marshall, a microbiologist at the University of Western Australia, says H. pylori is a lot like mitochondrial DNA, which is also used to investigate human migration patterns.
"You catch [H. pylori] off your mother," says Marshall. "All of us carry our mothers' mitochondrial DNA and that goes all the way back through the generations."
H. pylori has a further advantage in that it contains thousands of genes, compared to just 37 genes in mDNA, and differs between populations.
"It was found over [the] last few years that each human racial group carried a Helicobacter that was relatively unique in that group," Marshall says. Read more.

The vaccine revolution

2009-01-13T11:55:00.003+11:00

From Pathway magazine, the Royal College of Pathologists of Australasia, Winter 2008:
Being a baby one hundred years ago was a pretty dicey affair. Up to one in three would not live to see their first birthday, instead falling victim to any one of a long list of diseases including smallpox, diphtheria, measles, tetanus and whooping cough. Even if they did successfully run the gauntlet of these killers, they still had a lifetime of fighting ahead of them. Something as simple as a scratch could lead to an untreatable and possibly fatal infection.
All that changed in 1796. A rural English doctor called Edward Jenner discovered that inoculating a person with material from a cowpox lesion protected them against subsequent smallpox infection, and the first vaccine was born.
Since then, widespread immunisation has lead to the complete eradication of smallpox and, in the developed world, almost relegated infectious diseases such as polio, diphtheria, tetanus and measles to the pages of medical history. Read more (pdf file, page 22).

This sound barrier can be broken

2009-01-13T08:06:00.002+11:00

From The Australian, 10 January 2009:
At age two years and seven months, William Long is already an unstoppable chatterbox. “People say ‘oh my goodness, he really doesn’t stop talking’,” says his mother Sandra. Not that this would normally be considered that unusual, except for the fact that William is profoundly deaf, and has been since birth.
The discovery when their son was just three days old that he could not hear a sound came as a huge shock to Sandra and her husband. Neither had any family history of hearing problems, and no apparent cause could be found for William’s condition.
“I had this baby and I thought I can’t talk to him and he can’t hear me so I sort of shut down,” Sandra recalls. “I didn’t develop that loving bond.”
Thankfully, a chance meeting at an early intervention centre brought the Long family into contact with Dimity Dornan, founder of the Hear and Say Centre—a not-for-profit organisation that specialises in teaching hearing-impaired children to listen and speak through a program called auditory-verbal therapy.
As a result of that meeting, and receiving cochlear implants, William is now a consummate conversationalist who is scoring well above his age in auditory comprehension—what he understands—and expressive communication. He embodies the results of a recent study showing auditory-verbal therapy effectively levels the playing field for deaf children with cochlear implants in terms of speech, listening and language development. Read more in newspaper.

Sleep longer for healthier arteries

2009-01-07T11:30:00.003+11:00

From 6minutes.com.au, 5 January 2009:
A single extra hour of sleep can reduce the five-year risk of coronary artery calcification by 33%, according to research published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
The five-year study of nearly 500 healthy, middle-aged Americans found the coronary benefits of sleep remained even after adjusting for potential confounders such as age, smoking status, apnoea risk and other cardiac risk factors such as lipid levels and blood pressure.
The effect of sleep, or lack of, was so significant, the authors suggested sleep could rank alongside other more established coronary risk factors.
“The modelled effect of one additional hour of sleep on the odds of incident calcification was equal to the modelled effect of a 16.5mmHg decrease in systolic blood pressure,” researchers wrote.
Earlier research had already implicated sleep quality and quantity as a correlate of risk factors ranging from glucose and appetite regulation to inflammation and obesity.
However many of these studies relied on subjects’ self-reporting of sleep habits.
In this study, researchers chose a more objective measure of sleep duration and quality by using wrist activity monitors.
Researchers suggested a number of potential explanations for the association, including as-yet-unknown common factors affecting both sleep and calcification, mediators such as inflammation or cortisol, or diurnal variations in calcification. Read more.

Smacking ban could help save children's lives

2009-01-07T11:24:00.004+11:00

From 6minutes.com.au, 5 January 2009:
Outlawing corporal punishment of children, and improved detection of early psychotic illness in mothers, could go a long way towards reducing the number of child homicides in Australia, according to research in the Medical Journal of Australia this week.
A study of 165 child homicides found 27 deaths were caused by offenders experiencing acute psychotic illness, and more than half of these offenders—almost all mothers, many from non-English speaking backgrounds—had never been treated with antipsychotic medication.
“Patients in first-episode psychosis had shown signs of mental illness for an average of six months and had acute psychotic symptoms for an average of six weeks before the homicide,” the authors wrote.
Most of these offenders had had some contact with health services in the two weeks before the homicide.
Child abuse was the most common reason for child homicide, blamed for 59 deaths including five from methadone overdose.
The authors suggested that reducing the incidence of child abuse by banning corporal punishment of children—an intervention already shown to be effective in Sweden—could help prevent some child homicides.
From 1987 to 2001, 437 Australian children aged under 15 years were murdered, with the highest incidence of child homicide being in children under one year old, the authors found.
The figures compare rather unfavourably with the United Kingdom. Australian children aged 0-4 are around 50% more likely, and those aged 5–15 years are twice as likely, to die by homicide compared to their British counterparts. Read more.

Head-banging hammers the brain

2009-01-07T11:21:00.003+11:00

From ABC Science Online, News in Science, 18 December 2008:
Led Zeppelin's immortal song 'Dazed and Confused' might well have been a clinical observation on the state of their audience's brains, say Australian researchers who have found over-enthusiastic head-banging can cause mild brain injury.
In a study published in the British Medical Journal this week, two University of New South Wales (UNSW)researchers concluded that head-banging to a typical heavy metal tempo could cause mild traumatic brain injury or concussion, and neck injury, particularly as the tempo of the music and angle of movement increased.
"Clearly it's a serious issue," says Associate Professor Andrew McIntosh, co-author and professor of biomechanics at UNSW.
"If you observe people after concerts they clearly look dazed, confused and incoherent, so something must be going on and we wanted to look into it." Read more.

Dolphin spongers are workaholic loners

2008-12-11T10:07:00.002+11:00

From ABC Science, News in Science, 11 December 2008:
Female dolphins that use marine sponges to help them forage for prey spend less time socialising with others, but still produce the same number of offspring, according to a US study.
Researchers have long known of a bottlenose dolphin population in Western Australia's Shark Bay that use sponges as foraging tools, but they have been puzzled as to why only some of the dolphins use the sponges and why most are female.
In a study published on the PLoS One website, the team from Washington's Georgetown University reveal how the sponge-using female dolphins spend more time foraging than other dolphins and dive for longer in deep water habitats. Read more.
Also featured on Discovery News.

Hep C diagnosis: a testing time

2008-12-05T11:40:00.004+11:00

From The Hep C Review, Hepatitis C Council of NSW, December 2008:
The hep C virus is one slippery customer. Once inside, it sits quietly in the body, causing few or no symptoms that might give its presence away. It can remain unnoticed (asymptomatic) for a long time – up to ten years in some people – even to the point where it might have caused some people serious damage to the liver. The symptoms it does trigger, such as tiredness, abdominal pain and nausea, can cause problems but are so vague they can often be dismissed as simply being the result of other conditions such as the ‘flu, or the stresses of life in general.
What’s more, in the first couple of months after infection, conventional tests don’t always detect signs of the virus, so there is a risk of someone with hep C getting the all-clear. And not all people who receive a positive diagnosis will develop liver disease – some clear the virus within six months of infection without needing any treatment, and others may carry the virus in their body for decades without liver problems.
All this makes diagnosis of hep C difficult, but there usually comes a point in chronic infection – infection that lasts longer than six months after first contracting the virus – where either a doctor or the patient will get the feeling that something isn’t right, and the process of diagnosing hep C begins. Read more (pdf file, page 16).

HIV: a Nobel discovery

2008-12-05T11:36:00.001+11:00

From ABC Science Online, 27 November 2008:
Dr Jonathan Anderson saw his first patient with HIV in 1987 as a GP registrar in the UK. The man was sick but no one could work out why, until he was tested for a new virus that was only just emerging into the medical consciousness
Five years earlier, two French researchers, Françoise Barré-Sinoussi and Luc Montagnier, isolated a new human retrovirus from the lymph nodes of a man with swollen lymph glands.
It was the first time that scientists had identified a link between a virus and a host of opportunistic infections caused by damage to the body's immune system. This condition would later be called AIDS — acquired immune deficiency syndrome.
On 10 December, the researchers will receive the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine for the profound effect this discovery has had on the prevention and treatment of AIDS over the last 25 years.
In that time, while a cure has been elusive, there have been huge breakthroughs in treatments and quality of life of Australians living with HIV. Read more.

