Australian Politics
Fatal heart attacks have surged in Australia. Here’s why
The pandemic has caused a surge of fatal cardiac arrests in Australia, as delayed care and COVID’s damaging effect on the heart drives a major uptick in serious heart issues.
More than 10,200 Australians died of ischemic heart disease in the first eight months of 2022 – that is about 17 per cent higher than would be expected in a normal year.
According to an analysis of mortality data by the Actuaries Institute, about 2300 deaths from ischemic heart disease over 2021 and 2022 are considered excess, which means they fall outside the expected natural range.
“Deaths with ischemic heart disease really involve blockages of the blood vessels. And when you have blockages in the blood vessels you then damage heart muscle, and your heart fails, and it can go into cardiac arrest, which means that it essentially stops,” said Professor Steve Nicholls, director of the Victorian Heart Hospital.
Leading heart disease experts say the death statistics are concerning but not surprising. For years, cardiac deaths have been the leading cause of death in Australia. The pandemic has only increased the risk factors.
“It’s kind of the last straw,” said Professor Tom Marwick, director of the Baker Heart and Diabetes Institute.
“The camel’s back was straining under the burden of risk factors, and then we have an infectious disease on top with a bunch of inflammation, hey presto we get an increase of cardiovascular events.”
Coronavirus has been implicated in an increased risk of cardiovascular problems, with a study published in the prestigious science journal Nature finding that rates of heart attacks and stroke were substantially higher in military veterans who had recovered from COVID-19, compared to those who hadn’t had the disease.
A recent Australian study also found hospitalisations from myocarditis (inflammation of the heart muscle) and pericarditis (swelling of the membrane surrounding the heart), pulmonary embolism, heart attack and stroke were significantly more frequent after COVID‐19.
While rare cases of myocarditis and pericarditis have been linked to COVID vaccines, the Therapeutic Goods Administration says most people get better within a few days. Experts say vaccination is considered especially crucial for those with risk factors for cardiovascular disease.
The number of excess deaths in Australia surged to 15,400 in the first part of 2022.
While the majority of these deaths were from COVID-19, the nation is also seeing significantly elevated rates of deaths from diabetes, strokes and ischemic heart disease.
Cardiologists believe the increased deaths from ischemic heart disease are likely linked to the damaging effects of COVID, but also delayed diagnoses, prevention and treatment through the pandemic.
‘The camel’s back was straining under the burden of risk factors, and then we have an infectious disease on top ... hey presto we get an increase of cardiovascular events.’
Nicholls, a cardiologist, said the heart wards in public hospitals were very busy.
“So it’s not just that a lot of people are dying, but we’re seeing a lot of people at a whole range of different stages of [heart] disease,” he said. “One of our concerns early on in COVID was that we were going to miss people early [in heart disease] and then people would tend to present later.”
Nicholls said everyone should talk to their GP about getting a heart health check.
“We know the major risk factors for heart disease. We know that’s high blood pressure, it’s high cholesterol, it’s diabetes, it’s smoking, it’s obesity, and it’s a family history. You can’t do anything about your family history, but you can do something about everything else.”
Dr Amanda Buttery, the Heart Foundation’s clinical evidence manager, said there had been a reassuring surge in 2022 in the number of Australians getting heart checks, following marked decreases through lockdowns and the first Omicron wave.
November 2022 saw a record number of heart health checks claimed.
However, Buttery said the foundation remained quite concerned about mounting international evidence of a connection between long COVID and cardiovascular disease.
“COVID-19 infection worsens pre-existing heart conditions, and increases the risk of developing more than 20 heart conditions including heart attack, blood clots, heart failure and stroke,” she said.
“COVID infection in Australia grew substantially in 2022. We are yet to see the full impact of this in health data.”
The Actuaries Institute, the body that represents the actuarial profession in Australia and which evaluates and manages the financial risks faced by businesses, has also cited delays in emergency care caused by pressure on hospital systems as a possible factor in the country’s excess deaths. In Victoria, at least 33 people died from emergencies that were linked to delays in answering triple-zero calls or lengthy ambulance waits between December 2020 and May 2022.
However, Professor Tom Marwick said data he had seen on heart attack mortality suggested that may not be as big a factor as expected.
“Surprisingly, it shows that the mortality is just the same as pre-COVID. In other words, for people that got to the hospital, the outcomes are the same. The issue is, of course, the people that didn’t get to the hospital and the people who missed care and are presenting with more progressive disease now.”
