662 Results

  • Long Covid in Aotearoa NZ: Risk assessment and preventive action urgently needed

    … Summary Covid-19 can cause longer-term changes in health, collectively known … urgent recommendations to the NZ Government are:  Identify a proportionate response by conducting a comprehensive Long … response. However, existing evidence is enough to show that NZ can benefit immediately from reducing the …
    Briefing

  • Monitoring CO2 indoors for improving ventilation as a Covid-19 control tool

    … Poor ventilation in indoor settings is widely recognised as a risk factor for the airborne transmission of the virus … (SARS-CoV-2) that causes Covid-19. Virus-laden aerosols can remain airborne for hours in indoor spaces with low … the World Health Organization, which states that the virus can spread in “poorly ventilated and/or crowded indoor …
    Briefing

  • Long COVID: a crucial reason for vax, mask, and distance

    … initial illness. There are insufficient data to provide a trajectory or a timeline for duration and resolution. The downstream damage can affect: brain, heart, lungs, pancreatic beta cells … difficulties/shortness of breath, fatigue/malaise, chest/throat pain, headache, abdominal symptoms, myalgia, …
    Briefing

  • Potential for an avian influenza pandemic: Time for NZ to ramp up preparedness

    … Summary Influenza A(H5N1) virus, a major cause of highly pathogenic avian … 11  If the virus evolves to transmit in humans, we can expect rapid spread across the globe as with previous … is that there is already production technology that can deliver effective vaccines. 19 The candidate vaccine …
    Briefing

  • The case for denicotinising tobacco in Aotearoa NZ remains strong: response to online critique

    … This blog responds to a recent online critique of a study that modelled how key … in trials of VLNCs still live in a world where they can buy and access regular-nicotine content cigarettes – a … excluded (as in the above example), study participants can easily buy regular nicotine tobacco products from retail …
    Briefing

  • How best to classify and count NZ’s border control failures in the COVID-19 pandemic?

    … In taking a systems approach to pandemic control, it is helpful to … is meant by a “border control failure” so that such events can be used to guide performance improvement. This blog … are likely to be failures of this type, and genome testing can be used to help confirm such transmission events. This …
    Briefing

  • Analysis of a new NZ Treasury Report on soft drink tax

    … an action plan to tackle childhood obesity, but it lacks a tax on sugary drinks – a strategy for which there is good … need to defend non-action on taxing sugary drinks, they can point to this Report and obfuscate.  Indeed, this New … with close substitutes like alternative drinks they can rise to 1.0 or even higher (i.e. each 1% increase in …
    Briefing

  • The need for a robust scientific definition for the elimination of COVID-19 from New Zealand

    … at the country-level. In this blog we present the case for a scientific definition of elimination to help guide our … with Australian health authorities, as part of a strategy of opening up our shared borders for easier travel … and “eradication” are often used interchangeably, but a distinction is made in the field of infectious disease …
    Briefing

  • The urgent need for a Covid-19 Action Plan for Schools in Aotearoa New Zealand

    … New Zealand (NZ) in early 2022, the Government announced a policy for schools that was essentially a business-as-usual … in school communities is thus unknown. Official figures show that during Term 1 there were just under 100,000 … opportunities available to modify these factors where we can. As this blog summarises, schools are a critical part of …
    Briefing

  • Time to stop dodging bullets? NZ’s eight recent border control failures

    … highly infectious pandemic virus, including: shifting to a risk-based approach to border management (a traffic light … COVID-19 risk for Aotearoa/NZ. As described here, we can learn from systematically reviewing and improving our current risk managements systems. We can also learn from successful practices used in Asian …
    Briefing

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Public Health Expert Briefing (ISSN 2816-1203)