Exercise can battle breathlessness

2008-12-04T09:26:00.004+11:00

From The Australian, 21 November 2008:
IT happens regularly in Barry Blaikie's life: he finds himself standing breathless and paralysed in a street or shopping mall, trying desperately to drag enough oxygen into his damaged lungs to take that next step. People stop to help and ask him what's wrong, and he's brutally honest about his condition.
"I tell people straightaway I've got airways disease." But it's the next question that always bothers him. "Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, someone says 'did you smoke?' And you know what happens when you say yes -- all recognition just switches straight off," says Blaikie, the 73-year-old former West Australian state MP who quit smoking more than 30 years ago.
"If you have AIDS there is some empathy -- if you smoke there's none, if you have smoked there's none."
Airways disease, or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), is an umbrella term for several different conditions with the shared features of chronic, irreversible and worsening breathlessness. The most common conditions that come into the COPD category are chronic bronchitis and emphysema. Most people with COPD, but not all, have smoked.
According to a report released last week by the Australian Lung Foundation, this year COPD cost the Australian economy an estimated $98 billion in healthcare costs, lost productivity and loss of wellbeing. Heather Allan, executive director of the foundation's COPD National Program, says the report confirms fears about the high prevalence of COPD. The report shows 2.1 million Australians currently have some form of COPD and of those, 1.2 million have symptomatic COPD. Read more.

Lose weight, maintain your mojo

2008-11-21T13:47:00.002+11:00

From ABC Science Online, News in Science, 21 November 2008:
A man's secret to maintaining a healthy sex life well into old age could be as simple as shedding a few kilograms, says an Australian obesity expert.
Professor Gary Wittert, endocrinologist and Professor of Medicine at the University of Adelaide says erectile dysfunction is often a warning sign of underlying lifestyle-related diseases.
These include heart disease, diabetes and metabolic syndrome - a condition that includes risks factors such as high blood pressure, blood sugar and cholesterol.
"For men, the penis is the window to the heart," says Wittert, speaking at the Australian Health and Medical Research Congress in Brisbane. "The blood vessels in the penis are exactly the same as the blood vessels in the heart."
"If they have some erectile dysfunction then they've probably got subclinical coronary artery disease." Read more.

Silk the key to rebuilding bone

2008-11-21T13:44:00.001+11:00

From ABC Science Online, News in Science, 18 November 2008:
Silkworms and spiders could hold the key to engineering healthy bone tissue to replace damaged bone and teeth, according to a US biomedical engineer.
Speaking at the Australian Health and Medical Research Congress in Brisbane, Professor David Kaplan from Tufts University in Massachusetts says spider and silkworm silks are among the strongest natural fibres in existence, and have incredible properties.
"When you look at the mechanical properties of single fibre silks, they are remarkable in terms of tension and compression," says Kaplan.
Silk has the added advantage of being bio-compatible, so it can be used in humans. He says it has already been approved by the US Food and Drug Administration for use in early human clinical trials. Read more.

Dystrophies among rarest mysteries

2008-11-20T16:36:00.002+11:00

From The Australian, 15 November 2008:
IF little Jade Ochnio was a "normal" child, her mother Cheri believes she'd be a handful.
"If she was my able-bodied child, she'd be the naughty one," Ochnio says. However Jade, 7, is not able-bodied because she has congenital muscular dystrophy. A few seemingly minor misspellings and deletions in her DNA have left her with such severe muscle weakness that she cannot walk, and never will, and struggles even to raise her head.
When Jade was diagnosed at five months of age, doctors gave Ochnio a grim forecast. "When she was originally diagnosed, with the information we had, they did warn us she possibly wouldn't live past two years -- but she's now 7, so she's writing her own textbook at the moment," Ochnio says.
Jade's condition is one a group of inherited muscular disorders which range from the most common -- Duchenne muscular dystrophy, affecting around 1 in 3500 boys -- to rarer dystrophies that have yet to even be given a name.
Some will kill within the first year of life through failure of the heart and lung muscles, while others have a far lesser impact and allow patients to live a relatively normal life with minimal disability.
While the number of children affected by congenital muscular dystrophy adds up to several thousand in Australia alone, the condition is classified as a rare disease and as such, rarely earns the attention of the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industry, or medical charities.
However, the annual cost of supporting a patient with a muscular dystrophy can be as high as $100,000 per year, and many families struggle to care for an affected child.
It is for precisely these reasons that congenital muscular dystrophies, and other equally rare childhood diseases such as X-linked mental retardation, have captured the imaginations of Lyndall and Malcolm Beville.
It's uncommon to find two partners with such a passion for philanthropy in Australia, and even less common to find two people who can afford to indulge that passion. The result of this happy coincidence is the SMILE Foundation -- a charity dedicated to funding research into rare childhood diseases and to supporting families affected by them. Read more.

Southern Ocean close to acid tipping point

2008-11-11T12:01:00.003+11:00

From ABC Science Online, News in Science, November 11 2008:
Australian researchers have discovered that the tipping point for ocean acidification caused by human-induced CO2 emissions is much closer than first thought.
Scientists from the University of New South Wales (UNSW) and CSIRO looked at seasonal changes in pH and the concentration of an important chemical compound, carbonate, in the Southern Ocean.
The results, published in today's Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, show that these seasonal changes will actually amplify the effects of human carbon dioxide emissions on ocean acidity, speeding up the process of ocean acidification by 30 years. Read more.

The private life of the brain, with Wammo on Kiwi

2008-11-07T11:50:00.003+11:00

Talking New Scientist stories with Wammo on Kiwi FM, 1 November 2008:
The brain is doing very important things when stuck in neutral. Researchers have noticed that instead of lying dormant when unoccupied, the brain devours a huge amount of calories when we’re doing absolutely nothing. So what exactly is it up to? Some say there’s a major system within the brain that taps in to our memories, knitting them all together. Others believe all the evidence points to a default network that enables us to daydream.
And...
Spoken phrases seem to morph into song when repeated, shedding light on the difference between speech and song. In a US test, people who were played a phrase once and asked to repeat what they heard, spoke it back. But those who heard the same phrase many times sang it back.
Listen here.

Raking in the benefits

2008-11-07T10:54:00.003+11:00

From CSIRO's Process Magazine, February 2008:
Although a rake may appear to be a fairly straightforward piece of technology, when used in mineral processing facilities, the difference between a well-designed or poorly-designed rake can mean millions of dollars in scaled, damaged or poorly operating equipment.
Research is suggesting that even small changes to the size, shape, location and angle of the rake blades, and speed of the rake movement, could make a big difference.
Working through the Parker Centre for Integrated Hydrometallurgy Solutions, CSIRO researchers are exploring how variations in the size, shape and spacing of rake blades and changes in operating conditions can affect thickener performance. Read more (pdf file, page 10).

Study reveals AFL drinking habits

2008-11-04T10:01:00.001+11:00

From ABC Science Online, News in Science, 3 November 2008:
An Australian study has revealed for the first time the drinking habits of elite Australian football players, showing that unlike the rest of the population, AFL players do their riskiest drinking outside the football season.
It's the first time an entire sporting code has gone under the microscope to explore alcohol use and abuse. Researchers say the results suggest an entirely different approach to alcohol education is needed among this group.
The study, published in the latest edition of the Medical Journal of Australia, found that just 2% of AFL players drank at risky levels during the sporting season compared to 15% of the general male population.
But this figure climbed to 54% at the end of the season - a period sometimes known as 'mad Monday'.
Associate Professor Paul Dietze, an epidemiologist at the Burnet Institute in Melbourne, says the study highlights that the drinking patterns of AFL players differ significantly from those of the general population. Read more.

Suspicious minds, with Wammo on Kiwi FM

2008-11-04T09:57:00.002+11:00

Talking about the latest in New Scientist with Wammo on Kiwi FM, 30 October 2008:
Women beware. Men are better at detecting their partner’s infidelities than women. In a US study of heterosexual couples, 80 per cent of women’s inferences about fidelity or infidelity were correct, while men were accurate 94 per cent of the time. However, men were also more likely to suspect infidelity even when there was none. Researchers say the results make evolutionary sense because, unlike women, men can never be certain a baby is theirs.
and
Tell stock investors that the economy is influenced by activity on the sun and they would never believe you. That doesn’t stop plenty of them responding to other equally irrelevant information, though - and this tendency may be a factor driving current market volatility. Economists in the US have demonstrated that what happens in reality has very little to do with what actually happens in a market. Listen here.

