This week the column celebrates two wins for environmental health that Al Gore has called “powerful reminders that the antidote to despair about the state of climate and environmental justice is action!”
We also celebrate achievements in First Nations peoples’ health. And we bring some brickbats for governments, organisations and companies that are undermining and harming health.
Don’t miss the reports from recent conferences and journal publications, as well as details of upcoming events. There’s also a recommended read on healthcare inequities for people in prison.
The quotable?
Transforming the economy to deliver on health for all needs a more ambitious approach than, for example, taxing products that harm planetary and human health such as fossil fuels and tobacco. Governments should design partnerships, institutions, and tools that can deliver on bold goals and align investment and innovation with them.”
World Health Day
Marking World Health Day on 7 April, the anniversary of the World Health Organization’s founding in 1948, the WHO highlighted the impacts of political inaction, injustice, the climate crisis and the devastating impacts of conflicts.
“On this World Health Day and beyond, WHO is calling for governments to make meaningful investments to scale up primary healthcare; to ensure transparency and accountability; and to meaningfully involve individuals and communities in decision-making around health,” the WHO said.
“Recognising the interdependence between the right to health and other fundamental rights, the campaign includes calls to action on finance, agriculture, environment, justice, transport, labour and social affairs.”
Meanwhile, it’s also Global Public Health Week, whose theme is “Fostering Peace as a Prerequisite for Equitable Health”. Follow @WePublicHealth this week for more news from #GPHW24.
Read: The Lancet, Starvation as a weapon of war must stop
The authors conclude: “What can be done to hold perpetrators of starvation accountable? António Guterres, UN Secretary-General, and Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO Director-General, have been powerful voices expressing outrage when the rules of war have been violated. They have used their offices courageously to criticise member-states that have broken international humanitarian law.
“But, as the International AIDS Society–Lancet Commission correctly points out, the UN Security Council inconsistently addresses and rarely enforces international human rights law in conflict settings. The reality is that geopolitical rivalries prevent collective political action to stop inhumane and illegal actions by rogue governments.
“As wars worsen and leave deep scars in the moral conscience of the international community, health leaders must insist on the centrality of human rights to protect vulnerable and innocent populations struggling in conflict settings. The use of starvation as a weapon of war is a crime that must be prosecuted and punished to protect the most basic right of all: human dignity.”
Long COVID
Read more about the Long COVID Keystone report
It concludes: “There was a call for closer collaboration between people with lived experiences, including patients and their doctors, with basic scientists, clinical researchers, and other key stakeholders to fill the needs of the patient community with appropriately focused research, and to derive insights into identify treatments for Long COVID that might otherwise be overlooked.
“This disease provides a unique opportunity to forge these inclusive collaborations, and to model a new way of engaging with patient communities to accelerate biomedical research advances and impacts.”
MJA Insight, Why we must keep using the term ‘long COVID’
Associate Professor Danielle Hitch writes that the Federal Government response to their long COVID inquiry has acknowledged and provided in-principle support for most recommendations. “The emphasis on greater collaboration is a welcome recognition of long COVID’s impact on the Australian community. However, the recommendation to drop “long COVID” in preference to post-acute sequelae of COVID-19 (PASC) is problematic and distressing for the long COVID consumer community.
“This recommendation underestimates the colloquial use and deeper meaning of the term “long COVID”. In my opinion, we have no right to tell patients how they name or speak about the syndrome they identified. It is important we continue to use “long COVID” when communicating with patients, to acknowledge and respect their advocacy and hard-won lived experience.”
(Read more on terminology issues in this previous Croakey article by Alison Barrett: On PASC versus long COVID – and the potential for confusion.)
Celebrating some wins…
Read the BBC story: European court rules human rights violated by climate inaction
…and noting a shocker
BMJ: Exclusive: Outcry as Philip Morris International funds smoking cessation courses on Medscape
Medscape is in hot water over an extremely problematic decision to partner with tobacco industry giant Philip Morris International (PMI) on a series of new education courses on smoking cessation.
First Nations health news
Read more in this statement from Congress:
“The new service commenced late last year and there have already been more than 50 births supported by the new partnership service with early indications of improved outcomes including in the critical area of supporting pregnancies go closer to full term.
See the submissions on First Nations Clean Energy Strategy
Watch the video with Associate Professor Tamara Mackean
Read the speeches from the First Peoples’ Assembly of Victoria
Journal Watch
The authors conclude: “Health agencies should continue to advise against fan use in air temperatures higher than 35°C, especially for people with compromised sweating capacity (eg, adults aged 65 years or older). Improving access to ambient cooling strategies (eg, air conditioning or evaporative coolers) and minimising their economic and environmental costs through policy initiatives, efficient cooling technology, and combined use of low-cost personal interventions (eg, skin wetting or fan use) are crucial for climate adaptation.”
BMJ: Regulate industry in all economic sectors to achieve health for all
The authors state :To deliver on health for all, states must take on a proactive, market shaping role. They should drive innovation through governance, not constraining themselves to fixing markets only when the private sector fails to deliver on key missions.
“Transforming the economy to deliver on health for all needs a more ambitious approach than, for example, taxing products that harm planetary and human health such as fossil fuels and tobacco. Governments should design partnerships, institutions, and tools that can deliver on bold goals and align investment and innovation with them.”
BMJ Global Health: The cost of inaction on health equity and its social determinants
The authors argue that the return on investment in social determinants of health has never been greater.
The Lancet Global Health: No health without brain health
The NEJM: Nutrition in Medicine — A New Review Article Series
Announcing a new review article series centered on fundamental and emerging concepts in nutrition, ranging from the basic “pharmacodynamics” of food to evolving topics such as the relation between the gut and immunity and the role of the gut microbiome in health and disease. “We hope that these reviews will highlight how food is selected, ingested, digested, and metabolised, allowing clinicians to tailor it as prevention and intervention for many common diseases. Let us move toward abandoning “food for thought” and adopting “food as practice” to improve the health of our patients worldwide.”
Conference watch
Australian public health researchers are presenting at the People’s Health Assembly in Argentina
Snippets from the Perinatal Society of Australia and New Zealand annual congress
See the news from @LGBTIQHealthAu ’s 12th Health in Difference conference #HID24
See the Rainbow Realities report
Healthcare
Overland: Prison healthcare as punishment — the killing of Veronica Nelson
Sarah Schwartz writes that while healthcare in prisons is meant to be the same as that provided outside, this is far from the reality. “Rather, prison healthcare, or the absence thereof, is an extension of the logic of prisons — its own distinct form of punishment….Stigma and racism within the prison healthcare system, both on an individual and systemic level, entrenches the view that people in prison are undeserving of care.”
Her article investigates some of the structural determinants of healthcare inequities for people in prison, and suggests ways forward:
“Breaking down barriers and not treating prisoners and the healthcare they receive as separate from society — as disappeared — not only improves the health and wellbeing of people who go in and out of prison but also gets us one step closer to breaking down prison walls.
“Integrating prison healthcare systems with the public system includes transferring responsibility away from Corrections, departments of justice and for-profits, and towards health departments. It includes enabling people to access Medicare services and PBS medications. It also includes having medical professionals in prisons who also work across the public healthcare system.
“Central to having a safe healthcare system for First Nations people is that healthcare be culturally safe. That means having access to Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisations, which centre First Nations cultures and definitions of health.
“These steps would go some way towards enabling healthcare in prisons to be independent of the punitive correctional system.”
The Conversation: Evidence doesn’t support spinal cord stimulators for chronic back pain – and they could cause harm
#AusPol
Tips to craft influential submissions to government inquiries
Media matters
Events upcoming