Marwick said he remains very concerned that many of those most at risk of a heart attack don’t have a regular GP. He said Melbourne’s west, which has been disproportionately battered by COVID-19 outbreaks, was also one of the hotspots for heart attack. The area has fewer GPs per person.
At least 17,717 Australians have died of COVID. There have been 14 deaths linked to COVID vaccines from more than 64 million doses administered in Australia. One of those was a fatal case of myocarditis in a young woman where an expert vaccine safety group concluded a COVID vaccine was likely related, alongside several other factors.
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Solar panels are leading an energy revolution, but recycling them isn't easy
Almost every day, Anthony Vippond's solar recycling plant in Melbourne's north receives dozens of used solar panels.
In the car park, multiple tilting towers of the devices, held together by tie-downs, take up the spaces.
Right now, a lot of them come from schools as the state government upgrades or replaces about 500 solar panel systems.
Others come from businesses, homes or solar farms from rural Victoria.
Some have large holes shot through the middle, others are smashed, but most have no damage at all and have been cast aside because they are not as efficient as they once were.
All those used panels have to go somewhere, and it cannot be landfill; Victoria, South Australia and the ACT have banned solar panels ending up in landfill — they have to be taken to e-waste drop off points to be recycled.
It was a move made to stop heavy metals in the panels from leaching into the earth, and — with roughly 26,000 tonnes of solar panels predicted to be thrown away every year in Victoria from 2035 — to force industry to innovate.
But recycling solar panels is not straightforward. "They are laminate, they're stuck together, they're glued," Mr Polhill says.
To be reused, solar panels need to be broken down so each component — including glass, aluminium, copper, plastic and silicon — can be separated. And that takes a lot of heavy machinery to achieve.
Some of those materials can then be sold and used in new products.
Various companies in Victoria and South Australia are trialling different methods of breaking down solar panels from using chemicals and heat, to dry processes and computerised mechanical systems.
They each say their process is better than the one next door. But all have admitted one thing: the margins are not great.
Most solar recyclers strip and sell the aluminium from the frame, try to extract as many valuable metals as possible, then stockpile the rest.
Mr Polhill says at the moment, "it would be cheaper to put them into landfill than to recover them".
"Over the last few years companies have started to invest in recovering other materials but that is in its infancy and those materials have a very small market," he says.
But, there is one part of a solar panel that could change that: nano silicon. Silicon is found within the black and grey panels that capture sunlight.
And when refined into its purest form, nano silicon, it can sell for about $64,000 per kilogram. It is a ubiquitous substance used in everything from mobile phones and concrete to rubber, plastic, and computer chips.
Until now it has been tricky to reduce silicon down into its nano particles without using harmful chemicals like hydrochloric acid and nitric acid.
But researchers from Deakin University in Geelong say they have figured out a way to do it that is cheap, effective and safe for the environment. Researchers at the university started investigating their theory in 2019 and have repeatedly tested and reviewed the process to prove it can work and be scaled up for commercial use.
"Compared to other processes around the world, my process is really environmentally friendly," Deakin senior research fellow Mokhlesur Rahman says.
Dr Rahman says he's also discovered a way to combine nano silicon with graphite to create longer-lasting lithium-ion batteries for use in products like electric cars.
It is a breakthrough that could make recycling solar panels a far more viable industry.
Back at his recycling plant, Mr Vippond has been trying to create new products like sleepers and furniture from solar panel products, but says a way to easily and cheaply extract and sell nano silicon would be a game changer.
"Getting the best recovery out of the solar panel is probably more paramount than any other product just in relation to that [environmentally conscious] category that it comes from," he says. "Some of the work like Deakin University and others are doing in their research is quite incredible."
But Mr Polhill is sceptical. "How do we take that research and create a business model — that's the real nut to crack in this," he says.
"Recycling solar panels in Australia is in its infancy. So it needs continuous investment from both industry and from government to support this developing market and some of the technologies as well."
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-01-22/solar-panel-recycling-nano-silicon-extraction/101865624
*****************************************************Qld school mask mandates gone, but concerns over lasting effects of learning from home
This year promises to be the first uninterrupted 40-week state schooling schedule in three years, but concerns are mounting that some students may have emotional and behavioural control issues in the classroom post-pandemic.
Experts have flagged suspicions that remote learning has impacted children, particularly those who began their schooling in 2020 and became used to periods of being educated at home and mask wearing.
“One factor massively missed in the Covid space is those self-regulation skills,” Australian Catholic University early education expert Kate Highfield said.