Maths makes counting hair easy

2008-11-01T11:52:00.001+11:00

From ABC Science Online, News in Science, 31 October 2008:
New software is able to analyse exactly how many hairs there are in a patch of skin and could help in testing the effectiveness of baldness treatments and depilatory creams, say Australian researchers.
Researchers from CSIRO Mathematical and Information Sciences in Sydney report their findings in the November issue of the journal Skin Research and Technology.
The software, developed in partnership with a UK company, will make it easier for researchers developing hair removal creams to accurately assess how well they work, says image analyst Dr Pascal Vallotton.
"Up to now they were counting the number of hairs that survived after treatment manually," he says.
"That's hard work and it's difficult because you may count a hair twice or you may miss it, so image analysis offers distinct advantages because you always get the same counts and you get the right counts." Read more.

Timing is everything with snake antivenom

2008-10-31T09:00:00.002+11:00

From ABC Science Online, News in Science, 20 October 2008:
New evidence suggests antivenom should be given at least within an hour after a snake bite to be effective at reducing the blood thinning effects of venom.
Australian clinical toxicologist Dr Geoffrey Isbister, from the Menzies School of Health Research, and colleagues, report their findings online in the journal Toxicon.
The researchers developed a mathematical model of the action of taipan venom on the many proteins, called 'clotting factors', that contribute to blood clotting in the human body. Read more.

Meaty issues

2008-10-29T11:46:00.003+11:00

From G Magazine, November 2008:
Our diet revolves around meat. Imagine the footy without a pie, summer without snags on the barbie, or Christmas without a turkey. But rumours abound that being vegetarian is better for the environment. Could the lentil lovers be right?
Read more in magazine.

Fast eating a fast track to obesity

2008-10-23T10:50:00.002+11:00

From ABC Science News Online, 22 October 2008:
Wolfing down your food and eating until your seams are straining could double your risk of becoming overweight, Japanese researchers have found.
A study published in the British Medical Journal this week reveals that men and women who eat rapidly or eat until they are full are twice as likely to be overweight compared to people who eat more sensibly.
People who both eat quickly and eat too much are around three times as likely to be overweight, the researchers found.
They also report that the link between the eating behaviour and overweight remains the same no matter what the actual calorie intake from the food itself. Read more.

Boost your bone bank

2008-10-20T14:31:00.001+11:00

From ABC Health and Wellbeing, October 2008:
Osteoporosis may seem like a disease of the old, but prevention starts young. Are you doing the right things to keep your kids' bones - and your own - in top condition?
KILO for kilo, bone is stronger than concrete. Unlike concrete, however, it is alive and kicking; forever reshaping and rebuilding itself to adjust to new mechanical stresses and hormonal changes.
The amount of change is astonishing for something we think of as solid and unyielding. In a single week, a typical adult recycles five to seven per cent of their bone mass, and up to half a gram of calcium is absorbed into or released from the skeleton each day. But it can't do this without help.
There are three essential ingredients that enable our skeleton to remodel itself so much and still do its job: calcium, vitamin D and exercise.
Unfortunately, many of us neglect one or all of these, which may explain why one in two Australian women and one in three Australian men over 60 will have an osteoporotic fracture. Read more.

Dementia of young slowly unravels

2008-10-20T09:22:00.001+11:00

From The Australian, 11 October 2008:
ONE profoundly heartbreaking moment stands out for Jan Kuczerawy, in the anguished year since his wife Anne was diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia.
"There was a moment in the early stages where she realised something was wrong," says Jan. "She was frightened and she broke down in tears."
Thankfully, that moment of lucidity was brief and never repeated.
It's hardly something to be thankful for, but in the nightmarish world in which the families of people with this disease find themselves, they are grateful for such small mercies.
Frontotemporal dementia struck Anne at just 51 years of age. Within 16 months it has transformed this once-clever, compassionate and loving mother and wife into an overweight, confused stranger who must now be supervised 24 hours a day and is incapable of dressing herself. Read more.

'Fossil' HIV reveals virus history

2008-10-02T12:14:00.001+10:00

From ABC Science, 2 October 2008:
A preserved specimen of lymph node nearly half a century old has revealed how rapidly the HIV virus has diversified, according to international research.
A team of researchers from around the world has been trawling through decades-old tissue samples from African hospital archives in the hope of finding samples containing the HIV virus.
They struck it lucky with a sample that was collected back in 1960, from a woman living in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo.
This is the second-oldest sample of the HIV virus ever found - the oldest is from 1959.
The researchers found that the HIV viral sequences these two samples differ significantly in their genetic makeup. Read more.

Talking brain power with Wammo on Kiwi FM

2008-10-02T12:08:00.002+10:00

From Radio Wammo, Kiwi FM New Zealand, 2 October 2008:
Why do the most gifted and talented brains stand out from the crowd? Is there anything physical or psychological that sets them apart? A study of Einstein’s brain in 1998 showed it was 15 per cent wider than average, making it more spherical. And Controversial research suggests that pterosaurs were too heavy to fly. A Japanese scientist collected data from 5 large birds, including the largest in the world: the wandering albatross. Stories from New Scientist magazine.
Listen here.

Four and a half stars on Media Doctor!

2008-10-01T17:59:00.005+10:00

For the first time, one of my articles has been reviewed by Media Doctor, a website dedicated to improving the accuracy of media reports about new medical treatments.
And I'm very relieved to have scored 4.5 stars (out of a possible five) for my recent story in The Australian about research on a potential disease-modifying drug for Alzheimer's disease.
The article also tied with one by Adam Cresswell, health editor of The Australian, for Story of the Month this September.
Here's what the reviewers said:
"This is more of a feature article than news. It covers in some detail the development and early human testing of a drug that is designed to deplete amyloid- peptide beta, thought by some to be a cause of Alzheimer's disease. Strong features of the article are that it goes well beyond the media release that accompanied publication of the clinical trial report in July 2008 and the cautionary note that these are very early clinical data. The article could have pointed out that this was a randomised placebo controlled trial of two doses of the experimental drug. It could also have mentioned that rates of diarrhoea and nausea were slightly higher with the experimental drug than with placebo. But overall this is good reporting containing much of what we'd like to see in health reports."
Read more.

Guide for pitching stories

2008-09-26T14:40:00.005+10:00

I've found myself giving this advice to quite a few people over the past year or two, and while I don't by any means claim to be an expert in this, or have all the answers, I've learned a few things in my freelance career thus far.
So, here are my suggestions for wannabe freelancers trying to get a foot in the door, or just someone with a great idea for a story but not sure what to do with it.

Step one:
Be very clear in your mind why your story is interesting. It has to be more than the fact that it's something new - what it is about the story that interests you? That will help you work out what about the story will interest other people, and who those people might be (which helps with Step Two).

Step two:
The next step is to think about exactly the sort of publication that might be interested in your sort of story. The main thing to consider is the audience. Is your story going to appeal to the readers of women's magazines, science magazines, national or local newspapers, news magazines, financial mags, international magazines, national websites etc? Are you aiming for an audience with a special interest in your subject eg people with an interest in science or medicine, boat owners, environmentally-conscious people or tabloid newspaper readers?
A good way to answer this question is to go to your local newsagency, and buy a whole pile of magazines that loosely cover your subject area. For example, if you have a story about a scientific discovery, the obvious choices are mags such as New Scientist, Scientific American and Cosmos, but some women's magazines also run science stories, as do news magazines, popular health magazines and newspapers.
You should also think about whether your story is better suited to be a news article, a feature article or even a column-style piece. This isn't always easy to work out but generally a feature article is going to need a lot more substance beyond the immediate facts of the story. Lengthwise, a news story can range roughly from 300-800 words, while a feature can be anything from 1000-4000 words and even longer.
It's also worth checking out if any of your target publications have writers' guidelines available, as these can really help you work out if that publication is going to be interested in your story.
And it's also worth checking to see if any of your target publications have already covered your story idea. This is easy to do - just pick a few keywords from your idea and search their archives. There's not much point in pitching a great idea to a magazine if they have done a feature on it the week before.

Step three:
Now write a summary of your story. If you're thinking it will lend itself to a news story, then I would summarise it in 100-200 words, making it as punchy, sexy and succinct as possible. Tackle it as if you are writing a short news piece on it. If you're aiming for a longer feature then I would write a 400-500 word summary, with the same principles in mind. In both cases, it's worth including a list of suggested interviewees - even if you don't have specific names beyond the main subject themselves, think about what other voices might add to the story eg if it's a medical story and you're writing for a mainstream newspaper audience, maybe a patient voice will help, or having another expert opinion in there to add weight to the research.
It's also worth putting a bit of info about yourself at the bottom of your summary (if the editor you're targeting doesn't already know who you are) so they know who you are and your background and experience.

