I Had Not Realized This Has Become As Acute A Problem As It Clearly Is…

 

This appeared last week:

Calls for a national register to stem the tide of doctor suicides

EXCLUSIVE
By Natasha Robinson

Health Editor

3:21PM June 1, 2024

Leading doctors have called for the introduction of a national register of healthcare worker suicides amid indications that the true rate of doctors and nurses taking their own lives is much higher than statistics indicate.

Anti-suicide campaigner and cardiologist Geoffrey Toogood says the rate of clinicians dying amid unsustainable and growing pressures in health systems is shockingly high.

There are no official national statistics recorded on healthcare worker suicide. Peer-reviewed literature has assessed the rate of doctors’ suicide as being 34 per cent higher than the general population, based on coronial records. However, Dr Toogood believes the figure is higher.

“I have heard of 12 suicides just in the last six months, in different parts of the country, of different ages, and they are just the ones I have heard about it,” Dr Toogood said.

“You can’t put words into the feelings you have when you hear about it.”

Dr Toogood – who founded the charity CrazySocks4Docs to break down stigma and discrimination around mental health ­issues in medicine – said it was crucial to identify risk factors.

A national register could be linked to a service that could ­investigate the causes behind ­clinician suicide when families consent.

“How else are we going to work out the contributing factors?” Dr Toogood said.

“Suicidality is a very difficult subject, it can be very hard to know what has actually tipped that person over the edge at that time, but we really need to work out what is going on.”

The push for health system reform to protect doctors and nurses was given fresh impetus a week ago when Australian Medical ­Association president Steve Robson detailed his own suicide ­attempt 35 years ago and highlighted medicos’ tendency to be enormously self-critical and reluctant to seek help, coupled with sometimes dangerous working conditions amid medicine’s often “toxic culture”.

The article highlighted grave risks to doctors under investigation by the health regulator. The Australian Health Practitioners Regulation Agency’s chief executive Martin Fletcher responded this week, saying the issue was of the highest importance and staff were working to lessen the intense stigma currently associated with being the subject of a notification, as well as working with Professor Robson to further combat the issue.

“I think it’s incredibly important that we do everything we can to widen the gap between somebody thinking about harming themselves, and acting on that,” Dr Fletcher said.

“The stress that people feel they’re under in the health system is significant. Certainly we hear a lot of concerning stories about people feeling completely desperate. We really welcome a light being shone on this.

“We absolutely acknowledge our part in this.”

Ophthalmologists will join the call to better protect doctors’ mental health at a leaders’ form on Saturday ahead of Crazy­Socks4Docs day next week. The specialty has lost members of its ranks this year to suicide.

“Like all medical communities across the country, ours has not gone untouched, and we have ­experienced the loss of esteemed colleagues and friends to this ­silent pandemic,” said Australian Society of Ophthalmologists president Peter Sumich.

Townsville doctor Sarah Kleinman said the town had lost five doctors in the past two years. “Since I graduated I’ve just come to expect that one or two of my colleagues will die ever year and I’m getting tired of us accepting that that’s just the norm,” Dr Kleinman said.

“It’s time for us to stop having the old standard of ‘physician heal thyself’.”

Here is the link:

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/calls-for-a-national-register-to-stem-the-tide-of-doctor-suicides/news-story/50643a8db92d02264f691c008c43a72f

Doctor suicide is a very complex issue in part aggravated by public expectations of doctors as well as the access doctors have to the tools to carry out a suicidal impulse . Sadly medical training means you are equipped with the knowledge and tools on how to end it all….

The other aspect of this to me is the level of expectation many doctors work under with the risk that on occasion they will feel they have fallen short and act out accordingly.

Doctors are also, as a group, rather less inclined to seek help than others – noting that suicide is a cause of concern in most professions,

A complex and very sad issue!

David.

I Somehow Think The Chicken Has Flown The Coop On This!

