Using Stem Cells
Congratulations on the article that shows the realities of people coping with Parkinson’s disease (“Please help me, I’m falling”, June 3). It is pleasing to see that New Zealand has some top researchers investigating this disease.
However, it must be pointed out that New Zealand severely constrains its medical researchers through not allowing stem cell research. This research could easily result in further drugs and treatments for serious ailments such as Parkinson’s, diabetes and stroke. This is in complete contrast to the situation in Australia, Canada and the UK, where such study can be done with only a few restrictions.
As we care for those that suffer, and we do not want to lose any more of our promising medical researchers to overseas, our government needs to allow stem cell research now.
—Kent Stevens, Humanist Society of New Zealand (Wellington)
Tax Loopholes
In “For Peat’s sake” (Business, June 10), David Young draws attention to the creation of loopholes with the proposed investment tax regime. The idea that selection criteria can be devised to the extent that an individual company should have tax exemption is unsavoury. Why, too, is Australian investment exempt and not, say, that in the US, with whom we are seeking free trade, or that in Iraq, where we could be encouraging investment? Yet the practice is spreading. In proposals for the New Economy Research Fund and Research For Industry funding, the Foundation for Research Science and Technology is forced to play a similar game in order to meet their ministerial requirements. It is proposed that 30 percent of the research funding will be distributed on a negotiation basis with a set of criteria imposed that effectively eliminates the universities from consideration. This money, which will run for the next 12 years, appears to be earmarked for the Crown Research Institutes. Another set of criteria limits how much of the remainder each institute can bid for, but again favours the CRIs at the expense of the universities and technical institutes. Research excellence and taxpayer support for new-economy initiatives has become defined by an arbitrary set of investment criteria with aims that are not transparent. The government is directing research spending, and designing an investment tax regime, using measures that open it up to accusation of pork-barrel politics and cronyism. It should indeed be embarrassed, but we as taxpayers should be very concerned that individuals with deep pockets and good contacts can avoid taxes, and that in spending our taxes, government seeks to hide behind artificial devices rather than have open competition for excellence.
—Professor Colin Green (Auckland)
Global Warming
The retreat of a single glacier (Bluffer’s Guide, June 17) can be caused by anything from volcanic warming to lower snowfalls – perhaps a consequence of lower temperatures as well as global warming. And, yes, the latest data shows the interior of the Antarctic cooling with warming around the perimeter.
But using single local effects to advance the proof of a global issue is very misleading.
The article noted that in hundreds of peer-reviewed journals, not one had challenged the idea of global warming. That is correct.
Yes, sea levels are rising. But the rate of increase has not changed since records began. Yes, CO2 levels are increasing from 315 parts per million when first measured to 380ppm today. It is perfectly legitimate science to question whether changes in these very low levels of atmospheric CO2 will impact and at what level on global temperatures over time.
No one disputes that the globe is warming for the simple reason that there is universal agreement we are leaving an ice age. The issue the so-called doubters raise is the extent to which part of this warming – if any – may be attributable to human-induced emissions.
This is a much more complex issue and there are very reasonable scientific grounds for adopting a view that the jury is still out.
—John Blundell (St Heliers, Auckland)
Lycra Liberals
In reply to Nick Lewis (Letters, June 24), in my experience “English-speaking” migrants new to Aotearoa/New Zealand have often felt it appropriate to judge, criticise and give “helpful” advice to Kiwis about how we should behave. As a child in the 1950s I witnessed Brits (then called Poms), and now generally it is Americans, behaving in this manner.
Obviously believing that we “speak the same language”, Lewis felt comfortable interpreting Claire Williams’s letter from his point of view, seemingly oblivious of the fact that we have a different culture and a very different sense of humour. Most Kiwis would recognise the portrait Claire painted, that her words could well be said directly to the “lycra liberals” concerned, and that they would “share the joke” (perhaps with a small degree of chagrin).
—Kathleen Guy (Clifton, Christchurch)
Bare Feet
Public hygiene indeed.
