Chapter 1: What funding is being allocated to urgent care clinics in Australia?
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Priya, I know that you're an active person. Yes. Do you see active person content online?
Active? I actually don't. Can I tell you why? Because I've actually set my social media feed to remove such content. Oh, check you out. Yeah. Okay. So I don't have any of the Fitspiration, Fitspo, Day on a Plate, anything that could potentially throw me off.
Yeah, right. Nice one. I don't get so much of that either. But I've been getting a lot of old lady gains, which is the kind of fitspo I'm keen on. Can you explain that?
What are we talking about?
We're talking about women in their 70s, 80s, 90s who are doing deadlifts. They're doing, I don't know, bicep curls. They're building muscle. They're building and maintaining muscle. That's the fitspo that really inspires me.
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Chapter 2: How does 'Fitspo' content affect mental health?
That is well, well below that range.
Yes. And the risk of that is, of course, how many missed opportunities are happening in sexual health consults with someone like me, your GP? Is it on our radar enough? Are we talking about it enough? Why aren't we vaccinating people? But also it leaves us at higher risk of another outbreak, like what happened in 2024. Yeah.
Yeah. And I guess the big infectious diseases story of the week has been Hantavirus and the cruise ship, which has seen, as of this recording, three people have died and a handful of others have been infected by this virus. And it's something that I had never heard of until last year, actually, when Jean Hackman's wife, she died of Hantavirus. Yes.
I remember this. In February, yeah. And I remember seeing the virus and going, I never encountered this in medical school. No. But that was the first time people went, if a rodent is infected, it could transmit to a human and the rodent as well.
That's right, exactly, yes. And now we're seeing human-to-human transmission of Hantavirus. It's still pretty rare, but this particular strain of the virus that was found on MV Hondias, that cruise ship which is currently in the news, is an Andes version of the virus. So it's only found in the Andean part of South America.
And not much was known about it until about 2018 when there was a few super spreader events in which people got sick and died from this particular virus. This virus is carried by long-tailed pygmy rice rats. Okay. Very interested in that.
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Chapter 3: What is phage therapy and how does it work?
And the first patient in this cluster of cases went to a birthday party. They were there for 90 minutes. They had a fever. They had malaise. And they infected people there who then went on to infect more people. That was in 2018? That was 2018. So this is all reported in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2020.
And what these epidemiologists discovered was there seems to be a short time of transmission for the Andes hantavirus virus. The period in which you're infective. That's right, yes. Okay. But it takes a long time for symptoms to show. So back in 2018, some of these people that were infected at this birthday party didn't show symptoms for two to three weeks.
And so this makes contact tracing extremely difficult.
Chapter 4: What is the significance of Australia's elimination of trachoma?
So that's why people are saying that people who are on the cruise ship need to be monitored for another 45 days or so to make sure that they don't fall unwell during that time.
I think there's a lot of anxiety. We've had a lot of people come up to us today saying, will you be covering this on the health report?
They sure have.
Because I think it's reminiscent of COVID and the pandemic. And at this stage, the World Health Organisation are leading the public health response. But they've also said that the risk to the wider public remains low at this time and there's no cause for concern or travel restrictions. They have said that, the World Health Organisation.
Okay.
I think what my brain immediately went to, Belle, is how did this even get onto the cruise ship? Yeah. And local authorities in Argentina have suggested that it's because this couple went birdwatching in Argentina, have contracted it and then brought it onto the boat. And one of the couple has very tragically died.
Right.
But, you know, I think this is a really unique entity. We've got a rare virus in very close confines and there is a very aggressive public health response. So I think for, you know, this is a tragic situation for those on board. As you said, there's a long incubation period, but I think the risk to the wider public is low.
Okay. So I don't need to cancel my trip to Mexico later in the year?
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Chapter 5: What are the challenges of antibiotic resistance in healthcare?
Everyone's talking about it, Belle. And we've just heard that the federal government are going to permanently embed these Medicare urgent care clinics into the health system. And they've committed to investing $1.8 billion over five years, which is a lot of money. Mm-hmm.
And I think people will know these clinics because they're the free bulk billing walk-in clinics that you can see instead of an emergency department, ideally, for kind of low triage health problems. The question is, is there evidence that they actually work? And we are joined now by the Minister for Health, Mark Butler. Thank you for joining us.
My pleasure.
I guess the question is, though, Minister, you're investing a lot of money into these urgent care clinics and this is all before the final report is coming out on their evaluation on how effective they are. Are we jumping the gun a bit here?
I don't think we are. The interim evaluations have demonstrated, I think, beyond any question that this model is an important addition to an otherwise terrific healthcare system that we have here. From the time that I announced this model... a little over four years ago in the lead into the 2022 election. I've said this is in ways a missing piece of the jigsaw puzzle for Australia.
It's a very common model in most other countries we compare ourselves to, long established in New Zealand. Pretty prominent in the US, the UK, most European countries. So I think the interim evaluation demonstrates this is a really important addition to our healthcare system.
I think what ongoing evaluations will show is some ideas about how we can tweak the model rather than whether or not we should have it.
I'm going to declare my conflict, Mark, which is that I am a practising GP, so I am slightly conflicted here. But I think some people would argue that there is a real opportunity here to actually invest in primary care or general practice, which actually already delivers a lot of the care that urgent care clinics do. What's your response to that?
Yeah.
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