Step four:
Work out who you need to send the story to. You want the story to go to the right editor for the section, so if you send it to a generic email address there's a chance it might not get to the person you want to get it to. Have a look at the publication's masthead and find the editor you want to target eg the news editor, health editor, features editor. Even if you only have a generic email address to send to, at least you can mark it to the attention of someone specific.
If you can find out the name of the editor you're trying to contact, then either look for their email address or if you look at some of the other email addresses for that mag or company, you can usually work out what their personal email address will be.
Cold pitching stories to an editor you've never met can be tough and unless your story is a good one, there's a good chance you won't hear from them. But editors are busy people so if you haven't heard back in a couple of weeks, send a follow-up email and just check they received it and maybe ask if they found it of interest. Just because they haven't replied doesn't necessarily mean they're not interested.

Step five:
If you do get a knockback from an editor, or don't hear from them for months, don't consign the story to the scrapheap just yet. It may be that there are other publications interested, it might have more legs overseas than in Australia, or you might be able to rework the idea for a different audience and with a different emphasis. Have a look at your idea from lots of angles and repeat all the steps above.

These are just some loose suggestions that I have found have (sometimes, but not always) worked for me - hopefully they might prove helpful.
Bianca

Coconut: good fat or bad?

2008-09-25T17:00:00.001+10:00

From ABC Health and Wellbeing, 25 September 2008:
Much can be said about the pleasures of coconut. Certainly the cuisines of a large number of countries, from India to Indonesia, would be much the poorer without it. But would they be healthier?
Coconut is one of those foods that seems to ping-pong between the 'good food' and 'bad food' list, and if you're confused about this, don't worry – even the experts can't quite agree.
The confusion starts because of the differences between the use of coconut oil in cooking, and the use of coconut milk or coconut flesh. Both the American Heart Association and the National Heart Foundation recommend avoiding the use of coconut oil for cooking, but both their websites include recipes that contain coconut milk, albeit a reduced-fat version.
Despite the fuzzy perception that all things plant must be better for us, oil made from coconuts actually contains a whopping 85 to 90 per cent saturated fat. Saturated fats, usually the dominant type in animal foods, are generally regarded as the baddies when it comes to heart disease. Read more.

Drug closing in on Alzheimer's

2008-09-22T09:49:00.001+10:00

From The Australian, 20 September 2008:
BETA-amyloid protein isn't really much to look at. A tangle of amino acids, for much of our lives it exists harmlessly in our brains.
But occasionally, something goes wrong. As we age, beta-amyloid can start to accumulate, building into deposits or plaques that somehow interfere with normal brain function in a way we are yet to fully understand, but are all too familiar with: Alzheimer's disease.
Pathologist Ashley Bush, head of the Oxidation Biology Laboratory at Melbourne's Mental Health Research Institute, has a theory about what goes wrong. If he's right, it could not only lead to the first disease-modifying treatment for Alzheimer's disease, but it could also produce Australia's first home-grown blockbuster drug. Read more.

Chlamydia vaccine 'needn't be perfect'

2008-09-17T09:27:00.001+10:00

From ABC Science Online, 15 September 2008:
A vaccine against the sexually transmitted infection chlamydia could wipe out the disease even if the vaccine is not perfect at protecting against infection, according to Australian researchers.
According to a paper presented today at the Australasian Sexual Health Conference in Perth, the researchers predict that a 100% effective chlamydia vaccine could eradicate the infection within 15-20 years.
Using data on the prevalence of chlamydia, how it is spread, and the sexual behaviour patterns of a typical heterosexual community, Dr Richard Gray and colleagues were able to create a model that they then used to predict how different styles of vaccine might work.
They add that a less protective vaccine, which makes a person less infectious or shortens the duration of the disease, could still have a dramatic effect on infection rates. Read more.

Phone health an elusive call

2008-09-08T13:18:00.001+10:00

From Swinburne Magazine, September 2008:
How do you look for a health effect when there is no scientific precedent, no obvious physiological or physical mechanism to explain it, and the effect is likely to be so small that you will need extremely sensitive testing processes? This is the challenge facing researchers at the Australian Centre for Radiofrequency Bioeffects Research (ACRBR), which is investigating whether mobile phones and base stations affect people’s health.
Although there has been public concern and debate about mobile phone health risks, there is little scientific basis for this fear, according to centre director Professor Rodney Croft from Swinburne University of Technology. "One of the big difficulties is that physics doesn’t provide a mechanism that explains how a mobile phone or base station could have an effect on a person," he says.
Therefore, in the absence of a clear starting point, ACRBR researchers have tried to cover every possible base, says Dr Vitas Anderson, Associate Professor of Bioelectromagnetices at Swinburne and associate investigator at the ACRBR. "You name it, just about every biological endpoint you can think of is being investigated with respect to radiofrequency (RF) exposures." Read more.

Cultural collaboration to better meld communities

2008-09-08T13:16:00.001+10:00

From Swinburne Magazine, September 2008:
It has been more than three decades since the first wave of Vietnamese migrants arrived on Australia’s shores in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. Since then they have become an established component of modern, multicultural Australia, but it was not always a smooth journey – either for the new arrivals or for local community agencies such as the police.
Understanding and working with different ethnic communities can pose challenges for community stability and, in particular, for policing – different cultural values and language barriers tend to create mutual mistrust. It has been a particular cross for immigrants to bear, so to bridge the misunderstandings and communication gulfs that often exist, Swinburne University of Technology has launched an innovative project that aims to build trust, communication and cooperation between two test groups, Melbourne’s Vietnamese community and Victoria Police. Read more.

Good vibes need a body clock on song

2008-09-08T12:59:00.002+10:00

From Swinburne Magazine, September 2008:
Underneath the normal disorder of everyday lives there is a steady, strong and immutable beat that never changes. It is the pulse to which every living thing on the planet sets its rhythm of life, and it has been there since the very creation of our planet – the rising and setting of the sun.
The biological clocks of humans, animals and even plants are intricately linked with day and night. But occasionally our body clocks fall out of sync, and research shows this can have potentially serious psychological consequences.
Swinburne University of Technology researcher Dr Greg Murray has keenly studied the body clock or, in technical terms, the circadian system, and found its rhythms can have profound effects on human mood. Read more.

End of the line

2008-09-05T13:27:00.001+10:00

From Australian Doctor, 4 September 2008:
For some infertile couples, IVF can become a long and agonising process. Who decides when it is time to step off the conveyor belt and give up hope?

GIVING up on IVF is a little like turning off life support, says Dr Christine Read. The comparison may seem callous, but Dr Read, medical director at Family Planning NSW, has seen enough desperate women to know the anguish of this scenario.
"People invest so much in getting pregnant, [that] when they're told they aren't pregnant or [the pregnancy] lasts for a short time, then fails, it's devastating," she says.
It is three decades this year since the world's first IVF baby was born, in England. Two years after that, Australia's first IVF baby arrived, and the country's assisted reproductive technology industry has not looked back. In 2005 alone, there were more than 8000 IVF success stories in Australia. However, amid the tens of thousands of happy couples, there are some for whom IVF does not deliver. Read more.

Chain reaction leads to Nobel Prize

2008-09-03T15:20:00.002+10:00

From Pathway magazine, Autumn 2008:
Six months before the 1993 Nobel Prizes were due to be announced, Kary Mullis' mentor, University of California Berkley biochemist Joe Neilands, suggested to him that "you'd make it easier for the [Nobel] committee to give it to you if you didn't talk to the press so much". Not that Mullis' work was in any way controversial - far from it. He had developed the polymerase chain reaction; a technique for amplifying segments of DNA that was soon to revolutionise molecular biology.
What had Neilands on edge was his protege's openness about his use of LSD, and to a lesser extent, his enthusiastically proclaimed fondness for women and surfing. Thankfully, the Nobel Committee saw fit to overlook these apparent transgressions, and in 1993 awarded Mullis the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his discovery of the polymerase chain reaction.
Mullis is an intriguing character. Raised on a farm in rural North Carolina, he studied chemistry then completed a PhD and lectured in biochemistry, before joining biotechnology company Cetus Corporation as a DNA chemist. While working here, he made the discoveries that led to the polymerase chain reaction. But far more interestingly, he has also been tabled as an expert witness in the O.J Simpson murder case (although was never called to the stand), he has stirred controversy with his views on climate change and the link between HIV and AIDS, he has been quite forthcoming about his use of LSD in Berkley during the 60s and 70s, apparently believes in astrology, and is a keen surfer.
Kary Mullis’ entire Nobel autobiography is unusually dedicated to a portrayal of his family and upbringing. At the very end of the document, a single, brief sentence acknowledges his momentous role in scientific history: "I worked as a consultant, got the Nobel Prize, and have now turned to writing. It is 1994."
What this sentence fails to capture is the significance of his discovery, and why it was judged worthy of one of science's greatest accolades. "It has been absolutely transformative," says microbiologist Dr David Smith, Head of the Division of Microbiology and Infectious Diseases at PathWest Laboratory Medicine WA. More in magazine.

