The New Zealand State, Medical Capture & the Role of Strategic Ignorance. Summary New Zealand’s Unite Against COVID-19 ‘stamp it out’, or ‘elimination’ strategy is revealing it’s democratic and political deficit. The strategy relied on the deployment of policy, legislation and simple slogans focusing on case rates, vaccination, masking and […]
The River Story, attributed to Irving Zola, by New Zealand sociologist John B. McKinlay “A Case for Refocusing Upstream: The Political Economy of Illness” McKinlay, J.B. (first published 1975) My friend, Irving Zola, relates the story of a physician trying to explain the dilemmas of the modern practice of medicine: […]
The process of unwrapping the drivers of persistent societal and environmental problems involve extraordinary political challenges. Persistent wicked problems include such diverse issues as pervasive anthropogenic pollution, nutrient loss in food, the privatisation of data, climate change, obesity and non-communicable disease. Wicked problems require that the public, scientists and policy […]
My masters research project sought to understand why there was no policy in New Zealand aimed at stewarding endocrine disrupting chemicals; to limit EDC exposures, and protect the health of both humans and natural ecosystems. The risk of EDCs has been identified for over 20 years, and for roughly the […]
Biodiversity rhetoric often excludes comment on contamination and pollution from economic activity. Narratives relating to biodiversity loss often exclude the relationship of biodiversity decline and persistent applications of pesticides over years. Also avoided are the low level, or sub-chronic exposures to surrounding ecosystems -the soil and water profiles, and the […]
‘There is increasing Evidence That Endocrine Disruption (EDC) Exposures Play a Substantive Role In Disease Causation Or Progression.’ Gore et al 2015 An enormous quantity of medical literature involves the manipulation of synthetic chemicals at ultra-low doses – parts per billion, for example – to alter hormone function. Hormonally active […]
The theory of ‘wicked problems’ originated in the planning literature in 1973. Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber proposed that planning could no longer be efficiently managed by scientists and engineers due to the trickiness of goal setting and problem definition in dynamic systems with feedback loops, and the commensurate requirement […]
Pesticides. It’s Simple. The Corporation Selling The Product Should Not Select The Safety Studies. In the world of pesticides, regulatory agency policies preferentialise unpublished industry data over published scientific data. This is enabled through the production of policies which favours the decisions made by unaccountable institutions, the WHO-FAO JMPR and […]