658 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 … consistent pattern of improvement. Four years on from the start of the pandemic, the JN.1 subvariant is causing a …
    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

  • 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

  • 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 … with clusters of symptoms, often overlapping, which can fluctuate and change over time and can affect any system …
    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

    … need to defend non-action on taxing sugary drinks, they can point to this Report and obfuscate.  Indeed, this New … have (much) greater health gains, it is a good place to start with food taxes to help address the obesity epidemic … “Sugar Taxes and Changes in Total Calorie Consumption: A Simple Framework” . 1   Mathematically the report is a nice …
    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

  • 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

  • More than 147km – the transformative potential of the Wellington bike network plan

    … Wellington City Council is currently consulting on a cycle network for Wellington . This is a big deal. WCC are … fabric of the city over the next decade. This means people can start cycling soon instead of waiting for everything to be …
    Briefing

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Public Health Expert Briefing (ISSN 2816-1203)