It comes after major Covid-19 disruptions, mask rules and remote learning plagued the 2020 and 2021, with the first two weeks of term 1 2022 only for the supervision of vulnerable students and children of essential workers, to avoid pupils returning to school at the peak of a wave.
All students didn’t return until February 7 and the school year was not extended.
Dr Highfield said emotional and behavioural control issues could arise as a result of the lack of consistent in-class experience.
“It’s the child being able to work out what they need to focus on when their teacher is talking and there’s other distractions” she said.
“Children went from a 25 to 30-person classroom, to being at home with a parent, so they haven’t been practising self-regulation or behavioural adaptation.
“It also ties in with emotional wellbeing – can the child articulate if they are stressed or anxious? So we have these extra waves of social and emotional needs.”
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Australia Day time to see our country through new migrants’ eyes
Peta Credlin
To make the most of this new year, I reckon all of us should collectively make two resolutions: first, to count our blessings more; and second, to be less negative about our magnificent country.
Where I holiday, on the bay, just south of Geelong, there are lots of migrant families. Over summer, they were on the beach, usually three generations, and the one thing you almost never heard was whinging about Australia.
In fact, when you think about it, you hardly hear any of the usual complaints – that Australia is basically a racist, sexist and homophobic country – from anyone who’s a recent migrant. I guess that’s because they only came here because they could tell that the good far outweighed the bad. Certainly, there was enough good in this country, compared to their place of birth, to justify all the disruption involved in making a new life in a far way land.
Isn’t that worth thinking about as we prepare to celebrate another Australia Day: that a country with a quarter of its people born overseas – a higher percentage than any other – must have so much going for it when so many people are voting with their feet to get here?
No one has to come here. The fact that so many do, and are so glad to have won the lottery of life when they make it, should make all of us proud; even as we do our best to make a great country even better.
As usual, in the build-up to this Australia Day, there’s been the usual complaints about the date. We can’t celebrate Australia Day on January 26, it’s said, because that’s insensitive to the Aboriginal people who were here first.
Lots of woke public companies have told their staff that they can take-off a different day if they don’t regard January 26 as a day to celebrate. Others, like Kmart, have now banned the sale of Australia Day merchandise adorned with our national flag.
And while polling this week showed that more than twice as many Australians regard January 26 as Australia Day rather than “invasion day”, more people under 30 saw it as a day of shame, doubtless because of politically correct brainwashing in our schools.
Can you imagine Americans running the Fourth of July down like this?
For a long time, we celebrated Australia Day as a long weekend, not the actual day itself. But in 1994, all states and territories came together (quite rightly) to mark Australia Day on January 26 because, it was then thought, pride in our country demanded no less. How is it that only a couple of decades after reaffirming the importance of this day to our nation, we’ve got activists and elites pushing their agenda of shame rather than unity?
It’s true that British settlement ultimately meant doom for a hunter-gatherer way of life. And that there was violence on the frontier of settlement. And that many of the settlers looked down on Aboriginal people. This was the case with colonial settlements – French, British, Dutch, Belgian and others at this time – across the globe. Yet it’s also undeniable that Governor Phillip’s official instructions from London were to “live in amity” with the original inhabitants and that white men were hanged for the murder of black people as early as 1838, after the notorious Myall Creek massacre, showing that justice was colourblind under our imported rule of law.
We can rethink history but we can’t change it. We certainly can’t undo the British settlement and the subsequent development of Australia; so the best way forward – surely – is to make the most of it, especially given that the country that’s evolved here is a magnet to people from all over the world.
When Governor Phillip raised the flag and toasted the king on January 26, 1788, it didn’t just mark the beginning of the dispossession of the original inhabitants as the haters would have us believe. It marked the arrival on this continent of a civilisation even then distinguished, however imperfectly, by the rule of law, respect for individual rights and the demand for representative government.
It was the beginning of a country that has so far transcended the racism and systemic brutality of those times that people identifying as Aboriginal have a greater representation in our parliament than they do in the population; and have been elected because their fellow Australians have regarded them as suitable, regardless of race. It’s another sign of how little race is held against anyone in modern Australia.
So whatever might be in need of improvement, let’s stop running down our country for something it’s not. And let’s stop quibbling about the date for celebrating our country, keep it on the day that modern Australia began and, if you ever need reminding about how good it is here, ask a new migrant.
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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM -- daily)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Evelyn Rae, a conservative Australian political commentator
Margo Robbie -- a beautiful australian
My son Joe at ANU
One of the happiest pictures ever -- Cleo Smith, aged 4
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