Exercise keeps dementia at bay

2008-09-03T13:56:00.002+10:00

From ABC Science online, 3 September 2008:
Regular exercise in old age not only reduces the risk of physical problems such as heart disease and hip fractures, Australian researchers have found it may also slow down memory loss as we age.
A study of physical activity in patients with early memory problems found 150 minutes of walking per week led to improvements in memory, language and visual skills, as well as giving patients a boost to their confidence.
The results of the study, published in the latest issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, suggest that physical activity could be more effective in improving memory and mental function than drugs, and without the side effects. Read more.

Delaying dementia next best to a cure

2008-09-02T09:50:00.000+10:00

From The Australian, 30 August 2008:
AT this stage of life, Jane and Michael d'Arbon should be looking forward to retirement, long holidays, seeing their four children set off to make their mark on the world, and watching the next stage of their life together take shape.
Instead, they're giving interviews on the devastating impact of Alzheimer's disease. They can't make plans beyond the next 10 years, because Michael is unlikely to survive that long.
D'Arbon used to be a successful criminal barrister in Sydney, crossing swords with the best and worst of them. He loved his job, especially the camaraderie of fellow lawyers. But three years ago, at age 49, "that was shot to pieces". A diagnosis of early-onset Alzheimer's disease ended his courtroom career. Read more.

Living green for less

2008-09-02T09:48:00.002+10:00

From G Magazine, September 2008:
There are plenty of ways to go green without going into the red. Bianca Nogrady shares simple ways to make your eco-ideals a reality - for a fraction of what you might expect. Read more in the magazine.

Cancer Council Australia Research Highlights

2008-08-25T10:05:00.003+10:00

From Cancer Council Australia's Research Highlights (pdf, large file), 2008:

THE liver has a remarkable capacity to regenerate. Even after serious trauma it can regrow thanks to cells called hepatocytes that rapidly grow and divide after injury and replace the lost tissue. However, when more chronic damage is done to the liver, for example by diseases such as hepatitis B or alcoholic liver disease, another type of cell comes into play – liver progenitor cells.
Professor George Yeoh and colleagues from the Liver Cancer Laboratory at the University of Western Australia Centre for Medical Research have discovered a link between these liver progenitor cells and liver cancer. Their findings could explain why so many patients with chronic liver disease develop cancer. Read more on page 21.

ARSENIC is not normally associated with saving lives, rather destroying them. Yet this deadly element is a key ingredient in a new compound that is showing promise in the treatment of solid tumours.
Glutathionarsenoxide (GSAO) is an organoarsenical – a synthetic peptide (protein fragment) that includes an atom of arsenic. Professor Philip Hogg and colleagues at the University of NSW Cancer Research Centre created the compound to explore the workings of a particular protein, but then noticed something unusual – their compound was also extremely good at knocking out the mitochondria, which are the energy-producing structures in cells. Read more on page 43.

THE biggest challenge for immune-based anti-tumour therapies is how to penetrate the chaotic mass of tumour blood vessels that screens the tumour from an attack. Even the most efficient anti-cancer drug is rendered ineffectual if it cannot access tumour cells.
However, Associate Professor Ruth Ganss, Principal Research Fellow at the Western Australian Institute for Medical Research, may have found a solution.
“Basically we change the tumour so that it becomes more accessible to cells that have the potential to kill,” Associate Professor Ganss says. Read more on page 46.

THE development of computed tomography (CT) marked a major leap forward in medical imaging, allowing doctors to view the inner workings of the human body with far greater clarity. Unfortunately, when it comes to mesothelioma, CT scanning has its limitations, says academic medical oncologist Dr Anna Nowak, a researcher at the University of Western Australia.
Dr Nowak says a CT scan of lymph nodes in the centre of the chest will help identify whether the lymph nodes are enlarged, which could be the result of a tumour. However, the scan does not reveal how much of the swelling is actually a tumour and how much is inflammation that has developed in response to the tumour.
In response, Dr Nowak and colleagues are exploring the use of positron emission tomography (PET) imaging to investigate the spread of mesothelioma, plan treatment and monitor its effects. Read more on page 48.

FOR most people, Cytomegalovirus (CMV) is nothing more than a benign viral hitchhiker that we acquire when young, but which is kept in check by the immune system. However, for patients undergoing bone marrow transplants, whose immune systems are deliberately shut down, CMV is potentially deadly – an opportunistic killer that takes advantage of a compromised immune system to wreak havoc.
As many as one in three bone marrow transplant patients experience a recurrence of CMV infection, which attacks just about every organ in the body with often fatal consequences.
The only weapon doctors have is antiviral medication, which can sometimes hold off the virus long enough for the patient’s own immune system to regenerate and protect them. Read more on page 48.

EACH year in Australia around 225 children are diagnosed with leukaemia. Of these, around 175 are diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukaemia, making it the most common type of cancer in children aged 14 and under.
Around three-quarters of the children treated for acute lymphoblastic leukaemia are completely cured. However, molecular biologist Professor Murray Norris, Deputy Director of the Children’s Cancer Institute Australia for Medical Research, wants to understand more about the one-quarter of children who relapse after treatment. Read more on page 50.

THE ability to breathe easily is often taken for granted, so when breathing is hampered by end-stage cancer, it can be a frightening experience. Dyspnoea, or difficulty breathing, is a common feature of advanced cancer, yet doctors are not always able to bring relief.
Professor David Currow, Professor of Palliative and Supportive Services at Flinders University, is conducting a pilot study that uses a technique called academic detailing to help GPs better manage breathlessness among cancer patients. Read more on page 66.

Women's troubles

2008-08-21T09:41:00.002+10:00

From Australian Doctor, 21 August 2008:
“WANTED: Single, White Male for Medical Research.” When US bioethicist Rebecca Dresser wrote these words in 1992, she was not recruiting for a clinical trial. But she might well have been. Her landmark article drew attention to the deplorable reality that women were being excluded from clinical research across the medical spectrum, from cardiovascular disease to HIV.
The article had a profound effect on Australian academic Wendy Rogers, now associate professor of medical ethics and health law at Flinders University in Adelaide.
“I was horrified that women might not be included in research,” Professor Rogers says. She had long been interested in feminist bioethics, but her desire to investigate the gender divide in medical research was being stymied by a lack of information.
So Professor Rogers and colleague Dr Angela Ballantyne decided to dig up that information for themselves. They examined a big range of recent Australian studies to try to get a sense of how well women were being represented in medical research, and published their results earlier this year. Although a decade-and-a-half have passed since Rebecca Dresser’s comments, it seems not a lot has changed. Read more.

A rare bird

2008-07-31T10:49:00.002+10:00

From Australian Rural Doctor magazine, June 2008:
Under any other circumstances, Wudinna District Council might well be accused of stalking. Since Dr Scott Lewis first set foot in the remote SA town more than a decade ago, he has been a marked man.
They have waited in the shadows, following their target’s every move, carefully laying the groundwork to attract their quarry, then waiting patiently for the right time to pounce.
These days, this is what it takes to get a GP to a rural area – any GP, but especially one as talented and sought after as Dr Lewis. Read more (pdf file, page 20).

