Public health – Corpus

They shoot horses don’t they?

7 September 2020 7 Comments

Doug Lilly

Many people think of the hospice as a place where people with cancer go to die. Back in 2014, when I frequently walked past the Otago Community Hospice building in Dunedin’s North East Valley on my way home, that was my impression. What a sad place that must be to work, I thought. Although I practically lived on its doorstep, I had only ventured into this daunting place once. My partner had asked me to drop off a gift to a friend who was a hospice inpatient. I agreed, but only to leave it at reception. I didn’t want to go any further, in case I encountered dying people.

Like most people, despite ‘bearing witness’ to thousands upon thousands of deaths (both real and imagined) through images in the news and in film and television, my exposure to the reality of death and the dying process was minimal. When I went to the funeral home to view my father’s body in 2003, I was so uncomfortable about real death that I could only manage to look at him for a matter of seconds. When my mother had a serious stroke a few years later, I spent time with her as she slowly deteriorated, surrounded by her children, grandchildren and extended family. I was not present when she died, but when asked if I wanted to see her body, I declined, remembering how traumatic I had found trying to view my father’s body years earlier.

Are we there yet? On the exercise of patience

7 September 2020 4 Comments

Sue Wootton

Patience (n.): the calm endurance of pain of any provocation; perseverance; forbearance; quiet and self-possessed waiting for something.”

Year of the houseplant: this variegated minima recently sold for NZ$8,150. (Photo: Trade me/ hurley88)

Okay, that’s nice, but are we there yet?

Patience is a virtue, so the saying goes, but I disagree. Yes, it’s possible to have the patience of a saint, but it’s also possible to have the patience of the devil. Many crimes and abuses have been committed by people patient enough to wait, preparing all the while to strike. Aggressors against others are often very, very patient. For the victims of those aggressive or oppressive acts there is more wisdom than virtue in ensuring your survival by keeping your head below the parapet and biding your time. Patience is a strategy, a behaviour, a matter of judgement, of choice-in-circumstance. Just as courage is called out only in the existence of fear, patience comes into existence in the presence of, and in response to, impatience. It requires the exercise of personal restraint and impulse control in the service of a greater end goal, and it may feel entirely counter-intuitive in the moment. I hesitate to disagree with my trusty Collins Dictionary, but it may not feel anything like “calm endurance” or “quiet and self-possessed waiting.” Yes, the patient person waits, but it’s an active state involving paying attention, reflecting, planning. Patience isn’t a thing. It’s a capacity, an attitude. It’s an ongoing recallibration of approach rather than a one-size-fits-all solution. It’s a work in progress, a practice, an art.

Yes, yes, so you say, but are we there yet?

“Meninjitters”: The Bay of Islands Epidemic of 1941

20 July 2020 Leave a Comment

Lachy Paterson

The 2020 Covid-19 pandemic has been described, perhaps accurately, as a one-in-one-hundred-years event, but during its history New Zealand has a number of “scares” and lockdowns because of infectious diseases that have had detrimental impacts on Māori. In 2020, the memory of these epidemics has led some Māori communities to attempt to keep the coronavirus away from their own communities.

Historically, Pākehā were more concerned that Māori would spread disease to them. Māori were sometimes seen by Pākehā as a weak link in New Zealand’s chain of health defences, with poor, overcrowded and unsanitary housing and customs that could potentially spread disease. Māori, often due to poverty or lack of access, were also less likely to seek medical treatment, and epidemics could hit their communities hard.

Boracic snuff, camphor bags and masks

8 June 2020 2 Comments

Pamela Wood

Red Cross volunteers during the Spanish flu epidemic, USA, 1918.

How do you protect yourself against a pandemic virus? The current debate about the efficacy of wearing face masks in public as protection against Covid-19 echoes the difference of opinion during the ‘Spanish flu’ pandemic a century ago. And while we all now pay attention to handwashing and social distancing, in 1918 people followed government advice to breathe deeply in public inhalation chambers filled with a zinc sulphate mist or where a machine sprayed it directly into their mouth. Responsibility for their own health meant they also shared their own preventive measures for warding off influenza.

To mask or not to mask? According to the 1919 commission of inquiry which considered the best ways to deal with any future pandemic, there was complete agreement that doctors, nurses and other attendants in close contact with influenza patients should wear masks. This was probably prompted by the shock that in less than eight weeks, three quarters of hospital nurses had contracted the disease from pandemic patients. The question was whether citizens should wear masks in public.

Bread-making gone viral

20 April 2020 2 Comments

Meena Al-Emleh

Bread is such an essential part of the foodscape of twenty-first century New Zealand that, apart from food preference or allergy, it is often spared little thought in people’s day-to-day lives. That was until now – people who usually bought bread regularly are now baking it (if they can get enough flour) and rediscovering the pleasure of a freshly baked loaf from the oven. We now might worry about touching the bag the flour was bought in but we don’t distrust a bought loaf. This was not the case during the 1940s, when a number of major acts regarding food hygiene were introduced. One of these laws in particular – the bread-wrapping regulation – had the attention of the Ministry of Health, bakers, grocers, and the New Zealand public for a period spanning 1946 to the end of 1948. Fears concerning an earlier dreaded virus, poliomyelitis, were at the root of the issue.

The entire New Zealand wheat industry had deep ties to the government from the First World War which controlled the price of bread. Control was slowly relaxed over time, but during the Great Depression a wheat surplus crashed the market, leading to further trouble in the economic sector. By 1934 the NZ Master Bakers Association was calling for full regulation of wheat and bread prices once more, and in 1936 the Labour government did just that. Labour also created a Wheat Committee, involving representation for farmers, millers, bakers, grain merchants, and grocers in the new industry processes. The committee would buy the entire seasonal wheat crop and sell it on at a uniform price for everyone. Although this systematic restructuring benefited countless people, lower bread prices brought lower profit margins. It was for this reason that the costly practice of wrapping bread in waxed paper declined.

Community transmissions

6 April 2020 13 Comments

M. L. E. Brown

‘Community transmission’ is a term the entire world will be much more familiar with after the Covid-19 pandemic. In medical parlance, the term refers to the apparent absence of epidemiological link within a community beyond its confirmed cases. It might also be applied in a holistic sense, when the reach of mass catastrophe seeps into cultural and emotional memory.

My parents were older than those of my schoolmates. Born in 1913 and 1918 respectively, they were middle-aged by the time I was born in 1966. Theirs was the generation of New Zealand infants who started life scarred by the immediate effects of World War One. My mother was a wonderful sick-nurse. I remember an occasion when my elderly aunt and uncle caught a serious ‘flu. I recall myself in my mid-teens, hovering in the kitchen of their villa while my mother swept upstairs bearing reheated lunches she had pre-cooked at our place; and then downstairs again with linen and towels to be flung in my aunt’s ancient washing machine.

I wasn’t allowed upstairs. “Don’t eat that!” my mother snapped as I picked up a malt biscuit left over from my uncle’s barely-touched tray. She, who could never abide waste of any sort, scraped all the untouched food onto a tin plate and marched it out to the compost. She gave me some rubber gloves and told me to do the dishes and scrub the bench thoroughly with hot water and Vim. Afterwards, I mopped the kitchen and laundry floors with even hotter water and Janola while she returned upstairs to help the afflicted pair from their chairs back to the master bed she had already re-made with clean linen.