Today the HOS asks the question “Are you losing faith in the justice system?” based on this article yesterday in which a judge gave a female drunk driver, who killed a 36 year-old woman, a year’s home detention because she had “agoraphobia”. Add a Comment

The Herald reported on Tuesday on a Ministry of Health survey that says there is a problem of high after-hours fees After hours patients charged up to $250. I would have posted on this earlier, but apparently my site had to “propagate its DNS” before it would work – sounds nasty Doctor’s fees are always [...]

DPF over at Kiwiblog comments on this Herald story about Ian Powell of the Association of Salaried Medical Specialists (ASMS – the senior doctors union) criticising Deborah Powell (no relation!) of the Resident Doctors Association (RDA – the junior doctors union). Ian Powell apparently blames Deborah for the RDA’s propensity to strike and she accuses [...]

Seeing as I’ve just blogged about the meningococcal vaccine and I’m now going to rant about Gardasil, let me just say at the outset that I’m generally supportive of our vaccination schedule. There is no doubt that vaccines do much to reduce to disease burden in our population. However, the Ministry of Health does seem [...]

It turns out the the immunity afforded by the much vaunted meningococcal vaccine is rather short-lived. This is not exactly a huge surprise, given the inadequate research done by Chiron in to the effectiveness of the vaccine. In fact their packet insert says.

“The degree and quality of the cellular immune response is not yet established.”

Which means, in layman’s terms, “we don’t know whether this stuff works”. And even better:

“No prospective efficacy trials have been performed with MeNZB.”

Translation: The reason why we don’t know is that we haven’t tested it properly, yet. And the real doozy:

The sudden interest on abortion in New Zealand on the back of comments by Justice Forrest Miller a few weeks ago has brought all the rabid ones out of the woodwork. Abortion is certainly one of the most polarized of subjects and it is practically impossible to have a rational debate about it without descending into emotive argument. I find myself responding to the emotion on both sides of the debate.