Since most westerners walk in and out of shops, libraries, doctors’ surgeries and homes without taking their shoes off at the door, I cannot for the life of me understand Erin Mackie’s concern (Letters, June 17) over people choosing to go barefoot.
Going barefoot keeps one in touch with the earth we walk on.
Too many people living in the so-called civilised western world are out of touch with the world they live on. We are obsessed with hygiene to the point where we’re endangering our civilised selves and the planet with the overuse of chemical cleaners. Noting the reported rise in allergies among children of the western world, I suspect our insulation from “natural” dirt tends to weaken our immune systems.
Frankly, I’d rather walk in dirt, and even eat good healthy dirt as good healthy children often do, than breathe in chemical cleaners or eat off a table wiped down with bleach.
—Alun Bollinger (Blacks Point, Reefton)
I must confess that I’ve been known to nip into the dairy on a summer’s day for a popsicle myself, barefoot and unconcerned for the greater public health, blissfully ignorant of the public menace lurking between my unfettered phalanges. I recall seeing a couple of foreign gentlemen observing a barefoot teen in the supermarket, causing one to mutter perplexedly, “I do not understand this – surely New Zealanders can afford shoes?”
The only people exposed to danger must be the barefoot themselves, dragging all this filth back to their own houses. It is a risk I, as a backward Kiwi, will continue to take, and may I be so bold as to suggest that our upset friend should throw caution aside and experiment with this wild and crazy behaviour, one summer’s day. Only in the name of research, you understand.
—Mike Zandvoort (Christchurch)
As a North American, admittedly resident in New Zealand for more than three decades, I have to say I disagree with Erin Mackie’s statement that bare feet are “unhygenic and repulsive to North Americans”. I and a number of Americans I know are not at all bothered by bare feet, except when our children choose to have them in hazardous places (like on a bike). Similarly, I also know of Kiwis that are almost as repulsed as Erin Mackie seems to be by bare feet.
But I take strong exception to the description of this innocent New Zealand custom as “backwards and uncivilised”. Though I prefer shoes, some of the most forward-thinking and civilised folk I know are just more comfortable in bare feet.
—Robin Ransom (Wellington)
I realise that my initial address of this issue sounded rather and not-quite-ironically schoolmarmish and missionary-ish, and perhaps this tone, half tongue-in-cheek, contributed to the comprehensive misunderstanding of what I said there. It is only when I read this implicit equation between the death penalty and the baring of bare feet that these more serious reflections found articulation.
Further, I admit that the issue is not simply one of hygiene but of propriety. North American friends of mine are just as astounded at the sightings of grown women in supermarkets wearing nothing but socks on their feet and of teenagers attired for a shopping trip in the mall in pyjamas and slippers. I cannot hope to understand these things, but I do think that there is a legitimate line of distinction between the institution of the death penalty and of policy against bare feet in public places.
For the record, I have lived in New Zealand by election for five years; I love it here and love the people and the society. However, this issue, I confess, brought into full relief everything I find most alienating and unassimilable about my new home.
—Erin Mackie (North New Brighton, Christchurch)
TVNZ Bouquet
TVNZ has received many brickbats for the “dumbing down” of programmes over recent months. I would like to award a bouquet instead. I hope the Piano Man documentary about Michael Houstoun’s career and the “Artsville” programme about Gretchen Albrecht herald a new beginning. May there be many more documentaries of the same standard.
—Alison Safey (Wanganui)
Nicks and NBR
My contract was not up for renewal when I chose to leave NBR (Media, June 24). It is a sign of how happy I was at the paper that my contract came up for renewal nearly six months ago but I chose to wait until the end of the financial year to renegotiate.
Also, I am not leaving the NBR to join an insurance company. Some time back I had an idea for an e-commerce business and have been lucky enough to find investors with the belief in me to back it. While I look forward to being in business, I have enjoyed writing about it immensely. Lest folklore get any further out of hand, I’d like to make it known that not only have I been well supported by NBR’s management during my time here, they have been equally supportive of my career change. The NBR may have had issues with other men called Nick but it has no issues with this one.
