Adventure Ausrama Blog

Australia does not need engineers from other countries. The Australian Federal Government is devious in its behaviour to secure cheap engineering workers from overseas for businesses. Shaping the labour market in line with right wing beliefs on the freedom of movement of lower paid employees is normal for the conservative party misnamed the Liberal Party. The mistaken premise of wealth trickling down from the wealthy is also pushed by them. Despite many Australian engineers being unemployed the government is seeking 22 engineers from other countries. This is absolutely stupid and is political bias by the conservatives. However, once in Australia after spending their savings to set up a new life they have to go into the oversupplied labour pool. Put succinctly, they will have to be on welfare payments. The Immigration Minister Peter Dutton, a dimwit at best, has ignored protests from engineering bodies to take engineers off the Skilled Occupation List. The mining boom i...

How can the state pay for drugs that are shown to be effective against disease but cost far too much? Regularly, someone will be on a current affairs television program and point their finger at the government for not continuing to supply their needed medication. In the long term a government must balance the books. There is simply not enough revenue to provide new expensive drugs. A new treatment for melanoma called Ipilimumab is very effective, but it costs $120,000 for a three month course. It stops the cancer from spreading beyond the skin. Ipilimumab can also be used to treat some types of lung cancer. Should the government subsidize this drug? Like all medications there are side effects that can be severe in some patients. Symptoms include constipation, diarrhea, urination complications, bloating, stomach pain, fever and breathing difficulties. The drug usually extends life by several months. In some cases patients survive for a year. A value judgement is needed to d...

An old joke: Do you want a new heart? Then get one from a gorilla - "grunt!" This is not a joke any longer. Australia has just given the go ahead for animal-to-human transplants. This is a turn around from the outright banning of such transplants in 2004. There are two conditions: one, a monitoring system must be in place: and two, there must be a patient register. New Zealand allowed transplants in 2005. The first "transplant" involved implanting insulin producing pig cells into volunteer diabetics. This change has happened when direct research on animals such as chimpanzees is being reduced because tests can more effectively be done in a test tube. Results in many instances are quite different for chimpanzees, for example. This was discovered in AIDs research when chimpanzees didn't get AIDs. They became carriers of the disease. Animals are proving more useful when material at a cellular level is transplanted. Using animals as hosts is far more beneficial ...