What yours?

Do you know about Eve van Grafhorst? She was born in NSW in 1982 and needed a blood transfusion. From that, she was affected by HIV, which eventually became AIDs. She didn’t ask for that. Eve’s parents fought for her, against other parents in the area who knew nothing about HIV, and believed it was airborne. Eventually the van Grafhorsts moved to Hastings on the east coast of the North Island of New Zealand, and were welcomed there.

In 1992 Eve received the Variety Gold Heart Award. She was 10. A year later, in 1993, she died, at the age of 11. Princess Diana sent a letter to Eve’s mother, acknowledging Eve for her “courage and strength”.

These days many people know about HIVand AIDs, and understand that any person can get this. Have a look at AIDS Link International and read what can cause HIV and AIDS. Get yourself informed.

My research went on further. I know many smokers, and I know many who have given up. I also know many non-smokers. The packets for cigarettes say that “Smoking causes heart disease”, or “Smoking causes lung cancer”, among the other required statements. They are not correct. They should be re-printed to say that “Smoking can cause heart disease”, or “Smoking can cause lung cancer”. Why? Because smoking is only a small part of heart diseases, lung cancer and many other diseases.

I looked up some websites which listed what is known globally as dangerous diseases. Smoking doesn’t even show on many of those lists.

• 2010: Nursing Schools (USA) statistics for the ‘developing countries’ included malaria, influenza and asthma in the top 20.
• 2012: Forbes listed global death tolls: they included respiratory infections: death toll 3,060,166; HIV/AIDS: death toll 1,533,760; diarrhoeal diseases: death toll 1,497,674. They counted up to 10 diseases.
• 2016: The Meningitis Centre in Australia listed 9 diseases which could kill within 24 hours: meningococcal disease, streptococcus and stroke, among others.
• 2016: WHO listed 10 death statistics globally, which includes ischaemic heart disease (9.5 million), stroke (5.9 million) and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (3.2 million).  Lung cancer was further down the list, with bronchus and trachea. 
• 2017: News.com.au gave us a travellers list which included African diseases such as plague (which hit Europe in the Medieval history during the 13^th and 14^th centuries, killing one third of the population), tuberculosis (which kills one million people annually) and typhoid fever (killing around 220,000 every year). 
• 2017: SBS gave a list of what they felt was killing Australians. The top one was ischaemic heart disease (12.04% of all registered deaths). 
• 2017: The Conversation listed diseases which are still working to kill people, including tuberculosis, HIV/AIDs and influenza. Smallpox, they told us, was ‘eradicated’ in 1980, with the last recorded death in 1977, yet they say “Smallpox may be gone as a disease, but the variola virus controversially remains, kept secure in laboratories in Russia and the US. Concern has emerged about the prospect of smallpox as a weapon of bioterrorism. The impact of such an event could be devastating, given people are no longer routinely immunised against smallpox.” 
• 2018: Cheatsheet listed deaths from something within 24 hours. If you don’t know about these, then read this! It was written in June 2018, so it’s the latest list. Theirs included necrotizing fasciitis, meningococcal disease and epilepsy. 

So these different lists include different diseases over the last decade, yet none of them included smoking. In Australia, lung cancer is said to have killed 6,000 people, according to WEHI. Lung cancer “occurs because of genetic changes in lung cells. These occur more frequently in people exposed to DNA-damaging agents such as tobacco smoke.” Yet it is not the only cause of lung cancer. 

The “naturally occurring radioactive gas radon and its progeny”, according to ARPANSA, can change the DNA of a person who breathes this. It happens predominantly across the Great Dividing Range, and in Perth. And yet chemotherapy can change the DNA too – medicals are potentially diseasing those who have had chemotherapy. “The full extent of their cellular mechanisms, which is essential to balance efficacy and toxicity, is often unclear.” Do they know that? Do you? Look at the WEHI comment above.

