Public health - Corpus

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.

Lock-downs and liberty

30 March 2020 5 Comments

Sue Wootton

Remember MRS GREN, the mnemonic for the biological features necessary for organic life? Movement, Respiration, Sensation, Growth, Reproduction, Excretion, Nutrition. The great shared factor – the one that is present in them all – is movement, which occurs at some level, micro or macro, during every one of these functions. This intimate association between life and movement is reflected in human languages, which are laden with movement-related metaphors, imagery and symbolism. In English, for example, we speak of life cycles and seasonal cycles, of money or kindness making the world go round, of giving the nod or of shaking things off. We advise ‘going forward’ and ‘moving on’. We run ideas past other people; we are caught on the hop; we leap to conclusions; we take it step by step. Life, we say, is a journey. Sometimes we see the path clearly and lope along. Sometimes, however, we can’t see the woods for the trees, or our plans are stalled, or the wheels fall off, and everything comes to a grinding halt.

Public health priorities

6 May 2019 2 Comments

Barbara Brookes

How can it be that a public body appointed to set priorities for public health in New Zealand became described by a member of the same government that appointed it as “a bunch of cretins”?

The answer, epidemiologist and public health physician Sir David Skegg suggests in his compelling book The Health of the People (BWB Texts, 2019), is that politicians focused on personal health services take a short-term view, and ignore the longer-term factors that impact on the health status of the community. That preference for the short-term may be influenced by particular lobby groups – promoting food and alcohol, for example – industries whose interests would be endangered by regulation in the interests of health.

The Health of the People is motivated by concern that a focus on short-term medical services has left New Zealanders with almost no centralised planning and oversight of the kind that would have prevented what occurred in Havelock North in August 2016. In that disaster, 40 percent of residents became seriously ill because of unsafe drinking water, 45 people were hospitalised and at least three people died. While the issue hit the headlines when it occurred, the public learned little about the subsequent Inquiry, which found that the Ministry of Health failed in its duty of enforcing standards to ensure safe drinking water. The findings of the Inquiry were as invisible to the public as the bugs in the water.

The poetry of getting back to living

1 April 2019 Leave a Comment

Gail Ingram

I’m from Christchurch. On my website, I introduce myself by saying ‘writing saves my life’. Before 15 March 2019, I was going to try and persuade you how this was so. I wanted to argue that I had evidence of this, that in the experience of writing Contents Under Pressure, my soon-to-be published poetry manuscript, I supported my damaged children in the wake of the Christchurch earthquakes, and, in doing so, kept them living.

I wanted to communicate some of what it felt, as a mother, to support teenagers who were suffering severe mental stress, and how necessary and large the task was to work our family back to health. I wanted to be there; attend the hours and days and weeks in doctors’ appointments, school appointments; listen and learn and implement coping strategies, model them; and most of all, through it all, give love and survive.

Right eating: Dr Muriel Bell

4 March 2019 1 Comment

Barbara Brookes

The bag of nuts I have in front of me has a Health Star Rating of 5. The back of the packet tells me the nuts contain vitamins B1 and E, are a source of monosaturated fats and a source of fibre. With this good news I am invited to enjoy ‘happy snacking’. But I’m sure that ‘snacking’ in itself is not good for me. Snacks in between meals can only add to my overall calorie intake and hence increase my weight. I might join the stream of overweight New Zealanders (if I’m not already swimming in it) threatening to overwhelm our health services.

Dr Muriel Bell spent her life dedicated to thinking about nutrition and its effects on New Zealanders’ health. Diana Brown’s recently published valuable biography of this pioneering medical researcher, The Unconventional Career of Dr Muriel Bell, charts Bell’s life from her childhood, when vitamins were a little-known entity, to her death in 1974, by which time she had played a major role in nutrition research and education in New Zealand.