—Nick Bryant (Orakei, Auckland)
Waugh Point
Having studied the Letters of Evelyn Waugh, Christine White (Letters, June 24) now needs to turn to Cecil Beaton’s diaries. Waugh and Beaton may not have attended Harrow together but their education certainly overlapped at infant school: “… in later life one can never forgive the boys who tormented one at school. During my first morning at Heath Mount day school in Hampstead the bullies, led by a tiny, but fierce Evelyn Waugh, at once spotted their quarry in me during the morning ‘break’ as, terrified, I crept around the outer periphery of the asphalt playground”. It seems, unhappily, that Waugh did indeed “inflict misery on the young Cecil Beaton”.
—Don Bassett (Eden Terrace, Auckland)
Language Issues
Regarding the perennial problem of declining pronunciation standards in broadcasting, I have been dismayed at the sullying of the sabbath by National Radio’s transmission of a programme apparently titled “The arse on Sunday”.
—D Morris (Miramar, Wellington)
Online Only
Comparing NCEA
Goodness gracious me. I read with interest Karen Poutasi's letter (May 27) and I was overcome with mirth. With a child at the pointy end of this standards-based assessment system, I find her letter patronising in the extreme. It would seem to me to be a pity indeed, that the New Zealand health system, of which Poutasi is deeply responsible, is not standards based as well. To paraphrase her, I suggest that "with standards based assessment, hospitals and communities are free to customise and develop health programmes for patients in ways that were impossible in the straightjacket that was the previous system". Yeah right! Imagine that. How can this woman now preach to us the benefits of NCEA assessment after being both the architect and deliverer of the sham that is our current health system.
—Mark Campbell (South Yarra, Melbourne)
In the midst of the NCEA debate, everyone from experts on education to the Prime Minister herself has been questioned, interviewed and asked for their professional opinion on whether or not the NCEA should be replaced. It seems amazing to me that no one has thought of asking students, the very people that are experiencing the NCEA on a daily basis, what they think of the new system of education in New Zealand. I am 16 and currently hold an NCEA Level One Certificate. Like thousands of other students around New Zealand, I have experienced what life in an NCEA classroom is really like. Despite the qualifications and skills of the Minister of Education, Steve Maharey, he has never truly experienced the system he is now managing. All the students of New Zealand have opinions on the NCEA, but no one has asked us what we think. Students could be the government’s greatest resource for information on what is really happening with the NCEA, because we, the students of New Zealand, are the only people that have seen the NCEA as it really is. We should have a say in what becomes of the NCEA, because after all isn’t it our education that is at stake?
—Clay Ripma (Warkworth)
Bare Feet
James K Baxter, if only you could hear Erin Mackie’s diatribe on the naked.
“That New Zealanders so often do go barefoot … in public places … is one of the few customary practices here that seem not only backward and uncivilised, but dangerously unhygienic and repulsive to North Americans.”
Well, shame on us for ignoring our country’s imperative to play lapdog to North America.
The conclusion from Mackie’s status-anxious totalitarianism is that a nation’s civility hinges on its ability to shoe itself.
Well-shod or not, the Kiwi barefoot gait harks back to our proud pioneering heritage; baring our soles while not looking over our (international) shoulder deserves merit, rather than Mackie’s wincing example of “secular Calvinism” Baxter so aptly satirised in the 1960s.
The hygiene-based objection to the naked foot is without scientific basis and runs no deeper than the “yuck” factor.
Come on, feet aren’t private parts. How about addressing Kiwi issues (domestic violence, suicide, the debased family unit …) more deserving of your cultural cringe.
