News from Aotearoa/New Zealand and the Pacific Islands

[T&O]

Just for a Kiwi audience:

TVNZ+ has an overall excellent 16min documentary on young adults with Long Covid, one of the participants also has ME. A short clip of this was also shown on the 6pm news today

You have to be logged in to watch. Under 'News' look for “Offered rest home care at 24: Lonely plight of young Kiwis with long Covid”

ETA: though apart from the one person with ME nobody else mentioned it and the doctors seemed to almost go out of their way to avoid it, sigh

Thanks for that, will try and check it out when able… yeah, too much slips through the cracks.

 

[Sly Saint]

Wood burning and gas cooking hugely costly to healthcare systems, New Zealand study finds​

Air pollution from wood burning and gas cooking is massively costly to our healthcare systems and the economy. These are the conclusions of a peer-reviewed study from New Zealand that calculated the cost of hospital treatment, days off ill and early deaths from the air pollution produced by fireplaces, stoves, gas cooking and un-flued room heaters.
Indoor air pollution from New Zealand’s 523,000 wood burners was estimated to account for 446 hospital admissions for heart and lung problems, and 101 early deaths annually, in a country with a population of just over 5 million people. Breathing fumes from gas cooking indoors created more than 1,000 hospital admissions, 208 early deaths and more than 3,000 new cases of childhood asthma each year.

Dr Gareth Gretton, from the New Zealand government’s Energy Efficiency and Conservation Authority, said: “We were aware of growing international evidence of the importance of indoor air quality, but we did not have a method for quantifying the cost of air pollution from gas and wood burning appliances.”

Open fires were found to be the most harmful way to heat a home. The health impacts of extra air pollution breathed in each house with a fire led to an annual cost of around NZ$53,400 (£23,000) to the New Zealand healthcare system and economy. This assumes a household of two adults and two children who are exposed to air pollution indoors from their open fire.
Even modern stoves created indoor air pollution. The researchers estimated a health and economy cost of NZ$1,800 annually from air pollution breathed in by each household that used one of these appliances. And indoor pollution from gas cooking exerted an annual cost of NZ$9,200 from each household.

Jayne Metcalfe, from the New Zealand consultancy Emission Impossible, said: “The hardest part was estimating how much different indoor combustion appliances affect air quality in people’s homes. We reviewed studies from New Zealand and overseas, but indoor air quality is complex. Even so, the results were clear: no matter which assumptions you use, the health costs from indoor air pollution are significant for all the combustion appliances we looked at.”

MSN

 

[T&O]

Interesting, not sure this is seriously new information, though it certainly supports the currently popular step away from gas use ,(have to add that being financially stretched ,personally, its not helpful information !).

In a climate of growing extremes ,sometimes snowy, are we being told to spend more, amidst rising living costs, and burden our already (nz) failing power grid ?
Or -worse yet- purchase non-recyclable solar power panels ?
Sorry,… grumpy tired !
…these broad grandstanding statements…
Thankfully they note air quality is complex !(Without bringing cooking into the mix compare someone breathing air living right next to a main travel route/motorway with another in a well ventilated remote seaside home).
Studies of air quality in germany ,back in the 90s ,discussed those who walked along main traffic routes to work, what that can do to our lungs, even just sitting in traffic jams … just saying.

Something that always brings a snigger is imagining how our power companies would cope if everyone in NZ owned an electric car that required plugging in to fully recharge overnight…. would we have Chinas scheduled power cuts ? A heart Surgeon I know ,who works 6 months of the year in Shanghai, and 6 months here, said it could be challenging waiting for their generators to kick in if emergency work coincided with their regular power cuts.

 

[Chandelier]

The great divide: How different Covid-19 control strategies shaped pandemic outcomes

New research shows that internationally, jurisdictions that adopted exclusion/elimination strategies achieved dramatically lower Covid-19 mortality during the critical 2020-21 period without clear economic disadvantages.

www.phcc.org.nz

The great divide: How different Covid-19 control strategies shaped pandemic outcomes

Summary ​

At the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, countries responded in a range of ways. Our new research reveals that those that put in place explicit exclusion/elimination strategies achieved dramatically lower Covid-19 mortality during the critical 2020-21 period.

These jurisdictions recorded negative excess mortality—fewer deaths than expected based on previous years—with -2.1 deaths per 100,000 population, compared with 166.5 per 100,000 in other jurisdictions. In particular, island jurisdictions with stringent border restrictions experienced substantially better outcomes than non-islands.

Crucially, we found no consistent evidence that stringent border restrictions harmed economic growth compared to jurisdictions with less stringent restrictions. This finding challenges widespread assumptions about inevitable trade-offs between health and the economy.