My dad smoked a pipe for years. He finally gave it up when he got a bad winter cough sometime in the 1990s. He died from his fourth stroke in 2000, not from smoking. I found a website which said that smoking a pipe was “the art of manliness”. What is the difference between pipes, cigars and cigarettes, and why has the current government continued to increase the excise tax they take on smokes? According to the Department of Health, “Australia is the only country in the world to index tobacco excise to wage inflation (AWOTE) to ensure that tobacco products do not become relatively more affordable over time.” The only country in the world? Really??

My mum was diabetic. She had never smoked – she had only breathed dad’s pipe smoke until the 1990s. She had the gradual progression of peripheral artery disease which medicals told her could take her feet away – that is, she would have them cut off. She died in hospital in 2007 and never had her legs or her feet taken off.

How many people know anything that I have written about – which diseases are global, where does ‘smoking’ come into lung cancer, and why are the cigarettes and tobacco packets printed with incorrect comments? Do you care? What sort of disease might take you on? Who would care about that? Do you drink? Do you ever get drunk? Do you speed? Have you paid fines? Are you a Baby Boomer or a Millenial? Please tell me, because I am so fed up with how we live nowadays, how we treat other people.

Eve van Grafhorst got HIV from a blood transfusion in Australia when she was a baby but was mistreated. She was taken by her parents to New Zealand for a much better life. Is that very different to how people treat smokers? Are smokers now being treated the way Eve van Grafhorst was treated back in the 1980s?

Please tell me!

Whether you think you can…

There is an election coming up. Either a by-election or, later, some time, a federal election. Who will win? It must not be LNP. Their behaviour in the past 5 years has been abdominal, especially their relation to any politician of any other party which has not supported their ‘new’ acts or bills. ALP – Bill Shorten – seems to be the top of those that LNP picks on. Why do they? Is their abuse relative to their positions in government?

I read a book after Julia Gillard was out-voted in 2013, titled “Bewitched and bedevilled”, by many authors who objected to what LNP and the media had done, both to Gillard and to women. Gillard was the first female prime minister and ran a very good government with a shortfall team of Labor, supported by Greens and independents, but LNP, behind Tony Abbott back then, abused her unthinkably. The most visual in my own mind is the picture of Abbott, Bishop and other LNP people standing in front of two extremely unacceptable posters: one said “Juliar…. Bob Browns (sic) bitch” over some drawn in flame, the other was “Ditch the witch” with a witch drawn in the middle, flying on a broom. Gillard? A witch? A bitch??

Who the hell did the LNP think they were? Abusers? Bullies? Anti-women? Why did Abbott and his chaos team stand in front of those posters?? 

Since they were voted into government in 2013, LNP has ruined Australia. The present PM, Malcolm Turnbull, is a rich man. He doesn’t care about poor people (“escalates his war on the poor and unemployed”, New Matilda). He doesn’t care about disabled people (“government's bid to link disability funding to welfare cuts has backfired spectacularly”, SMH). He doesn’t care what tax is used for (“sticks defiantly to business tax cuts”, The Guardian). He doesn’t care about ABC (“ramps up attack on public broadcaster”, The Guardian). He doesn’t care at all about ALP (“party-pooper trick of calling five by-elections on the day of the Labor Party's biggest celebration”, Fraser Coast Chronicle). He doesn’t care about women politicians (“politics is still not an equal place for women”, The Conversation). He does care what goes into his own bank account (“the highest paid politician in the OECD”, SBS). 

The following essay writers from “Bewitched and bedevilled” wrote about what upset them – what upset so many women. This abuse they wrote about was from the media, the LNP party – and yes, LNP women. If you have never read “Bewitched and bedevilled”, read these: they can make you angry, make you cry, make your hair stand up on your neck.

Emily Maguire, p14:     Political reporting has all but ceased to exist.

Jane Caro, p24:             See, the critics imply smugly, we told you women just aren’t up to it.