—Mark Story (Hastings)
Saving Katherine Ryan
I have only 29 words to say to Graeme Lay (Letters, June 3): nucular, shtretch, ickscape, vunnerable, prostrate, New Ziland, aks, renumeration, mischeevius, reconnise, everythink, secetry, piticuly, Febury, anaethetist, icksetra, lacksadaisical, ceremoany, congradulations, cimmunity, should of, yous, orftin, impax, conshumer, satistics, Antartic.
—Lester Calder (Napier)
Might I suggest that the embololalial* "um" be added to Graeme Lay's linguistic offences for pressing the cough button. In the way it is used today, this "sound" is meaningless, unnecessary and gross verbal pollution. Let's get rid of it.
* Embololalia: a speech disorder in which meaningless sounds or words are interjected into sentences. (It was the word that tripped up our "Spelling Olympics" candidate.)
—Honor Hurly (Birkdale)
That catalogue of complaints on media use of language only scratches the surface.
Will someone in Radio New Zealand and TV news explain why it is that no one is any longer merely shot but is invariably "gunned down", presumably on the grounds that it is dramatic, shocking, designed to startle and alarm. In the same mode, note that cars no longer simply crash into objects: they "plough into" them every time.
It is absurd and as irritating as hearing that every disagreement, argument, controversy, debate, dispute, refutation and mild spat is a "row" that we are constantly informed has "broken out", giving all the connotations of an Irish pub brawl with plenty of head smacking and hurling of Guinness glasses.
And in the name of reason, why must every closure of a business or industry be described as "moth-balling", which might be acceptable if there was a realistic expectation that in due course these closures were to be reversed? Moth-balling – as in putting away the woolly sweaters until winter – is a ridiculous descriptor in most cases but completely irrational when it is meant to signify a complete cessation of business.
This slovenly approach to language is becoming more frequent by the year and is made more irritating by the mangled, over-enunciated delivery of mostly young news readers who generally resemble 10-year-olds carefully delivering the fruits of a research project for the edification of their parents on Speech Night.
The only respite is the slow decline of "at the end of the day", first popularised by Ruth Richardson and carried to extraordinary lengths by Tau Henare, who once used the term nine times in a single Morning Report interview.
Being a New Zealander and accepting that language must change does not mean an obligation to slide into cliché at every opportunity. Spoken media trainers – if such exist – should begin with basics.
—Norman Maclean (Gisborne)
Pragmatic Greens
I’d like to thank Brian Easton for his thoughts about the Green Party (Economy, June 3). Like Brian, the Green MPs, the party and I all feel the loss of Rod Donald keenly, and his death has opened up a number of questions for us.
However, I feel compelled to publicly challenge some of the assertions Brian makes about the Greens, namely that without Rod we are no longer pragmatic or willing to use market mechanisms and that we are better at criticising policies than offering positive alternatives.
Green Party policies are full of ideas to use market incentives to encourage sustainable behaviour, within a framework that sets the boundaries of that market. The market today does not reflect true costs, and allows some to impose the costs of their behaviours on society as a whole. There is no price on carbon emissions, water scarcity for irrigation, the release of toxic materials or the dumping of waste. So true-cost markets sometimes have to be constructed.
For example, Turn Down the Heat, our document of proposals to deal with climate change in New Zealand, outlines numerous market-based measures, such as allowing forest growers to share in the economic gains from the carbon credits to incentivise the growing of more forests, and requiring those producing greenhouse gases they cannot avoid to purchase offsets from those who can invest in carbon reduction. We also propose shifting some tax off work and enterprise, which is to be encouraged, and instead on to waste and pollution.
We have never been opposed to international rules for trade, but want to ensure that rules designed to maximise trade don’t trump international agreements on environmental protection and human rights, as the WTO so often argues they should.
As oil prices rise permanently, and with them the costs of international transport, we are concerned that New Zealand should continue to make for itself those things it can make adequately, while continuing to import those things it can’t, and exporting the things we do especially well.
