Brain health
Stephen MacFarlane & Daniel O’Connor
The human brain is the most complex object in the known universe. Such is its complexity, that even the number of brain cells (neurons) within it remains in dispute, with ...
Building Healthy Minds
Margot Prior
Jane is a 13-year-old girl whose father brought her along to a children’s clinic to see a psychologist for help with the many problems she was having. At home she ...
Child Health
Fiona Stanley
The health and wellbeing of children and youth are any country’s most crucial future concern (Stanley, Prior, & Richardson, 2005). Measuring health (or ill-health as we usually do!) and wellbeing ...
Choosing to eat good fresh food
Stephanie Alexander
My idea for the past twelve years has been to develop an enjoyable program suitable for all Australian primary schools, with the aim of positively influencing children’s attitudes and behaviours ...
Chronic Disease and Public Health
Margo Honeyman and Leonard Harrison
The rising incidence of allergic and autoimmune diseases imposes an ever-increasing burden on individuals, populations and economies. Possible mechanisms for this phenomenon, related to changed environmental conditions that impact on ...
Cities and Health: Preventing NCDs Through Urban Design
Melanie Lowe & Billie Giles-Corti
City planning is now recognised as an important part of a compre-hensive solution to noncommunicable diseases (NCDs). By 2050, some 75% of the world’s population will live in cities. Almost ...
Khoa Cao and Luke Oakden-Rayner
Artificial intelligence in healthcare
It may surprise you, but the first dreams of artificial intelligence did not arise in the basements of an MIT engineering lab, or the cosy rooms of an Oxford college ...
Jonathan Carapetis
Aboriginal Health
I begin with a few caveats. As a non-Aboriginal Australian, I am careful to avoid joining the legions of whitefellas who tell Aboriginal people how to live their lives. Nor ...
Barry Catchlove
The forgotten pandemic: 1900 bubonic plague in Sydney
Interest in COVID-19 has made many people aware of the so called Spanish flu pandemic, which killed millions worldwide post World War I. We also have some recollection of the ...
Max Charlesworth
Bioethics
Terri Schiavo, an American woman aged 41 years, was diagnosed as being in a persistent vegetative state (“brain dead”) and was kept alive by a feeding tube. Her husband, Michael ...
Michael Coote
Seeing to the end
‘Rage against the dying of the light’, so wrote the Welsh poet, Dylan Thomas, to his dying father in 1951. He is referring to his father’s impending death, but he ...
Martin Delatycki
Genetic screening
The explosion of knowledge in relation to the genetic basis of multiple conditions means that screening for the risk of preventable disease as well as for the risk of having ...