Another birth in a public hospital toilet

Aint government medicine wonderful?

A WOMAN has told how she miscarried "in a blur" in a hospital toilet then cleaned up the area herself. Mother-of-two Jodie Whiteside was 14 weeks pregnant when she felt something was "wrong". After believing her waters had broken, and able to see the leg of her child, Ms Whiteside headed to Maitland Hospital, about 30 minutes drive from her home in the New South Wales Hunter region. "En route my husband phoned up the Maitland Hospital emergency department to say what had happened and that I was on my way," Ms Whiteside said on the Fairfax Radio Network. "It was a blase response, basically that I have to be processed like everyone else and wait to see the triage nurse."

On arrival at the hospital, Ms Whiteside said she was "in a lot of pain, cowering over the counter" while she was being asked for her personal details. A triage nurse then asked Ms Whiteside a series of questions. "I said that I saw the baby coming away and she proceeded to take my blood pressure, I think that she took my temperature and she gave me a plastic pot and said 'I need a urine sample'," she said. "I told her that I was 14 weeks pregnant ... I asked her 'if I'm miscarrying what do I do?' She said there is nothing they can do and instructed me to go to the toilet."

After making her way through a crowded emergency department waiting room, Ms Whiteside reached the women's public toilet. "It's a bit of a blur to me, all I know is I gave birth to the child, I had it in my hands, I was given no other option, I just didn't know what to do ... I put it in the toilet and I had what they call afterbirth everywhere and I was thinking what poor woman wants to come into the cubicle after me," she said. "I tried to tidy it up a bit because it was just a mess."

A short time later Ms Whiteside was found a bed, was given an ultrasound and saw a doctor. She was offered surgery or told she could go home, and was then told that thousands of women had gone through what she had just experienced. Ms Whiteside chose to go home and has since written letters of complaint to the hospital and NSW Health Minister.

Chief executive of the Hunter New England Area Health Service, Nigel Lyons publicly apologised to Ms Whiteside today. "Let me say I'm very distressed to hear about the circumstances of Jodie's care," he said on Fairfax Radio Network. "It's clear that the distress that was caused by Jodie's experience at the hospital is something that we deeply regret and apologise for. "We'll fully investigate this and find out what's occurred and why and what we can do better. But the aspects that come through to me is that it is about the care that we've provided in terms of sensitivity."

Her experience is similar to that of Jana Horska, who miscarried in a Sydney hospital toilet in September 2007 after waiting two hours in the emergency department.

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Australian atheists banned from bus blitz

Atheists in Australia wishing to follow the lead of their British counterparts have been refused permission to launch advertising slogans on local buses. British atheists campaigners launched their campaign - proclaiming, "There's probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life" - on 800 buses this week. But a similar campaign by the Atheist Foundation of Australia has been rejected by the largest outdoor advertising company in the country, APN Outdoor. APN Outdoor gave no reason for barring the $16,000 Tasmanian campaign, which was set to feature slogans such as "Sleep in on Sunday mornings" and "Celebrate reason".

David Nicholls, president of the Atheist Foundation of Australia, told the Sydney Morning Herald the rejection amounted to a breach of freedom of speech. "Australia is in desperate need of a human rights and equal opportunities act," Mr Nicholls said. "It's clear that western Europe, the US and Britain have better laws than we do when it comes to . respecting freedom of speech. "The intention was to demonstrate to the public that there is an alternative to religion that is rational, reasonable and worthy of thought.

"It took three weeks for APN Outdoor to come to a decision, after they initially told me there'd be no problem. The final discussion by phone to an executive ended with an abrupt message that they were not going to take our business." Mr Nicholls said the Foundation would take the case to the Tasmanian Anti-Discrimination Board.

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Rudd's green plan won't help Australia's artificially created car industry

News that exports of Holden utes to America have been cancelled is the latest nail in the coffin of the Australian automotive industry. It is an industry in terminal decline, and it's time the Rudd Government admitted it. Yet in 2008 prime Minister Kevin Rudd and his Industry Minister, Kim Carr, did the opposite and expanded automotive industry assistance to $6.2 billion. With 64,000 workers employed in the industry, the package is equivalent to nearly $100,000 per worker. And that's on top of tariff protection.

But neither subsidies nor tariffs are helping to create a long-term, viable industry. Tariffs and subsidies make industries unresponsive to consumer demand. And being unresponsive has caused the problem that now plagues the industry. The Australian automotive industry has traditionally produced large passenger vehicles. But Australians clearly don't want them.

Last year just 171,432 of the 1,012,432 cars sold were made locally -- less than 20 per cent. Tougher economic times have seen overall sales drop 3.6 per cent on 2007. But sales of locally made cars dived by 14.5 per cent. Meanwhile, demand for small and medium cars, primarily made by importers, account for more than 50 per cent of the market.

At least 60 per cent of locally made cars are sold through fleet to corporates. With company belt-tightening, the pressure to turn over their fleets may wane.