Implant infection answer a winner

2008-06-22T16:34:00.002+10:00

From The Australian, 21 June 2008:
THE brain is an incredibly fragile organ. Evolution certainly thinks so -- it has surrounded this mass of nerves and cells with a solid case of bone to guard against physical trauma, and lined its blood vessels with an almost impermeable membrane to guard against chemical and biological threats.
As long as these defences remain unbreached, the brain is relatively safe.
But sometimes they have to be breached. Cochlear implants bypass damaged hearing systems to directly stimulate the auditory nerves, but to enable this, surgeons must drill through the bone and implant electrodes deep within the inner ear, where they come into direct contact with the nerves.
It is testament to the careful design of implants and the skill of the surgeon that this procedure and the device are so safe. But in June 2002, something went wrong. The US Food and Drug Administration began getting reports of bacterial meningitis in children who had received a cochlear implant. Their investigation revealed a 30-fold increase in the risk of bacterial meningitis compared to the general population, especially in children with a particular US-designed cochlear implant that included a "positioner" -- a tiny wedge that held the implanted electrode against the wall of the inner ear.
The discovery led to swift withdrawal of that design of implant.
Around the same time, a young Taiwan-born Australian doctor, Benjamin Wei, was taking his first steps on the path to becoming an ear, nose and throat surgeon. But unusually, he also hankered for the laboratory.
"At the time, meningitis and cochlear implants were very topical and I was very interested and I wanted to have some experience in research," says Wei, an ENT surgical registrar and scientist at The Bionic Ear Institute in Melbourne.
Earlier this month, Wei, 31, received the 2008 Victorian Premier's Award for Health and Medical Research for his investigation into the link between implants and pneumococcal meningitis. What he discovered has implications not just for cochlear implants, but for any device implanted in the brain. Read more.

Want a genetic test? Get insured first

2008-06-13T11:56:00.001+10:00

From Australian Doctor, 13 June 2008:
Patients considering genetic testing should be advised to take out life insurance beforehand, an expert says, after an Australian study found one in 10 patients diagnosed with an asymptomatic genetic condition experienced some form of discrimination.
Data from the Australian Genetic Discrimination Project, which surveyed clients of clinical genetics services, showed 10% of patients experienced “negative treatment”, with 42% of incidents occurring in the context of life insurance.
The most common incidents included being refused life insurance, difficulty applying for life insurance and increased loading on premiums. Read more.

Cancer success one to boast about

2008-06-01T22:25:00.001+10:00

From The Australian, 31 May 2008:
ONE in two Australian men and one in three Australian women will be diagnosed with cancer by age 85.
If they happen to be living in Denmark at the time, around half of them could expect to still be alive and kicking within five years. Luckily though, they're in Australia, which means nearly two-thirds can expect to survive for five years after diagnosis, which for many is as good as a total cure.
The difference between one-half and two-thirds might not sound like much, but with an estimated 106,000 new cases of cancer diagnosed in Australia each year, the numbers soon add up and paint an impressive picture of cancer survival Down Under. Read more.

One tick red meat can do without

2008-05-10T09:09:00.002+10:00

From The Australian, 10 May 2008:
THEY were just ordinary pork spare ribs, properly cooked and harmless. But they were enough to land Peter Moore in hospital with a severe allergic reaction.
"It wasn't instantaneous," says Moore, 32. "Maybe a couple of hours later I went to bed and woke up with hives, really big welts covering my body."
When he began having difficulty breathing, his wife rushed him to hospital.
Several months later it happened again, this time after a meal of meatballs, and then again a few months later after beef nachos. Moore had no known allergies and was in perfect health, which left him and doctors puzzled as to the cause. "At the time, I wasn't eating beef or pork at home so we stitched it together that it must be something in the meat, like a preservative or something," says Moore.
But it wasn't any flavouring or preservative -- it was the meat itself.
Moore had developed a very rare allergy that whenever he eats red meat causes full-blown anaphylaxis, an extreme immune system response that can cause breathing difficulties, sudden drop in blood pressure, unconsciousness heart failure and even death.
And he's not the only one. Nearly 50 adults living in one small corner of Sydney have become allergic to red meat, most of them in the past five years. Read more.

Dying to be green

2008-04-28T13:54:00.004+10:00

From G Magazine, May 2008:
My mother wants to be composted when she dies. Not just in a figurative "give my body to the Earth" way, but in a way that befits someone whose passion for gardening knows no bounds.
Her final act will be to produce the lushest crop of tomatoes and zucchini her garden and this world has ever seen. I'm not entirely sure what the health department will make of this request, but my mother doesn't care. She'll be dead.
As the Baby Boomers enter their twilight years and begin to consider the details of their demise, it's no surprise that this enterprising generation are pushing the boundaries when it comes to their funerals. And with the environment front and centre of society's conscience, many are planning their funerals with future generations in mind. Read more.

Spinal research steps ahead for cure

2008-04-14T09:37:00.001+10:00

From The Australian, 12 April 2008:
SUPERMAN was one of the relatively lucky ones. The fall from a horse that crushed actor Christopher Reeve's spinal cord may have robbed him of his ability to walk, move or even breathe without help, but he still had money, and he had support.
Unlike so many people incapacitated by spinal cord injury, Reeve was surrounded by a caring family and support, could afford the considerable expense of adapting his home and life to his new circumstances, and was also a powerful, visible campaigner for research into spinal cord injury.
It's a far cry from the majority experience of spinal cord injury victims, most of whom are young men injured in accidents. Read more.

So friendly, but practically useless

2008-04-03T22:45:00.002+11:00

From Heckler column, Sydney Morning Herald, 21 March 2006:
"Hello, madam, my name is Rashid. How may I help you today?"
And there, the soft voice with a pleasant lilt to it, full of willingness and unfailingly polite, is my demon. On the other side of the world, stuck in a room full of others like him, burning the midnight oil to pay his way through university, this man is the source of my angst, torture and intense frustration. Read more.

'Jack of all trades' becomes media master

2008-03-18T09:03:00.001+11:00

From Swinburne Magazine, March 2008:
It took a Hong Kong fortune cookie to help web entrepreneur Domenic Carosa understand the path to business success. "It said ‘a jack of all trades and a master of none’," recalls Domenic, 33, one of Australia’s top young entrepreneurs.
"I was insulted," he quips lightly, but adds that a couple of years later he realised the cookie’s words did describe him.
The late Kerry Packer always recommended hiring people who are better than you in their respective areas – specialists – and Domenic credits part of his own rapid rise in business to adopting that approach. Read more.

Hanging on the telephone

2008-03-07T14:43:00.001+11:00

From Australian Doctor, 29 February 2008:
Dodgy music, out-of-date information and unanswered phones are all ways to aggravate your patients when they call — but it doesn’t have to be like that.
HELL is hold music that is a tinny, expressionless facsimile of a once-beloved tune, mangled beyond belief and painful to listen to. Unfortunately, this musical travesty is still inflicted by businesses on captive customers whose only crime has been to ring when lines are busy.
For general practices this hold ‘music’ can be a patient’s first impression of the practice —Mozart sounding like it’s being played by a one-fingered, heavily sedated pianist.
“It’s a window on your practice,” says Dr Lynton Hudson, a GP in Warwick, Queensland, and chairman of the RACGP’s national expert committee on standards.
Like any good shop window, a practice’s phone message should give potential customers a sense of the practice and inform them about its services, its people and its requirements. Read more.

Alcohol abuse eclipsing heroin

2008-02-24T11:25:00.004+11:00

From The Australian, 23 February 2008:
Awareness that Australia has a drinking problem has reached the highest levels of government, writes Bianca Nogrady.
ANDREW didn't think his friends had a drinking problem. That is, until a few drink-driving offences landed him in the Odyssey House drug and alcohol rehabilitation program. Now Andrew sees alcohol a little differently.
"I was drinking pretty much half a bottle to a bottle of bourbon a night, and a six pack of beers," he says. "I sort of thought I had a drinking problem, but I thought I had youth on my side -- I thought it wasn't something I had to address right now. (I thought) it wasn't causing much of a problem for me -- but it was causing a problem for my health."
That's putting it mildly. When he came off alcohol he had "the DTs", or delirium tremens -- the confusion, disorientation and agitation sometimes experienced by long-term heavy drinkers who suddenly cut their habit. He had a heart murmur, and his doctors told him he had a high chance of having a stroke. That was just over a year ago. Andrew is 24. Read more.

Talking mad experiments with Wammo on Kiwi FM

2008-02-01T11:39:00.000+11:00

From Kiwi FM, 1 November 2007:
Talking with Wammo about the latest in New Scientist magazine, including elephants on LSD and why herpes is bad for the ageing brain. Listen here.

Major cardiac risk in aspirin-resistant patients

2008-02-01T11:26:00.000+11:00

From Australian Doctor, 21 January 2008:
BMJ Aspirin resistance, thought to affect up to one-third of patients, is associated with significantly increased cardiovascular morbidity, a comprehensive meta-analysis suggests.
The research, which analysed 20 studies including 2930 patients with cardiovascular disease, found aspirin-resistant patients had an almost sixfold increase in risk of death, were almost four times more likely to experience a cardiovascular event, and were at more than four times greater risk of acute coronary syndrome compared with non-resistant patients. Read more.

