Australia
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Americans Living Longer Than Two Decades Ago, But Overall State Of Health Care Is 'Mediocre,' Despite Spending Increase: Report
The United States is falling behind its economic peers in most measures of health, despite making gains in the past two decades, according to a sweeping study of data from 34 countries. Read More »
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Assessing The Global And Regional Burden Of Liver Disease
Researchers from Australia presented their research on the underlying causes of liver cancer and cirrhosis deaths at the Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases, concluding that these two diseases result in 1.75 million deaths each year. Viral hepatitis caused two thirds of those deaths... Read More »
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Australia to follow New Zealand's lead on changes to software patent laws
The movement to pass new laws doing away with software patents continues to pick up steam. Following on the heels of action by the government of New Zealand to abolish software patents, the Open Source Industry Australia (OSIA) is urging the Australian government to do the same. In addition to New Zealand's recent ban on software patents, the European Union (EU) has been debating similar moves for more than a decade. Brazil, Russia, India and China are also beginning to get on board with the idea. Read More »
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Australia's Boom Is Anything But For Its Aboriginal People
Eleven miles by ferry from Perth is Western Australia's "premier tourist destination". This is Rottnest Island, whose scabrous wild beauty and isolation evoked, for me, Robben Island in South Africa. Empires are never short of devil's islands; what makes Rottnest different – indeed, what makes Australia different – is silence and denial on an epic scale. Read More »
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Australia's Chief Scientist Includes Open Access In STEM Vision
Australia’s chief scientist Ian Chubb has presented recommendations to the country’s parliament for a national strategy on research in science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM). Amongst other things, his report highlighted the role that open access could play...
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Australian Chief Scientist: Act Now, or Expect Deadly 'Post-Antibiotics Era'
In the latest warning that antibiotics resistance is nearing dangerous levels in modern populations, Australia's chief scientist has issued a stark warning that if we don't invest in combatting it now, sore throats and other minor infections could one day be deadly. Read More »
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Australian government can't recruit fast enough for Open Source
The tide is turning with the use of open-source software within the Australian government Read More »
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Australian Teenage Science Prodigys Discover Ways to Reduce Antibiotic Resistance, Among Other "Phenomenal" Findings
Teenagers across Australia are producing scientific findings that could potentially change the way we live and the world we live in. One of the country's brightest young minds has developed a way to make bacteria less resistant to antibiotics. Another has created six new types of bioplastic including one which decomposes at 300 times faster than plastic. Two brothers have come up with a laser device to make road cycling safer...
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Can Public Health Data Mapping And Visualization Transform Healthcare Globally? [Australia]
Laurie Hawkins, project manager of the Victorian Human Services Directory in Australia discusses how public health data mapping can improve global health...
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Canada's Headed For A HealthCare.gov Disaster Of Its Own
I am deeply disappointed at yet another massive government IT failure, and sadly, not surprised in the slightest. The Canadian government's initiative to consolidate more than 1,500 government websites into a single super site, Canada.ca, is failing and starting to look like Canada's version of the disastrous Healthcare.gov. The original deadline for completing the project passes this month, with costs ballooning from $1.54 million to a reported $9.4 million, and growing...
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Commonwealth Establishes Australian Digital Health Agency to Complement My Health Record
The federal government has announced the establishment of the Australian Digital Health Agency and an advisory board comprised of doctors, informatics specialists, digital experts, and customer service executives tasked with ensuring the nation's health system is technologically up to date. Speaking at the Health Informatics Conference 2016 in Melbourne on Monday, Minister for Health Sussan Ley said the new agency will set the national agenda for technical and data standards, promote clear principles for interoperability, and open source development within the health system...
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Crisis Communication: Saving Time and Lives in Disasters through Smarter Social Media
As the worst bushfires seen for generations in New South Wales raged across the Blue Mountains, Southern Highlands and the Central Coast two years ago, people urgently needed fast, reliable information – and many turned to their phones to get it. The NSW Rural Fire Service was prepared with a smartphone app, Fires Near Me, which was downloaded almost 200,000 times. At the height of the fires, its Facebook page was recording more than a million views an hour. A social media campaign also helped the NSW Rural Fire Service Facebook community more than double from 120,000 to 280,000, while its Twitter reach jumped from 20,000 to 37,000 followers. Crucially, this helped to alert people to danger areas and places to avoid driving near...
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Devil's Milk Could Be the Killer Ingredient in War on Superbugs
Devil's milk has proved to be an unlikely weapon in the increasingly desperate global fight against superbugs. Australian researchers have discovered that peptides contained in the milk of Tasmanian devils can kill some of the most deadly bacterial and fungal infections, including golden staph. Having scanned the devil's genome and discovered the six naturally occurring antimicrobial peptides, researchers from Sydney University set about replicating them artificially. They then tested the peptide's effectiveness at killing some of the most harmful bacteria known to humans...
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Drones Spread Wings From War Zones To Disaster Areas
While lawmakers around the world struggle to keep up with the growth in the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) — commonly known as drones — innovation and community participation are changing how this weapon of modern warfare can be used for humanitarian purposes. Read More »
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Drugs You Don't Need For Disorders You Don't Have
One evening in the late summer of 2015, Lisa Schwartz was watching television at her Vermont home when an ad for a sleeping pill called Belsomra appeared on the screen. Schwartz, a longtime professor at Dartmouth Medical College, usually muted commercials, but she watched this one closely: a 90-second spot featuring a young woman and two slightly cute, slightly creepy fuzzy animals in the shape of the words “sleep” and “wake”...
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