Addressing a Human Rights Crisis: Health Care for Prisoners in Australia.

People are sent to prison as punishment and not to experience additional punishment. Nevertheless, this principle is habitually violated in Australia: prisoners frequently receive health care that is inferior to health care that is available in the general community. Numerous official inquiries have identified deficiencies in prisoner health services, notwithstanding the apparent intention of legislative provisions and non-statutory guidelines and policies in various jurisdictions to ensure prisoners receive appropriate health care.

How to Manage a Pandemic?: Decision-Making under the Public Health and Wellbeing Amendment (Pandemic Management) Act 2021 (Vic).

Victoria is the first Australian jurisdiction to enact legislation establishing a regulatory framework specifically to guide government management of the COVID-19 pandemic and future pandemics. The Public Health and Wellbeing Amendment (Pandemic Management) Act 2021 (Vic) inserts Pt 8A into the Public Health and Wellbeing Act 2008 (Vic). The worthwhile stated objective of Pt 8A is to ensure that decision-making in response to an existing or emergent pandemic is "proactive and responsive", "informed by public health advice and other relevant information", and transparent and accountable.

Responses to Monkeypox: Learning from Previous Public Health Emergencies.

Since the 1970s, the zoonotic disease monkeypox was reported as appearing in humans, principally in central and west Africa. However, from May 2022, escalating numbers of persons worldwide contracted it. On 23 July 2022, the World Health Organization declared this outbreak to be a public health emergency of international concern (PHEIC) and initially observed that it was "concentrated among men who have sex with men, especially those with multiple sexual partners.

"A Nasty Bump": Lessons from Refugee Doctors' Defiance of Discrimination, 1937-1950.

Prominent members of the Australian medical profession sought to prevent European doctors who immigrated to Australia in the late 1930s and 1940s from practising medicine. This article explores how these so-called "refugee doctors" contested the major strategies used by Victorian, New South Wales and Queensland statutory medical boards, influenced by the British Medical Association - Australian doctors' peak body - to impede their medical practice. In Australia's eastern States, refugee doctors challenged refusals to grant them registration to practise medicine, appealed decisions to deregister them, and practised medicine while unregistered.

A Panacea for Australia's COVID-19 Crisis? Weighing Some Legal Implications of Mandatory Vaccination.

Although Australia's rates of infection, illness and mortality from COVID-19 have been relatively low, they have escalated with the rapid transmission of the Delta variant. Restrictions imposed on people's liberties to curb the spread of the virus in several Australian States have engendered economic hardship, mental health challenges, and collective exhaustion and impatience. Several vaccines have been developed and approved for use in Australia that have proven effective in reducing the likelihood that the vaccinated will contract COVID-19 and, if infected, transmit and suffer serious illness and/or die from it.

Embracing the Future: Using Artificial Intelligence in Australian Health Practitioner Regulation.

Artificial intelligence (AI) - computerised technology that imitates aspects of human intelligence - is developing at a rapid pace. It is increasingly used to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of multifarious processes in private industry and public administration. Among the statutory authorities that have begun to explore the potential for AI to assist them are regulators of Australia's health professions.

Professional reports for sentencing courts: recommendations for reporting on child exploitation material offenders' risk of recidivism and prospects for rehabilitation.

Denunciation and general deterrence are major objectives of sentencing those who are convicted of possessing or distributing child exploitation material in Australia (CEM offenders), but courts also strive to achieve specific deterrence. To this end, courts tend to rely on professional reports as evidence of risk of reoffending and prospects for rehabilitation. After outlining matters that courts consider when sentencing CEM offenders, we discuss key empirical findings concerning CEM offenders' risk of recidivism, and then evaluate two approaches for assessing this risk: actuarial assessments; and structured professional judgment.

Moritz Meyer and the Medical Board: Preventing Refugee Doctors from Practising Medicine in Victoria, Australia, 1937-1958.

In 1937, the Medical Board of Victoria (the Board) declined to register Moritz Meyer to practise medicine in Victoria, Australia. Meyer was a Jewish doctor who had completed his medical degree in Germany and obtained postgraduate qualifications in Scotland. Meyer successfully challenged the Board's decision in the Supreme Court of Victoria and the Board's appeal against that decision to the High Court of Australia, which was dismissed.

Hartnett, Epstein, Van der Hope: Regulating Unconventional Doctors.

Doctors Francis Timothy Hartnett, Zygmunt Epstein and Izso Hartmayer Van der Hope were the first medical practitioners to appeal against decisions of the Medical Board of Victoria (Board) to cancel doctors' registration to practise medicine after finding that they had engaged in infamous conduct in a professional respect. This article analyses the Board's decisions in the 1940s regarding these three doctors and their appeals. The article argues that the doctors were unconventional and the Board's members, whose own career successes were built on their adherence to custom, allowed their aversion to the doctors' nonconformity to compromise their impartial assessment of their behaviour.

Monitoring a “Menace”: Peer Review and the Regulation of Substance-Addicted Doctors, 1933-1948.

This article examines the first power that Victorian parliamentarians granted to the Medical Board of Victoria (Board) to regulate impaired doctors. Convinced that substance-addicted doctors were a “menace”, in 1933 the legislature gave the Board discretion to remove their names from its register of “legally qualified medical practitioners”. In the next 15 years, however, the Board chose not to cancel the registration of several doctors who came to its attention for their addiction to alcohol or drugs and instead the Board monitored those doctors; it mostly sought assurances from the practitioners that they were obtaining treatment for their addiction, abstaining from consuming alcohol and drugs, and refraining from practising medicine, usually until their treating practitioners considered that they were fit to resume medical practice.

“My [Electronic] Health Record” – Cui Bono (For Whose Benefit)?

We examine the operation of Australia’s national electronic health records system, known as the “My Health Record system”. Pursuant to the My Health Records Act 2012 (Cth), every 38 seconds new information about Australians is uploaded onto the My Health Record system servers. This information includes diagnostic tests, general practitioners’ clinical notes, referrals to specialists and letters from specialists.

A delayed inheritance: the Medical Board of Victoria's 75-year wait to find doctors guilty of "infamous conduct in a professional respect".

The Medical Board of Victoria (Board) was created in 1844 to register "legally qualified medical practitioners". It was not until 1933, however, that the Board attained the power to remove from its register a doctor who had engaged in "infamous conduct in a professional respect" (the power), even though the General Council of Medical Education and Registration of the United Kingdom on which the Board was modelled had been granted the power 75 years earlier. This article argues that the delay in the Board's inheritance was attributable to successive Victorian Parliaments' distrust of the Board and that this attitude was unwarranted, at least from early in the 20th century.

Cluster roots of Leucadendron laureolum (Proteaceae) and Lupinus albus (Fabaceae) take up glycine intact: an adaptive strategy to low mineral nitrogen in soils?

Background And Aims: South African soils are not only low in phosphorus (P) but most nitrogen (N) is in organic form, and soil amino acid concentrations can reach 2.6 g kg(-1) soil. The Proteaceae (a main component of the South African Fynbos vegetation) and some Fabaceae produce cluster roots in response to low soil phosphorus.

Ribosomal protein L11 negatively regulates oncoprotein MDM2 and mediates a p53-dependent ribosomal-stress checkpoint pathway.

The gene encoding p53 mediates a major tumor suppression pathway that is frequently altered in human cancers. p53 function is kept at a low level during normal cell growth and is activated in response to various cellular stresses. The MDM2 oncoprotein plays a key role in negatively regulating p53 activity by either direct repression of p53 transactivation activity in the nucleus or promotion of p53 degradation in the cytoplasm.