Kathy Lette, p35:         Perhaps it’s time all Australian women took up knitting, to enable is to impale misogynists on the end of our needles.

Helen Razer, p44:         Yes. Yes. Politicians have ALWAYS made empty promises with big smiles. The thing is, now, no one seems to care.

Helen Pringle, p75:       What is new is that the use of the pornography to incite laughter against women has migrated into the heart of political discourse, as a way of humiliating those who don’t know their proper place.

Eva Cox, p83:               On the wider questions, gender remains an uncomfortable fit with power politics.

Catherine Lumby, p90: Female politicians are seen as female before they are seen as politicians.

Claire Hawey, p100:     She has been a victim of frequent and often shocking nastiness – sometimes by people who were also grotty sexists.

Clementine Ford, p108:          These are the depths of sexism to which political discourse in this country sunk while wrestling with the challenge of a woman in charge.

Shakira Hussein, p120: …similarities in strategies that [women] adopted to negotiate the minefield of gender and power in which they found themselves.

Ruth Hessey, p125:      Another quick check of the image-makers’ guide to success reveals that a woman ‘diminshes her image as an expert or an authority figure’ if she ‘turns a man on’.

Tracey Spicer, p133:     [LNP] had described her as ‘deliberately barren’ and, as a consequence, ‘unqualified’ to lead the country. It wasn’t long before this slur was dragged back from the muckheap and slung again. And again.

Carol Johnson, p140:    Male politicians who replace existing leaders seem to be constructed as understandably ambitious, while women who do so risk being constructed as ruthless and devious.

Chloe Hooper, p156:    The relationship between journalists and a politician is a co-dependent but not a transparent one.

Tanya Plibersek, p187:  It is absolutely clear that the News Ltd media were extremely hostile towards the Labor Party under both Julia’s and Kevin’s leadership. It’s also true that the right-wing talk-back hosts have a very clear political agenda of their own.

There is an election coming up. Either a by-election or, later, some time, a federal election. Yes, I said this at the start of this blog, but it is winding me up. I am a very, very small part of everything that Turnbull and his party does not care about, does not like, but I did not choose to be here, I did not choose to be poor, I did not choose to be disabled and I wish I could work.

Who will win the by-elections and the federal election? 

It must not be LNP.

Trenoweth, S 2013, editor Bewitched and Bedevilled, Hardie Grant Books, VIC

Maybe it happened in your lifetime...

On 29 May 1953, 3 years before I was born and 65 years earlier than 2018, New Zealand’s Edmund Hillary (b 1919, d 2008) and his mountaineer Tenzing Norgay, climbed to the top of Mt Everest. They were the first men in the world to do this, and set a record that many others would attempt to break. He was knighted in 1953. Later, 20 January 1957, Hillary was one of New Zealand's main presence in Antarctica, and helped to establish the Scott Base.  Returning back there in 1967, he was one of a group who climbed Mt Hershel  (3,335 metres) for the first time. 

In 1958 the Wairakei Power Station was commissioned. It was New Zealand's first geothermal power station, and only the second large-scale geothermal power station in the world. The NZ National Film Unit had a pictorial of Wairakei (2:32 into the film) and other power stations built at the same time, at Mercer and the Atiamuri man-made lake. I used to work as a payroll officer in 1973, going each week to pay out in cash at eight Waikato River dams: Aratiatia (1964), Ohakuri (1961), Atiamuri (1958), Whakamaru (1949), Maraetai (1953), Waipapa (1961), Arapuni (1929, first built) and Karapiro (1948, closest to Hamilton where I lived and worked, was built second). 

