Poor medical outcomes in remote aboriginal communities

I watched the 4 Corners show last night on aboriginal deaths from rheumatic heart disease in the remote community of Doomadgee.   

This is a difficult issue, as the individual treatment the three women received appeared inadequate.  (Although, it should be noted, there was really not enough detail provided to make confident assessments of what was going on.)

But - there was absolutely no contextualising the difficulties of providing good medical treatment in those communities.   And perversely, Aboriginal leadership (and locals) crying "racism" - as they did repeatedly on this show - as the root cause is not going to help.  It's already hard enough to get medical staff to work at remote aboriginal communities, because they are isolated, often socially dysfunctional, and dangerous.   Throw in "and the locals will riot and call you racist if they think you caused someone's death" and you are only going to exacerbate the staffing problems.

I mean, there was frequent reference to the ill women being assessed at night through a metal grill at the hospital.  Was there any attempt to explain why these places have to be run like that at night?  No, none at all.  

This is a well known problem, and the ABC has at times run stories on nurses who bravely try to work at remote locations.  (In fact, I heard one story again on the radio today.)   And here are some extracts from an article in BMJ Open last year:

 

As I said, this seems some really important background if you're going to talk about cases involving poor outcomes, even in individual cases.   

Update:   I think I should also have added - given that the problems of working in these remote communities are well known, it would suggest that those who nonetheless try to give it a go are far from racist.    

Conservative blogger watch

As far as I can make out, over years of reading, Currency Lad is about 50 and never been married.  I wonder if he ever wonders why:

  

Less than optimal

This is a pretty surprising image to see out of Sydney, where (apparently) you can lose your car to a flood while on top of a high bridge above other water:

 

Sounds like an interesting, if depressing, read

At Slate, a review of a book about the incredible scandal that is Alex Jones and the Sandy Hook "truther" movement.   Just an appalling situation that it has taken so many years for the American system to deal with. 

Some random notes

*   Forgot to say during last week's flood event - doesn't anyone question the number of private pontoons that are allowed on the Brisbane river?  I mean, the last big flood taught us that they need to be super secure or else they cause havoc downstream, but this time there seemed to be dozens nonetheless careening down the river.

*  I couldn't believe some of the stories from Hertz in America, where they report a car stolen if a credit card is knocked back when someone rings up wanting an extension.   Then years later, hapless renters can be arrested even when they know the card payment later went through and the car was returned.   Just hopeless administration, probably worsened by having so many different states with different laws complicating matters further. 

* You want to know about an academic who seems to be a one person grievance industry?   (I think Greg Jericho, who I think is sensible on most things except trans matters, re-tweeted - them? - complaining about the ABC doing something apparently wrong when referring to drag and trans during the Gay Mardi Gras telecast).  Here are some selection from their (I think that's right?) twitter account:

And yet, I still don't think the West is militarily weak and swooning for Putin and Christofascism is the way forward.

*  Speaking as I was of the Brisbane River - it makes no sense whatsoever that my city, with its shallow, flood prone river, and big but shallow bay with one deep channel through it, should be being considered at all for a new defence base for nuclear submarines, as I heard on the radio this morning.

*  Trump, being an idiot, all over again.

*  Helen Dale, writing about the Ukraine war on 28 February, makes some bad calls:

We now know that not only does Nato lack the capacity to intervene militarily on Ukraine’s behalf, but it also can’t even impose effective economic sanctions. Germany is so dependent on Russian gas that, while Western powers work to suspend Russia’s participation in the SWIFT international banking system, Germany has won itself a special carve-out, otherwise it won’t be able to pay Gazprom and German grannies will turn into popsicles next time there’s a cold snap. ‘We are currently seeing the downsides of a sovereign nation constructing a barrel-shaped pipeline and then obligingly bending over it,’ Bond observes drily.

She should stick to esoteric fiction.

 

What, indeed...

Update:  lots of people saying this was a big exaggeration for propaganda purposes.  All the same, it's a worry to hear of any military engagement anywhere near nuclear power plant.