Surprise find could stop salmon parasite

2008-01-10T17:24:00.000+11:00

From FISH, September 2007:
An unexpected discovery by researchers from the Tasmanian Aquaculture and Fisheries Institute is opening the door to new diagnostic techniques, treatments and vaccines that could substantially reduce the impact of amoebic gill disease in Tasmania and around the world. Read more.

Magic bullet theory

2007-11-21T16:58:00.000+11:00

From Pathway, the magazine of the Royal College of Pathologists of Australasia, Summer 2007:
You’re mowing the lawn on a fine Sunday morning, when suddenly an invisible band wraps around your chest, squeezing tightly and painfully until you can hardly breathe. This is what patients with angina pectoris fear: the ‘elephant sitting on my chest’ sensation that strikes with little warning and lasts for up to 20 minutes. Read more.

T cell turnoff

2007-11-20T10:27:00.000+11:00

From Scientific American, December 2007:
HIV is devastating because it attacks and destroys the body’s defense system against pathogens, leaving patients fatally exposed. So what would possess scientists to treat HIV-positive patients with drugs that suppress the immune system? Read more.

Meeting of models helps reduce toxic waste

2007-11-19T09:08:00.000+11:00

From Process magazine, October 2007:
An unfortunate twist of chemistry means that one of the earth’s most beautiful metals requires one of the planet’s most deadly compounds to extract it from an ore body: gold mining relies on the use of cyanide to dissolve gold into solution so it can be recaptured as pure metal.
The inevitable by-product of this process is a cyanide-containing slurry that is discharged into specially constructed tailings dams, where the solids settle out and the solution can be reclaimed for reuse.
The recently introduced International Cyanide Code, which sets voluntary guidelines on the quantity and concentration of cyanide being released into tailings dams, recognises the importance of reducing cyanide discharge.
Parker Centre researchers at CSIRO Minerals have taken a novel approach to reducing discharge and ultimately meeting new standards. Using computer modelling, the team investigated a method of reducing cyanide discharge while increasing the amount of water reclaimed and reducing the need for other reagents, such as lime, used in the gold extraction process. Read more. (pdf file, page 9)

Bowel program works but needs men

2007-11-01T08:53:00.000+11:00

From Australian Doctor, 1 November 2007.
THE first year of the National Bowel Cancer Screening Program has been encouraging, although issues such as a poorer male participation rate and delay in colonoscopy follow-up are yet to be resolved, a leading gastroenterologist says.
About 156,000 Australians took part in the first stage of the faecal occult blood test-based screening program, returning 11,000 positive tests and leading to the diagnosis of more than 100 suspected cancers, according to data released at the Australian gastroenterology week conference in Perth last week. Read more.

Expecting perfection

2007-10-25T11:12:00.000+10:00

From Pathway, Spring 2007.
One of the most spectacular errors in pathology history might indirectly be credited with claiming nearly 20 million lives. It’s even more astounding to learn that the pathologist behind it was in fact the founding father of histopathology, Rudolph Virchow.
Virchow failed to diagnose German Emperor Friedrich III’s laryngeal cancer until it was too late. The politically moderate and liberal Friedrich died in 1888 after ruling for just 99 days, and his militaristic son Wilhelm II inherited the throne, setting Europe on the path to the slaughter of World War I.
To err is human, even if you do happen to be a world expert in the field. And at its heart, pathology is a very human practice, says Dr Stewart Bryant, President of the RCPA. Read more (pdf file, page 32)

When the bad bugs bite

2007-10-25T11:09:00.000+10:00

From PathWay, Spring 2007.
Debbie: ... How can we all have died at the same time?
The Grim Reaper: (pointing with a skeletal finger) The salmon mousse!
Geoffrey: Darling, you didn't use tinned salmon did you?
Angela: I'm most dreadfully embarrassed...
Monty Python managed to make light of it in this sketch from The Meaning of Life, but in reality, food-borne illness is no laughing matter.
An estimated 5.4 million cases occur in Australia each year, causing around 18,000 hospitalisations and 120 deaths. It leads to 2.1 million lost days of work, 1.2 million medical consultations and 300,000 antibiotic prescriptions. Read more (pdf file, pg 20)

Top 50 Medical Innovations

2007-10-25T11:04:00.000+10:00

From Australian Doctor, July 2007.
From artificial hips to anti-epileptics, the Pill to penicillin - the 20th century has seen a wealth of medical innovations emerge that have transformed how we practice medicine. Read more (pdf file).

Talking teflon frogs with Wammo on Kiwi

2007-08-28T12:53:00.000+10:00

From Kiwi FM, 23 August 2007:
What happens when you cross a frog with a non-stick frying pan? New Scientist has the answer. Listen here.

G's guide to eco-fabulous cleaning

2007-08-28T10:49:00.000+10:00

From G Magazine, September/October 2007:
Who has time to research the environmental cred of every cleaning product in their house? In this 8-page guide to non-toxic, eco-friendly cleaning, Bianca Nogrady breaks through the greenwash to find the best choices.

Neck size a strong sleep apnoea clue

2007-08-28T10:47:00.000+10:00

From Australian Doctor, 24 August 2007:
Insulin levels and neck circumference are the two strongest predictors of the risk of obstructive sleep apnoea, a leading obesity expert says.
Speaking at the recent Australian Doctor/HealthEdGP Summit on Diabetes, Obesity and Heart Disease in Sydney, Associate Professor John Dixon said a neck circumference of 43cm or more for men and women was a clear predictor of obstructive sleep apnoea. Read more.

Grape escape

2007-08-23T13:01:00.000+10:00

From Australian Doctor, 23 August 2007:
THERE’S a guilty pleasure involved in drinking good-quality wine while the sun still shines high in the sky. But in the vineyards of Mudgee, NSW, such pleasurable behaviour is one of the delights of a visit to this wine-growing region. Read more.

GPs alerted to influenza cardiac risk

2007-08-23T12:58:00.000+10:00

From Australian Doctor, 23 August 2007:
GPs are urged to be alert for cardiac symptoms in high-risk patients with influenza, as Australia struggles through its worst flu season in several years.
Experts warned the infection could trigger acute coronary syndrome in patients with existing heart disease, and urged doctors to take preventive action. Read more.

Restless legs diagnosis missed in kids

2007-08-16T10:27:00.000+10:00

From Australian Doctor, 16 August 2007:
Restless legs syndrome is under-diagnosed in children and could be an underlying cause of behavioural and sleep problems, experts say.
A US survey of more than 10,000 families found 1.9% of children aged 8-11 years and 2% of children aged 12-17 years met the criteria for restless legs syndrome, but only 11% of these patients had been previously diagnosed with the condition. Read more.

Fantastic Voyage

2007-07-17T10:16:00.000+10:00

From Australian Doctor, 16 July 2007:
Once firmly in the realm of science fiction, nanotechnology is fast becoming a medical reality - so fast that regulators are struggling to catch up.
IN the classic 1960s science fiction film Fantastic Voyage, a medical team is shrunk to micrometre size and injected into the body of a dying scientist, with the mission of removing the blood clot that threatens to claim his life. They have just one hour to complete their task before the miniaturisation process reverses and they are restored to full size.
The story is one of countless nano-sized scenarios that have kept sci-fi fans enthralled for decades. But, while miniaturisation of entire humans is unlikely in the foreseeable future, nanotechnology has now moved from fiction into fact. Dramatic advances in the field promise extraordinary benefits for numerous areas of medicine - including cancer therapy and diagnostics - but they also raise unique safety concerns. Read more.

Pathology Update 2007

2007-07-13T10:00:00.000+10:00

From Pathway, Winter 2007:
On one side of Sydney, lycra and sequins were in, but at Darling Harbour, lab coats were definitely the order of the day. As Sydney’s gay and lesbian community celebrated Mardi Gras, the Royal College of Pathologists of Australasia held their annual Pathology Update conference on March 2–4, hosting nearly 1000 delegates from as far afield as Malaysia and London.
Presentations included:
- The future for children with acute lymphoblastic leukaemia is looking a little brighter now that Australian and international researchers have identified a group of genes that could help target more aggressive treatment to those who need it most. Read more (scroll to page 40).
- A new approach to diagnosing subarachnoid haemorrhage offers a robust screening alternative to the more costly and difficult spectrophotometric scanning, say New Zealand researchers. Read more (scroll to page 40).
- An Australian researcher is heading the mammoth task of building a database of human genetic variation, which could revolutionise genetic medicine. Read more (scroll to page 42).
- Early detection and improved treatment have significantly increased life expectancy for children with cystic fibrosis, but an Australian expert has stressed the need for increased vigilance and standardisation in testing for the disease. Read more (scroll to page 42).
- A new group of genetic mutations has been identified that places carriers at a 70% lifetime risk of gastric cancer, and also significantly increases the risk of lobular breast cancer in female carriers. Read more (scroll to page 45).
- Pathology services in the United Kingdom are set to undergo a radical overhaul after an inquiry chaired by Lord Carter of Coles found fragmentation of service and a lack of centralised, standardised information on pathology services. Read more (scroll to page 45).