There have been some markets that demand Australia's large cars, notably the Middle East. Cars being exported to the Middle East are being subsidised by our taxpayers' dollars. But we aren't getting subsidised oil in return.

The Rudd Government may argue that it's reforming the sector by continuing to phase out tariffs. But with every drop in tariffs, it is simply increasing equivalent subsidies. The only difference is, the cost is being spread to every taxpayer, instead of just to consumers of new cars.

The Government is also using its $1.3 billion green-car fund to achieve its industry and climate-change objectives by encouraging research and development of lower-emissions vehicles. If the objective of the fund is to get consumers to buy lower-emitting cars, subsidising research and development isn't the best way to go about it. Estimates show that State and Federal Government taxes and tariffs add $7000 to the cost of a Toyota Prius. Removing these taxes and tariffs would be the best way to increase sales.

And Australia is highly unlikely to become a green car innovator. At best, Australia will contribute to the development of their next range of vehicles. And any short-term benefit will be small. During a global economic downturn, the first concern of consumers is not to buy expensive "green" cars. It's to buy cheaper ones. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, more than a million new cars are bought annually. Yet only 5000 Priuses are estimated to be sold this year. Consumers are still voting with their hip pockets, not their green thumbs.

The Rudd Government may argue their plan is working. Days before Christmas, Holden announced that it was to develop its new four-wheel-drive model out of Adelaide and will deliver 1200 jobs. But so long as these 1200 jobs are built on the false foundations of government subsidies, no worker can have faith in the sustainability of their job. Successive governments have conned automotive industry workers into thinking their jobs are viable. They never have been, and it is the Government's job to clean up this mess.

To be fair to workers, the Rudd Government should use its industry assistance to retrain workers and find them alternative employment. Government spending on infrastructure projects provides a potential pathway. The geographic concentration of the industry in Geelong and Altona will mean any collapse will be devastating. Retraining will lessen the impact on these individuals and communities. More importantly, young workers need to be stopped from entering a dead-end industry. But the Government won't, because the affected communities correlate strongly with marginal seats. And the cost of inaction will be borne by consumers with higher car prices, and workers with an uncertain future.

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Childhood obesity epidemic a myth, says research

THE rise in childhood obesity has halted, defying warnings that it is an "epidemic" that is out of control. Obesity rates among children levelled off around 1998 and have remained steady ever since, exploding the myth that children are becoming more overweight than ever before. Research by the University of South Australia found the alarming rise in the percentage of children who were overweight or obese recorded through the 1980s and much of the 1990s had stalled. Timothy Olds from the SA University School of Health Sciences analysed 27 Australian studies of childhood weight status between 1985 and 2007 and found a "clear plateau" in recent obesity data.

The analysis concluded that overweight and obesity prevalence rates among children had settled at 23-24 per cent and 5-6per cent respectively for the past five to 10 years. "These findings directly contradict assertions in the published literature and the popular press that the prevalence of pediatric overweight and obesity in Australia is increasing exponentially," it said. Even in recent years, some researchers have predicted childhood obesity would reach adult prevalence levels within 30 years.

"People are always reluctant to let go a notion which is their life work," Professor Olds said. "I include myself in that because I've written quite a few papers predicting that exponential increase, but we've got to look at the facts and the facts don't bear that out."

Last year, comparative data published by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare and a separate analysis by University of Sydney associate professor Jenny O'Dea also challenged the popular perception that children were becoming fatter by the year. Professor Olds said some still held to that viewpoint because they had a lot invested in childhood obesity. "It's a sensational story for the media, academics have built careers in dealing with and treating childhood obesity and, frankly, the success of their grants depends on a sense that it's a national crisis that's continuing," he said.

In April last year, Australia's governments added obesity to their list of national health priorities, alongside major killers such as cancer, heart disease and diabetes. Professor Olds said his study results should not detract from efforts to combat obesity, warning it was still too common among Australian children and was still on the rise among adults. The lull in weight gain among children could prove temporary if anti-obesity campaigns ceased, the study warned.

Professor Olds said walk-to-school programs, healthy diets and other improvements could finally be affecting the problem. He said some children could be more resistant to obesity, while others were genetically predisposed to weight gain. The recent lack of movement in childhood obesity rates could be linked to this difference. "(It may be) we've just reached a situation where we're so saturated with opportunity for inactive play, it's so easy to access energy-dense food, high-caloric food, that any child that will become overweight or obese has become overweight and obese."

Public Health Association of Australia's Mike Daube said it was probably too early to say that childhood obesity rates had levelled off, noting it had taken decades to achieve equivalent results in anti-tobacco campaigns.

Obesity Policy Coalition spokesman Craig Sinclair at Cancer Council Victoria said the sedentary, calorie-rich environments that children were growing up in had not changed. Today's children were more likely to carry extra weight, and tomorrow's health system would end up paying for those excesses through extra heart disease, cancer and diabetes admissions.

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