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Search Results: antibiotics

  • RELIGION

    Beyond belief

    • Ken Haley
    • 15 December 2023
    1 Comment

    The bandage around my knee drew the practitioner’s eye, and my attempt to talk it away as a minor issue  was no match for her professional perseverance. While I waited, she called in a specialist from orthopaedics, who took a good look at the affected area and warned me that unless I presented myself at outpatients very soon, ‘this could kill you’.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Judgment and the burden of ignorance

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 15 June 2023
    2 Comments

    Kathleen Folbigg's release, prompted by the discovery of a genetic mutation that created reasonable doubt in her conviction, marks a significant intersection of science and law. However, the case highlights the need to critically assess the weight and limitations of scientific authority in our justice system, acknowledging the inherent uncertainty embedded within human affairs.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Why the threat of AI is invisible

    • David Halliday
    • 13 June 2023
    1 Comment

    As artificial intelligence evolves, warnings of an AI surpassing us in cognitive abilities grow louder. Yet, these threats, which echo sci-fi nightmares, are met with skepticism and complacency, rather than fear. Are our human minds, fine-tuned by evolution to grapple with tangible, immediate threats, ill-equipped to comprehend the abstract risk of a runaway AI?

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Take this: A story of pharmacy

    • Michael McGirr
    • 14 April 2023
    5 Comments

    What are the implications of widespread use of Metformin, Pembrolizumab, or Nivolumab, and what do they say about us? Featuring a humourless pharmacist and a thick wad of prescriptions, the story of our complicated relationship with pharmaceuticals is a meandering map of the human condition.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Jane Goodall's quest to stem the human plague

    • Catherine Marshall
    • 12 July 2017
    7 Comments

    Revered for her groundbreaking study of chimpanzees in Tanzania's Gombe Stream, Goodall has spent the past three decades travelling the world in an effort to alert its human inhabitants to the alarming news: we are destroying the planet. The message seems to have been lost on those in a position to halt the change, for research scientists have just reported that a mass extinction is currently underway, a biological annihilation in which billions of regional or local populations have already been lost.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Another casualty of the mucus wars

    • Megan Graham
    • 29 April 2015
    3 Comments

    Public transport is a likely site for an ambush. Not only are passengers attacked at a time when their surroundings encourage a diminished will to live, they are also crammed intimately into a small space, allowing broad-scale invasion that goes initially unnoticed. There is always one way to ensure victory. Sir Alexander Fleming discovered the nuclear bomb of the bacteria world — an antibiotic to obliterate all players, good and bad. No defence, no attack. Annihilation back to square one.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    The ignorant courage of the anti-vaxxers

    • Jen Vuk
    • 27 April 2015
    22 Comments

    When my friend Lena told me she wouldn’t be vaccinating her newborn son Sammy, I admit I was fascinated but not surprised. Lena was always going to do motherhood her way. There are many like her who decided with a clear vision and level-head. But I can no longer accept these decisions. Since having my own precious boys, my world view has shifted and I am less ignorant.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The boy who can move mountains

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 25 June 2014
    9 Comments

    Ignoring the Greek tradition of family names, my son and his Cretan wife called their son Orestes. The name means 'he who can move mountains', and it is almost as if some instinct informed the young parents of 'naming power', and of the possibility that such power might be needed. The first mountain resembled Everest: the operation on the day of his birth, which was necessary to correct a malformed oesophagus.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Remembering Barry O'Keefe

    • Brian Lucas
    • 29 April 2014
    5 Comments

    The late Barry O'Keefe was among the best known barristers of his time and no doubt there will be many tributes to his prowess as advocate, judge and corruption commissioner. The integration of the spiritual life and professional career is a challenge for most people. How do you find stillness and God's presence when there are constant demands on your time and energy? O'Keefe said his attendance at daily Mass was integral.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Contraception not the answer to maternal mortality

    • Eugene Hurley
    • 18 July 2012
    67 Comments

    More than 350,000 women die every year from difficulties related to pregnancy or childbirth, many on our own doorstep in East Timor and Papua New Guinea. Senator Bob Carr's announcement of a doubling in AusAID funding for family planning targets pregnancy itself as the problem, rather than the lack of good basic health services.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Insect empathy

    • Chris Wallace-Crabbe and Margaret Cameron
    • 19 October 2010

    Industrious servant of excellent fame .. You sting to protect the hive, then you die ... Instinct is such an unworthy name .. Which calls a selfless attitude, a lie.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Exploding pig flu

    • Bronwyn Lay
    • 27 May 2009
    8 Comments

    As Australia deals with its own incursion of H1N1, a strange event on a Geneva-bound train reminds us that this virus is in human hands. Meanwhile the manufacture of a vaccine for the virus raises doubts about medical ethics and equity.

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