Stem cell therapy helps incontinence

2007-07-09T10:48:00.000+10:00

From Australian Doctor, 6 July 2007:
LANCET Stem cell therapy is being hailed as the next leap forward in urogynaecology after a trial of skeletal muscle stem cells as a treatment for stress urinary incontinence reported a 90% success rate. Read more.

Web stokes Gardasil vax fears

2007-07-09T10:46:00.000+10:00

From Australian Doctor, 6 July 2007:
First it was a mass fainting, now unsubstantiated rumours of a link to infertility have seen some parents withdraw approval for their daughters to receive the HPV vaccine, Gardasil. Read more.

Patients peeved by sharing, caring GPs

2007-07-05T15:15:00.000+10:00

From Australian Doctor, 6 July 2007:
SHARING personal information with a patient during a consultation might seem like a nice way to build a good doctor-patient relationship, but a study has found such disclosure has the opposite effect.
Bringing up personal tidbits interrupted the flow of information between the doctor and patient and used up valuable patient time for no benefit, according to a paper in the Archives of Internal Medicine (25 June). Read more.

Help thin on the ground for obese kids

2007-06-28T12:10:00.001+10:00

From Australian Doctor, 28 June 2007:
A SYSTEM-wide failure is leaving the vast majority of overweight and obese children without any form of treatment, an expert says.
As new data show one in four Australian children is overweight or obese, Professor Louise Baur, professor of paediatrics and child health at the University of Sydney, called for regular Medicare-rebated health checks for children and electronic assessment tools for GPs to address the crisis. Read more.

Caught on camera

2007-06-01T11:15:00.000+10:00

From Australian Doctor, 1 June 2006:
Recording patient encounters can be a practical and useful teaching tool.
THE camera can reveal some unconscious habits. When Dr Rachel Sutherland was filmed during a consultation with a patient, she discovered to her surprise that she talked far more than she thought. Read more.

Services break through the bandwidth frontier

2007-05-16T15:36:00.000+10:00

From Solve, May 07:
In some industries, office chat is an important part of the creative process, particularly in collaborative situations such as film post-production. But what happens when, as is becoming more common, work colleagues are separated by vast distances – one in Sydney, for example, and the other in Los Angeles – and both need to be working together at the same time? This is the sort of challenge being addressed by CSIRO researchers at the Centre for Networking Technologies in the Information Economy (CeNTIE) project, and its applications stretch from film production to research, to medical diagnostics and online commerce.Read more.

A question of ownership

2007-05-01T15:30:00.000+10:00

From Australian Doctor, April 26, 2007:
Questions over the ownership of the H5N1 influenza strain raise wider issues about medical research, individual rights and company profits.
WHEN CSL proudly announced in January that it was applying to register its pandemic influenza vaccine, the company could not have foreseen that its supporting dossier would spark a global storm with far-reaching implications for vaccine research. Read more.

5th World Conference of Science Journalists

2007-04-20T18:39:00.000+10:00

A huge pat on the back to the Niall Byrne and his team for putting on a brilliant 5th World Conference of Science Journalists. The debates were thought-provoking, the attendee list impressive and the entertainment (and wine) of excellent quality.
The presentations included the ins-and-outs of reporting on public health issues, bias in science journals, the challenges of climate change reporting, an update on quantum computing (which I think I understood about 30% of) ... just to name a few things.
I found my previous understanding of the concept of 'balance' was challenged and eventually transformed after hearing how damaging it has been for the media to keep giving air-time to the anti-climate change lobby.
I used to think 'balance' meant presenting both the for and against views, but I've since realised that in the case of climate change, this perpetuates the impression that the scientific community is still in disagreement over whether climate change is real. In fact, there is almost total concensus amongst reputable scientists that climate change caused by human activity is real. The debate is now over what the results of this change will be.
The challenge of achieving 'balance' when reporting about health and in particular, public health issues was also discussed. How do journalists distinguish between reputable scientific opinions and the zealots? We bear a considerable burden of responsibility for the impact our reporting has on the public when it comes to such issues as immunisation, HIV/AIDS and obesity.
When the UK media went into a frenzy over claims the MMR vaccine caused autism, it led to a dramatic decline in childhood vaccinations, some children subsequently become ill with measles, mumps or rubella and a very successful preventive health strategy was thrown into disarray. A similar effect has been seen in Africa after rumours were spread about the polio vaccine. The backlash against that vaccine has seen a dramatic resurgence in polio that now threatens children all over the continent and has set polio control back by as much as 30 years.
But how, as journalists, are we to know when sensational claims are legitimate and when they are fringe? As Professor Chris Del Mar from Bond University suggested, resources such as the Cochrane Library provide a reputable and reliable update on the state of evidence on a wide range of health subjects. If a claim is made that drastically challenges reviews like these, it clearly indicates the need to seek second, third and even fourth opinions from recognised experts in the field.
We're all working under the yoke that "if it bleeds, it leads" - no one loves scandal or controversy like an editor - but I've come to appreciate from this conference that giving voice to fringe-dwelling opinions lends them a legitimacy they would never have among the scientific and medical community. In the process, it sows the seeds of doubt in the public mind, which in the case of things like immunisation and climate change, we simply cannot afford to do.

On top of the world

2007-04-10T09:32:00.000+10:00

From Australian Doctor, 6 April 2007:
THE howling, freezing wind scours my chapped face and sucks the air from my lungs as I stagger over the rocky terrain and wonder what the heck I’m doing here. Mount Everest Base Camp in Tibet is as close to hell on Earth as I’ve ever experienced. Read more.

Putting the squeeze on fat

2007-03-07T09:29:00.000+11:00

From Australian Doctor, 24 August 2006:
More carbs, fewer carbs, hypnotherapy, counselling … obese patients have tried them all. Is bariatric surgery the magic bullet for a growing problem?
WHEN it comes to losing weight, surgery beats all other strategies hands down. What other method allows even the most intractably obese patients to shed 30-50% of their body weight and, for the most part, keep it off for at least 10 years? Read more.

Bubbling with life

2007-03-07T09:25:00.000+11:00

From Australian Doctor, 28 November 2006:
YOU can smell it in the intermingled aromas of steamed dumplings and Chanel No 5, hear it in the voices speaking Cantonese, English, Hindi and myriad other tongues and accents, and see it in the dusty noodle shop jostling for customers alongside Hugo Boss, Cartier and Versace stores. Hong Kong is the ultimate mix of East meets West. Read more.

Travelling

2006-10-19T15:32:00.000+10:00

I'm currently on 6.5 months leave travelling around the world, so I'm unavailable for freelance work. My partner and I are travelling through China, Tibet, Nepal, India, Europe and South America - our travel blog is at http://hairymountainfolk.blogspot.com.
I'll be back in March 2007.
BN

Countdown to crunch time

2006-09-07T20:12:00.000+10:00

From PathWay, Winter 2006:
IT'S a pathologist’s worst nightmare. Somewhere in the steady parade of slides is one bearing the telltale stamp of malignancy, yet as it passes in front of tired, overworked eyes, the warning signs are missed and the sample is labelled normal. A cancer goes undiagnosed and a diagnosis that could save a life is delayed.
This is a rare, worst-case scenario, but experts are predicting it could become more common as a dwindling pathology workforce is stretched to its limits. The workforce crisis, which has so many in the profession dreading the next five years, is beginning to affect patients, and it will get worse over time. Read more.

Food for thought

2006-09-07T20:08:00.000+10:00

From Australian Doctor, 9 August 2006:
The lunch break is the ideal time for registrars to feed their appetite and sharpen their skills.
FOR many Australian registrars, lunch seems to be a concoction of dubious nutritional value eaten when and where time permits.
For some lucky ones it is a stroll along the beach followed by a wholemeal salad roll paid for by the clinic. Read more.

Sensory solutions

2006-08-03T14:34:00.000+10:00

From CSIRO's Solve magazine, August 2006:
The science of ‘advanced materials’ is fast opening up new industrial frontiers.
In the high-speed, low-atmosphere conditions of space travel, even the most minuscule piece of dust or rock can cause serious damage to space vehicles – and repairs are obviously not simply a matter of taking the ship to a local garage for a quick touch-up. For one thing, the nearest garage is likely to be hundreds of thousands of kilometres away. Read more.