I believe the Green Party has offered more positive alternatives over recent years than other opposition parties. For example, we secured funding for our Buy Kiwi Made campaign, which helps address our huge and unsustainable balance of payments deficit. Other recent achievements include a huge boost to environmental education in the recent Budget, and a number of positive, progressive pieces of legislation in progress: removing the legal defence of reasonable force for child abuse, raising the youth minimum wage, restoring the ability of local councils to consider climate change when granting consents and, most recently, our Waste Minimisation (Solids) Bill, which would put in place a number of measures to reduce the amount of waste we produce in New Zealand, which is now higher per capita than in the US.
Brian Easton is right that pragmatism needs to be an important part of our Green vision. I believe it already is, and has been for some time, as all these positive achievements demonstrate. Though Brian’s conversation with Rod was tragically terminated, I look forward to continuing it with him.
—Jeanette Fitzsimons, Green Party co-leader (Wellington)
Inflation and Labour
Brian Easton, in "Fiscal conservatism rules" (Economy, May 20), misinterprets a Treasury 1984 statement, which identifies one merit of a floating exchange rate regime, as a statement in support of fiscal laxity. He then attributes the high real exchange rate in the late 1980s to actual fiscal laxity. He does not consider the possibility that the Treasury statement is consistent with the higher real exchange rate, which followed the destabilising 19.9 percent rise in nominal wage rates (an 11.8 percent real rise) in the year to September 1986, at a time when monetary policy was already disinflationary.
In any case, the charge of fiscal laxity under Labour is baffling. Labour inherited huge actual and incipient government deficits from the previous administration, and reduced them. Table 8A in the Minister of Finance's July 27, 1989 "Economic Strategy" document presents four measures of the fiscal deficit from 1984/85 to 1989/90. The raw conventional deficit measure shows that a deficit of 8.4 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) in 1984/85 was projected to be a surplus of 4.5 percent of GDP by 1989/90. The other three measures confirm the turnaround story. For example, when adjusted for inflation and the economic cycle, a deficit of 4.6 percent of GDP by 1984/85 was projected to be a surplus of 2.5 percent of GDP by 1989/90.
These facts appear to destroy Easton's proposition that increased fiscal deficits during this period increased the real exchange rate.
Easton’s claim that he “made himself highly unpopular” during this period by apparently advocating what the government was actually doing – reducing the fiscal deficit markedly – is similarly baffling. Unpopular with whom?
—Bryce Wilkinson, Capital Economics Ltd (Wellington)
Fair Trade
Sarah Barnett (“Espresso for Africa”, June 3) was quite right to leave Starbucks out of her fair trade coffee article. Starbucks – a company that professes fair trade coffee purchasing in East Timor – doesn’t actually buy coffee from East Timorese coffee farmers but from the glibly named Cooperativa Cafe Timor. CCT claims to be a cooperative of 18,000 farmers. Far from it.
CCT has been operating in East Timor since 1993, during the Indonesian occupation, supported by USAID through the US-based National Cooperative Business Association. CCT claims to pay growers between $1.26 and $1.41 per pound for coffee. I don’t know who qualifies as a grower but a Timorese friend of mine who works in an NGO that promotes sustainable agriculture told me in March that people are paid $0.18 a pound to pick Starbucks coffee beans.
I still buy Timorese coffee from Trade Aid and New World but it sticks me that a company like CCT on-sells coffee that is labelled as fair-traded.
—Dave Owens (New Plymouth)
It was good to see the Listener giving the fair trade movement a bit of a profile. The concept of buying goods that are ethically traded and free from forced child labour is gaining momentum on a global scale, and although New Zealand lags a bit, we are getting there slowly.
What you could have mentioned was that Trade Aid has led this movement in New Zealand.
This not-for-profit organisation was started by Vi and Richard Cottrell when they brought a consignment of carpets back from a group of Tibetan refugees in 1973. What began as an outlet in someone's garage has grown to a chain of 30 stores across the country, has developed a business, Trade Aid Importers, which buys from groups where sustainable fair trade is making a difference, and has created jobs for around 50 New Zealanders. This is a success story on all fronts.
