COSS Network submission to Inquiry into chronic disease prevention and management in primary health care

Chronic disease causes nine out of ten Australian deaths, according to this report. Chronic disease in Australia Chronic diseases in Australia are significant contributors to illness, disability and premature death. Chronic disease causes nine out of ten Australian deaths. Heart disease, cancer, lung disease and diabetes account for three quarters of all of these deaths. In 2007-08 one in 50 people reported having four or more chronic health conditions. This proportion increased with age, with eight per cent of people aged 65 or older reporting four or more chronic health conditions. It is anticipated that the rate of chronic disease in the community will continue to grow, and the health system will struggle to cope. The World Health Organization has called chronic conditions ‘the health care challenge of this century’ Chronic diseases are often long term. As a result, they pose significant challenges for the health care system. People with chronic disease use health services including hospitals, primary and community health, regularly and often over a long period of time. For example, heart disease was the main cause in about one in every 16 hospital admissions and played a secondary role in one in ten admission. Kidney disease and the need for dialysis in particular, accounted for between one in seven to eight hospital admissions. &nbsp

Vaccines

Have you ever had a vaccine? I have. Some haven’t. I remember when I was a kid, maybe around six, sitting on the paper-covered exam table in my doctor’s office. The room was sterile and cold, and a nurse was approaching me with the needle. Like most children, I was absolutely petrified. The fear of the unknown, of the pain, of a foreign metal penetrating my body...completely out of control and unaware of what it was supposed to protect me from...only aware of the fear. I cried. I tried to get away. They had to hold my arm down to keep me from pulling away. My mom couldn’t watch and had to leave the room because she felt so guilty watching me sob in fear, with no way to comfort me. It stung when the needle pierced my skin. And then again and again. Five times. At least they didn’t do a finger prick that day too. Those scared me the most

Biodiversity and perceptions of risk: Reactions to the use of a single donor for stem-cell derived red blood cell transfusions

Blood transfusion is a well-accepted medical technology that currently relies on a supply of red blood cells from many thousands of altruistic donors. Cultured red blood cells using stem cell technology could offer a replacement technology, providing a limitless supply of red blood cells from a single source. This project used interviews and focus groups to explore the views of a wide range of publics towards cultured red blood cells. This paper explores how participants referred to a lack of biodiversity in cultured red blood cells in three ways. The first was as a comparison to GM crops, with concern over a monopoly on blood supplies. The second was a perceived increased risk associated with a single source of blood. Thirdly participants saw the lack of biodiversity as a threat to the altruistic nature of blood donation from multiple donors

A Wee Lesson in Science Communication

The University of Edinburgh encourages its Ph.D. students to participate in a broad programme of science communication activities, designed to enhance public engagement in scienc

Furious: Myth, Gender, and the Origins of Lady Macbeth

This thesis attempts to understand the fabulously complex and poisonously unsettling Lady Macbeth as a product of classical reception and intertextuality in early modern England. Whence comes her “undaunted mettle” (1.7.73)? Why is she, like the regicide she helps commit, such a “bloody piece of work” (2.3.108)? How does her ability to be “bloody, bold, and resolute” (4.1.81), as Macbeth is commanded to be, reflect canonical literary ideas, early modern or otherwise, regarding women, gender, and violence? Approaching texts in the literary canon as the result of transformation and reception, this research analyzes the ways in which Lady Macbeth’s gender, motivations, and words can be understood as inherently intertextual. By tracing the provenance of Lady Macbeth’s character to figures from Greek and Roman mythology—particularly Clytemnestra, the Furies, Medusa, Medea, and Orestes—this work reckons with how Lady Macbeth’s catalyzing of violence receives mythological ideas regarding women and wrath. When we see rage or violence in Lady Macbeth, it is in some way coded for figures of wrath in classical mythology and their afterlives. By appropriating and translating these figures (as Bottom is ‘translated’), Shakespeare\u27s depiction of Lady Macbeth renegotiates the extant gender binary, opening up new possibilities for gendered behavior that neither embrace nor fully disown binary concepts of womanhood and femaleness. Examining sources from early modern literature—including medical texts, poetry, and translations of Greek and Roman mythological works—this work dives into the ideological framework that both establishes and complicates Lady Macbeth’s identity. This thesis suggests that, by identifying pervasive background of classical mythology in Macbeth, we can perform a more nuanced analysis of Lady Macbeth’s poisonous maternity and destabilizing impact upon the patriarchal settings of the play. Her drive towards violence can, as a result, be seen as a concurrent and traumatic intensification and repudiation of emotions or characteristics typically perceived as feminine or maternal. By evoking and sometimes explicitly quoting rageful or violent mythological women, Shakespeare simultaneously renders Lady Macbeth dangerously feminine, disruptively masculine, and stubbornly ambiguous