Australia's approach to its biosecurity and borders has always been two-pronged - quarantine first, vaccination second. This article asks what this combination looked like in practice by exploring two neglected smallpox vaccination campaigns directed towards Indigenous peoples in the early twentieth century. We argue these were important campaigns because they were the first two pre-emptive, rather than reactionary, vaccination programs directed towards First Nations people.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe successful pursuit of goals requires the coordinated execution and termination of actions that lead to positive outcomes. This process relies on motivational states that are guided by internal drivers, such as hunger or fear. However, the mechanisms by which the brain tracks motivational states to shape instrumental actions are not fully understood.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe successful pursuit of goals requires the coordinated execution and termination of actions that lead to positive outcomes. This process is thought to rely on motivational states that are guided by internal drivers, such as hunger or fear. However, the mechanisms by which the brain tracks motivational states to shape instrumental actions are not fully understood.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAs COVID-19 and its variants spread across Australia at differing paces and intensity, the country's response to the risk of infection and contagion revealed an intensification of bordering practices as a form of risk mitigation with disparate impacts on different segments of the Australian community. Australia's international border was closed for both inbound and outbound travel, with few exceptions, while states and territories, Indigenous communities, and local government areas were subject to a patchwork of varying restrictions. By focusing on borders at various levels, our research traces how the logics of medico-legal bordering have filtered down from the international to the intra-national, and indeed, into hyper-local spaces.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMutations in Talpid3, a basal body protein essential for the assembly of primary cilia, have been reported to be causative for Joubert Syndrome (JS). Herein, we report prominent developmental defects in the hippocampus of a conditional knockout mouse lacking the conserved exons 11 and 12 of Talpid3. At early postnatal stages, the Talpid3 mutants exhibit a reduction in proliferation in the dentate gyrus and a disrupted glial scaffold.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJoubert syndrome (JS) is a ciliopathy associated with mutations in numerous genes encoding cilia components. TALPID3 encoded by KIAA0856 in man (2700049A03Rik in mouse) is a centrosomal protein essential for the assembly of primary cilia. Mutations in KIAA0856 have been recently identified in JS patients.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAmyloidosis a rare disorder characterised by the deposition of amyloid protein aggregates in different organ systems throughout the body with resulting functional impairment of affected organs. It can present with localised or multisystemic deposits. Diagnosis is often delayed due to the non-specific nature of the symptoms.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: ExteNET showed that 1 year of neratinib, an irreversible pan-HER tyrosine kinase inhibitor, significantly improves 2-year invasive disease-free survival after trastuzumab-based adjuvant therapy in women with HER2-positive breast cancer. We report updated efficacy outcomes from a protocol-defined 5-year follow-up sensitivity analysis and long-term toxicity findings.
Methods: In this ongoing randomised, double-blind, placebo-controlled, phase 3 trial, eligible women aged 18 years or older (≥20 years in Japan) with stage 1-3c (modified to stage 2-3c in February, 2010) operable breast cancer, who had completed neoadjuvant and adjuvant chemotherapy plus trastuzumab with no evidence of disease recurrence or metastatic disease at study entry.
Age-related degenerative changes within the vertebral column are a significant cause of morbidity with considerable socio-economic impact worldwide. An improved understanding of these changes through the development of experimental models may lead to improvements in existing clinical treatment options. The zebrafish is a well-established model for the study of skeletogenesis with significant potential in gerontological research.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: The zebrafish is an important developmental model. Surprisingly, there are few studies that describe the glycosaminoglycan composition of its extracellular matrix during skeletogenesis. Glycosaminoglycans on proteoglycans contribute to the material properties of musculo skeletal connective tissues, and are important in regulating signalling events during morphogenesis.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBull Hist Med
February 2013
Historiography on tropical medicine and determinist ideas about climate and racial difference rightly focuses on links with nineteenth- and twentieth-century colonial rule. Occasionally and counterintuitively, however, these ideas have been redeployed as anticolonial argument. This article looks at one such instance; the racial physiology of Indian economist, ecologist, and anticolonial nationalist Radhakamal Mukerjee (1889-1968).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFTwenty-four centuries have passed since the doctrine of AirsWaters Places was articulated in the Hippocratic corpus, promoting a mutually constitutive vision of humankind and climate. Yet the "airs, waters, places tradition" has proved remarkably resilient and adaptable as a framing device for relations among nations, natural and human resources, and human health. Redeployed in diverse historical contexts across time, the relationship between climate and humans has evolved from a dependent one in which human constitution and health are determined by climate to an interdependent one in which humans and climate influence one another.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Ex vivo lung perfusion (EVLP) is a novel approach for extended evaluation and/or reconditioning of donor lungs not meeting standard International Society for Heart and Lung Transplantation criteria for transplantation.
Methods: We retrospectively evaluated 13 consecutive EVLP runs between January 2009 and December 2010. Lungs rejected for routine transplantation were implanted to the EVLP circuit and reperfused using acellular supplemented Steen Solution (Vitrolife, Göteborg, Sweden) up to a target flow rate of 40% of the donor's calculated flow at a cardiac index of 3.
J Epidemiol Community Health
March 2008
The connection between infectious disease control and national security is now firmly entrenched. This article takes a historical look at another security issue once prominent in debate on foreign policy and international relations, but now more or less absent: overpopulation. It explores the nature of the debate on population as a security question, and its complicated historical relation to the development of world health.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIEEE Trans Ultrason Ferroelectr Freq Control
October 2012
Investigations into the characteristics of water-coupled ultrasonic capacitance transducers have been undertaken for a range of transducer configurations. The radiated fields have been scanned in water using a miniature hydrophone detector, and the results compared to theory based on a plane piston approach. Micromachined backplates in conjunction with thin Mylar and mica membranes have been investigated, together with aperture modifications such as an annulus and Fresnel zone plate.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIEEE Trans Ultrason Ferroelectr Freq Control
December 2009
A micromachined Fresnel zone-plate has been used to focus ultrasonic waves in air over a range of frequencies (450 to 900 kHz). The zone-plate was mounted upon a planar micromachined air-coupled capacitance transducer, which was capable of generating toneburst ultrasonic waves in air over a wide frequency bandwidth (<100 kHz to 2 MHz). A second air-coupled capacitance detector (apertured to 200 microm) was scanned in the field of the zone-plate source in order to image the generated ultrasonic field at various frequencies of operation.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis paper argues that analysing past public health policies calls for scholarship that integrates insights not just from medical history but from a broad range of historical fields. Recent studies of historic infectious disease management make this evident: they confirm that prior practices inhere in current perceptions and policies, which, like their antecedents, unfold amidst shifting amalgams of politics, culture, law and economics. Thus, explaining public health policy of the past purely in medical or epidemiological terms ignores evidence that it was rarely, if ever, designed solely on medical grounds at the time.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Epidemiol Community Health
April 2006
This article examines policies of health screening with particular reference to the “Australian model”. It details how historical approaches can contribute to an understanding of contemporary public health policy.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn recent publications and as an ongoing project I have been pursuing the idea that public health and infectious disease control have been part of the legal and technical constitution of 'undesirable' and prohibited entrants: an under-recognised means by which individuals and certain populations have been specifically classified and excluded from the territory and body politic of Australia. This article surveys and summarises these ideas and points to some of the recent redirections. These include a growing interest in the legacy of twentieth-century medico-legal border control on current (highly discriminating) regulations governing entry; a concern to make admissions under immigration and health law and regulation conceptually central; and the more familiar focus on race-based exclusions.
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