—Barbara Arbuthnot, Trade Aid, Botany (Auckland)
Gender Equality
I used to have a great deal of respect for feminists who sought gender equality in the workplace. Then I did a women’s-only multimedia course in Australia, designed to encourage females into the male-dominated IT field. We had a guest lecturer, a woman who is renowned for her continued feminist activism since the 60s. To say I was disappointed with her was an understatement, particularly following her ridiculous statement that she’d “never once filled her car with petrol – that’s a man’s job!” It appeared to me then that she wanted to have her cake and eat it too, for surely equality should mean equality in all areas, not to be picked and chosen according to whim. On returning to New Zealand, I’ve noticed an onslaught of media coverage regarding the debate over women and their rights to be fulltime subsidised mothers and desire for more work-place flexibility.
What annoys me most about this debate, and the government’s emphasis on “family first” and subsidies for children, is the ignorance shown towards those of us who are either single, or with partners, who simply do not want children. I belong to the first category, while several friends belong to the second. We are consistently asked when we are going to start families, with the implied assumption that we are “selfish”. Yet on top of this prevalent attitude we pay full taxes and full price for health care, while subsidising the education, living costs, care costs, and doctors fees of other people’s children. It is now nearly impossible for a single woman to obtain a mortgage, yet alone pay the rent and bills while living alone. We have to flat with others to make ends meet, and see no security or relief available any time in the future. Our savings ability is negated due to our lower-than-male-counterparts’ wages, yet we are seen as living a life of luxury, shopping for designer shoes and constantly eating out.
I am so tired of reading the whinging and whining of women with children who have the ability to live alone, have made the choice to have children, who have decided that maternity leave and flexible working hours are more important than equal pay rates. I am so sick of colleagues who have the ability to take days off for their children while those of us without stay and work, with no equal leave allocated to us. I am tired of the presumption by employers that, as a female, I will be wanting maternity leave when, in reality, I just want a fair and even playing field. Gender equality should mean the existence of an ability to make any decision with no negative social or economic consequences. It definitely should not be selective in its focus.
—Heather Beeston (Raglan)
Canterbury Irrigation
In the next few weeks Central Plains Water, a company of some 370 shareholders, will designate the land it seeks to acquire, under the Public Works Act, in order to build its irrigation scheme on the Canterbury Plains. This scheme seeks to merge water from the Waimakariri and Rakaia Rivers, in a 25m-wide level headrace, following roughly a line 235m above sea level, from the banks of the Waimakariri to the Rakaia. This mixed flow of 40,000 cumsecs will then be fed through approximately 500km of 13m-wide canals, down to State Highway 1, where it will be “bywashed” back into the Waimakariri, Rakaia and Selwyn rivers. As the Selwyn flows into Lake Waihora, these waters will also be affected, as the “bywashed” Selwyn will carry more of the “mix” than itself. Of course, the intended use of the water is irrigation and for that read large dairy/spray units. No stream in this area will flow without oversprayed water from the headrace mix and the nitrates, herbicides and coliforms it picks up along the way. The total destruction of the integrity of all streams in the Selwyn region will be the result as they seek to create their New Waikaia.
—Stephen Clarke (Springfield, Canterbury
Stealing Ideas
Kiwi entrepreneurs who turn ideas into gold can expect to fairly profit from their ideas (“The midas touch”, June 10). This fact is made plain in the programme Dragons’ Den, as inventors bargain with the investors for a share of their business and are keen to strike a good deal and/or retain a profitable piece of the action for themselves. Imagine if the entrepreneurs appearing on this show had their ideas taken from them for little or no money. It would be outrageous and plainly inequitable. Yet this is exactly what we do to scriptwriters in New Zealand.