I'm feeling more convinced that internment camps for key members of the Murdoch family and all of Fox News is warranted

 

Superyachts considered

Am I alone in this?   When I see pictures of Russian owned "superyachts" that look like this:

 or this:

my thoughts run to "why does anyone want to own something that looks a mini cruise ship anyway?"

I mean, they must cost a mint to operate (although maybe that can be charged to a company?), but seriously, who has that many family and friends that they can entertain on it and make it seem inhabited?    I imagine most of the time they are far from fully occupied, and feel kind of empty and wasted.

And if you let people you don't know well take a holiday on them, as some sort of reward for hard work, or for sleezy deal making, don't you get problems with bad behaviour?

 

That was hard

I lucked out and got Wordle today, but gee, it was a hard one.    

More of the same

There are storms and heavy rain passing through Brisbane this morning, but it seems more like the "normal" fast moving storms...so far.  Some big wind damage at Beerwah, north of Brisbane, they were saying on TV this morning, but without any images yet.

The news from Ukraine is sort of moving slowly now, it seems, making the doom scrolling feel a bit tedious.   (Makes it sound like I'm demanding more disaster so I can be more engaged with twitter - sorry.)   

Anyway, on the up side, even if it is sort of taking some pleasure in negatives:   seems to me a lot of people are over Stan Grant's weird positioning into some sort of soft-ish left wing contrarian, willing to entertain the "it's the West's fault that they've gone all squishy liberal and can no longer understand salt of the Earth conservatives like Russians".   Bernard Keane's been a strong critic of Grant and his fatuous writing:

And his free to view article on Crikey is pretty good.

Gray Connolly has copped a lot of flak for his SMH article too, which I didn't bother reading as I've already decided he way, way over-rates himself as a pretend historian.   He's just too full of conservative Catholic biases to be taken seriously.

Oh, and I just looked at Twitter and see this idiot making a deeper idiot of himself:

Update:   Bernard Keane mocks John Pilger as a Putin apologist, too.  (And from the photo in the article, Pilger could now pass for the decrepit as John Laws now.  Not a good look.)

Anastasia comes out looking OK

Just noticed this tweet, which I would say is very effective (and super efficient) in explaining to the public that rail services in Brisbane (and elsewhere) are out for good reason.

 

I also think she presents very credibly during a natural disaster like this. 

Day 3 of no power

At least (one of the) fridges got cleaned out.  I'm pretty sure that if this hadn't happened, in 30 years time, my kids when dealing with the last of their parent's deceased estate would have have been throwing out egg whites in a plastic freezer bag from 2012.  

Update:  power's back.  Yay.  (And ancient frozen egg whites collected in the rubbish today.)

Rainfall records break, and floods follow

Graham Readfearn in The Guardian notes:

The Bureau of Meteorology has been checking the rainfall data from the floods in south-east Queensland, revealing a string of broken records and a stunning amount of rain.

In the six days from 23 to 28 February, at least 33 places recorded more than one metre of rain, including an astonishing 1.77 metres falling at Mount Glorious, just east of Wivenhoe Dam that helps reduce flooding in the city.

Parts of south-east Queensland and north-east New South Wales had at least 2.5 times their average rainfall for the month, with some areas getting five times the average.

In Brisbane, 792.8mm fell into the city rain gauge over the six days to 9am on 28 February, which is above the previous six-day record of 655.8mm set in January 1974.

For the first time ever, the city had three consecutive days when more than 200mm fell. Before last month, there had only been eight previous days when the city had seen more than 200mm in one day.

The BoM national manager of climate services, Dr Karl Braganza, said this meant the city had received almost 80% of its annual average rainfall in only six days.

In northern New South Wales, several places in the northern rivers region had daily totals above 500mm up to 9am on 28 February.

Braganza said preliminary analysis of rainfall in Lismore, which is currently inundated, suggested more rain had fallen in the town than the previous record in March 2017 when the remnants of Tropical Cyclone Debbie passed through.

As I've been noting for years - climate change and its effect on rain and floods was the massively disruptive and costly effect that was not discussed enough in early talk about climate change, and just imagine how much worse it may get with another .5 to 1 degree temperature rise.