From July 9-10 1958 an earthquake in Alaska in Lituya Bay triggered the largest megatsunami on record. The wave washed 525 meters (1722 feet) up a mountain, and yet only five people were killed – three people who were standing on a beach which was subsided 100 metres under sea level, and two others who died on their boat in Lituya Bay. The University of Alaskan Fairbanks said:

“Neil Davis, a Fairbanks author, geophysicist, and emeritus professor at the Geophysical Institute at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, flew over Lituya Bay in a Super Cub two days after the earthquake. ‘When I got there, it was a truly amazing sight,’ Davis said. ‘The bay was filled with icebergs and trees, and there was a tongue of trees and ice going out to sea outside the bay.’”

https://www.slideshare.net/DeikshiNagalakshmi/natural-disasters-1-61451848 

The Auckland Harbour Bridge, 1020 meters (3,348 feet) in length, was opened on 30 May 1959, after four years of construction. It started with only four lanes, but that was very quickly discovered to be not wide enough. The “add-ons” (Nippon clip-ons) were done in 1969, but 15 years later were found with fatigue in the joints. They had to be replaced. Toll charges were paid on the bridge until 1984, but were removed then. This bridge is still a main road from Auckland CBD to the north side.

Pic: By Archives New Zealand from New Zealand - Auckland Harbour Bridge, CC BY-SA 2.0,  

On 14 July 1960 Jane Goodall, with her mother (because the British authorities “were so shocked at the thought of a young girl going to live with animals in the jungle”), went to Gombe Stream National Park. Goodall “devoted her life to living among the chimps” and “stud[ied] them in their natural environment”, as the biography website said, and found out some very interesting information about the chimps:

• chimpanzees used tools, challenging the belief that only humans used tools (when Jane's research mentor Professor Louis Leakey received an excited telegram from Jane describing her discoveries he made his infamous response: "Now we must redefine tool, redefine Man, or accept chimpanzees as humans.")
• they have close relationships within groups of chimps, sometimes marked by sharing food and primate grooming
• relationships between a mother chimpanzee and her children
• war against local rivals
• losing their conservation may leave them homeless.

Goodall had spent nearly 50 years working with the chimpanzees until, in 2003, Queen Elizabeth II named Dr Goodall a Dame of the British Empire. 

What happened on 13 August 1961, when I was only 5 years old, saddened me. East Germany began constructing the Berlin Wall, and soldiers stood in front of the construction on East German territory with orders to shoot anyone who attempted to defect. I have met people over my life who were in Berlin when it was built, and others who were in Berlin when it was demolished 28 years later on 9 November 1989. I celebrated – East Berliners were now part of the German democracy! Pink Floyd’s lovely The Division Bell has a song, A Great Day for Freedom which I have always seen as their celebration of the Berlin wall demolition. There are other songs listed on the First Post website, and a history about the wall on the History website. 

Rachel Carson's book Silent Spring was published on Sep 27 1962. In June excerpts were published in New Yorker magazine, and President Kennedy read some of it. Carson was a marine biologist and a scientist who cites evidence for her claims. Carson’s website said:  “Silent Spring began with a ‘fable for tomorrow’ – a true story using a composite of examples drawn from many real communities where the use of DDT had caused damage to wildlife, birds, bees, agricultural animals, domestic pets, and even humans.” A storm of protest and hyperbole rose from chemical companies, including Monsanto, and a few scientists friendly with the chemical industry. This gave her book more publicity and stimulated the environmentalist movement.

In May 1961, South Africa had left the British Commonwealth and became entirely independent, but their apartheid had worked for years before that.  On 12 Jun 1964, Nelson Mandela and seven others were sentenced to life imprisonment and sent to Robben Island prison by the South Africa government. Mandela was not a criminal, yet the South African apartheid (Afrikaan word used since 1929) still worked then. It had officially started in 1948, until 1990 when the South African government finally let Mandela out. Their apartheid was abolished in mid-1991. Mandela, born in 1918, anti-apartheid revolutionary, political leader and philanthropist who became President of South Africa from 1994 to 1999, died on 5 December 2013 in Johannesburg, South Africa.

I hope these interest you, because they are world events, whether or not in your lifetime. Maybe I will continue this on my next post.