Scriptwriters are simply entrepreneurs by another name. Our ideas are the basis for everything on our television and movie screens, on stage and radio. However, local scriptwriters have been working for the same low rates of pay for well over 10 years. We are expected to hand over all rights to our ideas for what is, by international standards, a laughably modest upfront payment. And unlike every other major English speaking country in the world, New Zealand writers do not receive residuals, ie, a share in the ongoing profits generated from their ideas.
TVNZ, the very network that screens Dragons’ Den, is one of the worst offenders. In a recent in-house “contest” called Life’s a Pitch, TVNZ staff were invited to come up with ideas that would make successful television shows. TVNZ took the rights to all submitted entries for no payment and have refused repeated requests by our organisation to negotiate fair rates of pay with the creators. You want to find a real dragon’s den? Look no further than our state broadcaster.
—Dominic Sheehan, Executive Director, New Zealand Writers Guild (Auckland)
Truth to Power
The editorial “Speak truth to Power” (June 3) is good in pointing out the many lies of Donald Rumsfeld, US Secretary of Defence, but it is too late. “Power” today doesn't care what critics, let alone the world's disenfranchised, say. The primary effect of this editorial now is to perpetuate the illusion that “power” can be reasoned with.
This is similar to the concept that “arms control” (eg, strategic arms limitation treaties) can prevent nuclear war. The primary effect of “arms control” is to perpetuate the illusion that human institutions have control of nuclear weapons. But only total nuclear disarmament, which removes those addictive corrupting monsters from “power”, can prevent a nuclear holocaust.
What is required now is for people to express their humanity and act upon it together. Democratic governing must include everyone daily. The very concept of “power” may be outmoded. That realisation is what is making those addicted to power and exploitation so desperate about wielding it, through lies or whatever means, in increasing the use of military force, in concentrating more wealth in fewer hands, and in doing so little about disarmament and climate change. They can sense their time has passed.
—Richard Keller (Lyall Bay, Wellington)
The Perfect City
What with Hamilton being smothered in semi-permanent fog this time of the year, one is hard-pressed to see if it is indeed on the way to being Hilary Falconer's “perfect city” (Letters, June 10).
Ms Falconer complains at Hamilton being overlooked by the Listener at the expense of less-populated Dunedin. Look at the latest census figures, Hilary. More people live in the Hutt Valley than in either Hamilton or Dunedin.
As with Hamilton, and unlike Dunedin, we have a major river, with its huge amenity potential, running through our heart. Unlike either Hamilton or Dunedin, we also directly border a sheltered coastline.
Only Gisborne is truly comparable. And poor little Gisborne – love it though I do – is so remote you just about need a passport to get there.
—Don Carson, Communications manager, Hutt City Council (Wellington)
Treating Disease
Dengue fever is potentially deadly (Letters, May 20). Most people actually have no signs of the disease, only a minority get ill, and an even smaller minority (often teenagers) die.
Malaria medicines have no effect, either on preventing or curing the disease. Printing D J Heggie’s letter is in this regard a bit risky as it may induce people into believing they can.
Only prevention works on dengue: avoid getting bitten by protecting yourself (clothing, repellent, nets …) and make sure your environment is mosquito-proof (any “dead” water potentially breeds mosquito larvae).
If one has a high fever and no other symptom while in a dengue fever-infected area, one should assume they have dengue and take only paracetamol, and strictly avoid aspirin and Ibuprofen, which may worsen haemorrhages sometimes connected with dengue. But most of the time symptoms such as a cough or a runny nose will appear, suggesting it is not dengue. Homeopathy offers treatments for dengue fever.
—Anne Tadiello (Thailand)
Saving Wildlife
I was inspired by "Bribery and the Beast" (Editorial, April 29) to do something more about our wildlife.
But what? I run a B&B in Auckland's CBD and there are very few remnants of wildlife in this area, and I count myself very fortunate to even hear a tui.
So, I did this http://www.aucklandbedandbreakfast.com/nz_wildlife/support_wildlife.html and I hope that those people who see it will feel empowered to help.
—Susan Sweetman, Braemar on Parliament Street (Auckland)