Oh look, two stooges

 

No power (continued)

It seems the estimate for the repair time for power to houses in my neighbourhood has stretched out to Friday!   I know this happened to other houses in my area in the 2011 floods (5 to 7 days with no power), but my particular neighbour only lost it for one day.  Hence we were not particularly worried when it first went off yesterday morning.

Now, a friend has lent us a generator.  Noisy, smelly things they are.   But I think the idea is to run them for a couple of hours to get the fridge cold, then turn it off for an hour and don't open the fridge.   We have eskys and plenty of ice too.  And a gas stove (yah).  

Speaking of gas stoves, I know they are getting so much bad PR for their health effects now, but I'll put on my populist "it didn't affect me, so it can't be so bad" hat now and mention that I grew up in a house with town gas and therefore a gas stove top and oven, in a rather small three bedroom house in which I sometimes shared with older brothers who would smoke in bed.  (!)  I have now lived in a house for nearly 20 years with a gas stove top from bottle gas. 

No one in my family (6 siblings, and parents) ever suffered asthma or any lung disease*.  Neither of my kids (now adults) suffered asthma.  Same with allergies to anything (which I mention because of asthma's connection to allergy.) 

Is it because I live in a warm climate, where kitchen windows are nearly always open during cooking?   But my life experience is not consistent with "gas is really bad for health".

Anyway, back to the floods.   This report concentrated mostly on suburbs on my side of town, so I'll put it here.    

 

The estimate of the number of houses affected seems to be about 15,000 to 20,000. 

But the Lismore flood is more remarkable - highest known historical flood exceeded by 2m! I mean, that's really incredible.

 

*  Whoops - I forgot that I had included both parents in that explanation, but my father did die of lung cancer.  However, he was a life long smoker who gave up only a few years before the cancer was diagnosed.   All of my brothers eventually gave up smoking - I think by their 40's at the latest.    

Amusing

 Here's a question:   why does Murdoch, or anyone with their head on right, consider Piers Morgan a "star".   He's always been shallow, and I have always found him instantly dislikeable.    

By the way, Morrison did turn up in Brisbane yesterday afternoon, and did an underwhelming TV appearance.   I think everyone seeing it probably thought "you're only here because of Hawaii."   Amusingly, I didn't see his visit even covered on the evening news, which I'm sure must have irritated his minders a lot. 

What a disgrace of a Party

 

This is the thing they are talking about in relation to the GOP:

Notice: due to Graeme, comments are in moderation

I'm sick of having to constantly delete Graeme Bird's anti-Semitic conspiracy comments, which are at full blown fever level due to the situation in Ukraine. 

So all comments are going into moderation for now.

Floods, again

Well, seems I'll be living through the third major Brisbane flood in my life time.  It has been extremely wet in the Western suburbs today, and the promised move of the worst of the rain band to the south of the city just never seems to happen.

More news tomorrow...

 

Update:   Anyone who has lived in Brisbane for a long time would agree the weather yesterday was very unusual.   We're used to storms that whip through in the space of 30 minutes to an hour, dump a huge amount of rain, and are gone.   What we don't see much is systems that produce thundery slow storms that hang around for, like, 6 to 9 hours?  The rain just kept coming yesterday, with only occasional slow downs in rate.  Mostly, steady heavy rain with bursts of "torrential".

As with 2011, it's kind of weird.  If you can get to an unaffected suburban shopping centre, you wouldn't necessarily know how bad the flood affected parts are going.  But roads are cut everywhere:

The flooding in my area (which is close to the river) is not a high as 2011, but there are businesses and houses well under.   Unexpectedly, the power has gone off at home due to flood damage.  (As per 2011, when it was off for a day.)   But other streets not far away still have power, which seems odd.

 

I have read someone saying that it was a record 3 day rainfall event, but haven't seen that confirmed yet.

 

Anyway, what a weekend for doom scrolling - floods and the threat of nuclear war....

 

 

Just too stupid

This is just breathtakingly shameless and deeply stupid.   Yet brainless partisanship is on full display in the comments...