This appeared last week:

E-cigarette use rising in NSW despite vapers saying they want to quit

June 2, 2024 — 5.00am

The number of people using vapes in NSW increased last year, but survey data suggests more than half are considering quitting in the next six months.

According to figures from the latest NSW Population Health Survey, published by the Ministry of Health on Friday, almost 19 per cent of people aged 16 to 24 identify as a current user of vapes, also known as e-cigarettes.

Self-reported vaping rates increased in every age group in the 2022-23 survey. However, among under-35s – who have the highest vaping rates – the increase in uptake was smaller than the previous year.

Federal and state governments are cracking down on vaping, amid concerns from health bodies that the devices have addicted a new generation to nicotine.

On January 1, the federal government banned importation of disposable vapes, commonly sold at convenience stores, regardless of whether they contained nicotine. Further import restrictions were introduced in March, seeking to limit vaping to solely a smoking cessation aid, prescribed by a doctor.

In the first quarter of 2024, NSW Health seized more than 124,000 illegal nicotine e-cigarettes from retailers.

The efficacy of these measures remains to be seen, but data from a second survey conducted by state health authorities, Cancer Institute NSW’s Smoking and Health Survey, suggests vapers are considering quitting their habit at the same rate as smokers.

Fifty-one per cent of vapers and 55 per cent of smokers were considering quitting in the next six months. One in five people who vaped said they had thought about quitting daily over the past two weeks.

The survey, conducted in mid-2023 and also published this week, interviewed 1200 adults from across the state, including smokers, vapers and those who did not smoke or vape.

It was the first time the survey, also conducted annually, had asked about vaping habits.

Cancer Institute NSW CEO Professor Tracey O’Brien said it was great to see that vapers were considering quitting at the same rate as smokers, as both could cause considerable health harms.

She said she was also particularly pleased to see more than 80 per cent of people aware of vapes agreed they were unsafe to use, up for 73 per cent in 2021.

“[It is] a sentiment we hope will continue to grow,” she said.

“There are ongoing efforts in NSW to educate the community about the harms of smoking and vaping and I applaud everyone working to prioritise their health and wellbeing.”

However, O’Brien said health authorities could not be complacent as vaping rates continued to increase, particularly among young people.

“Like cigarettes, vapes are also full of harmful chemicals that have been known to cause cancer and there is growing evidence that young people who vape are more likely to take up smoking, which can significantly increase their cancer risk,” she said.

“We are very concerned that a new generation of people will become addicted to smoking if vaping use continues to increase in young people, which is why it’s important that people avoid taking up vaping or seek help to quit.”

The Cancer Council NSW’s Generation Vape survey of teenagers aged 14 to 17 suggests a third have tried a vape, half of whom had never previously smoked a cigarette.

Last year, six young people presented to NSW emergency departments with symptoms including seizures, loss of consciousness and vomiting, after using vapes purchased on Snapchat. Department incident logs show state schools have dealt with several cases of students selling vapes.

A report on vaping published by the NSW Advocate for Young People in November found high school students wished nicotine vapes were harder to access, and wanted to receive help to quit without fear of punishment.

NSW Health Minister Ryan Park said he strongly supported the federal government’s vaping reforms.

“The overwhelming advice from medical experts is for a prescription model in which e-cigarettes can only be obtained for medical purposes,” he said.

“It’s encouraging to see that among young people who vape there is a strong desire to quit.”

Here is the link:

https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/e-cigarette-use-rising-in-nsw-despite-vapers-saying-they-want-to-quit-20240531-p5ji84.html

Given the potency, competitive cost  and wide distribution of vapes it is hard to believe that the cat has not managed to slip out of the bag on this one. There is just too much money to be made by the illegal sellers and importers of vapes to think they will just give up this lucrative little side-line!

I am prepared to bet that if we come back in five years vapes will be well more common than today.

Does anyone think I will lose money?

David.

AusHealthIT Poll Number 749 – Results – 02 June 2024.

 Here are the results of the poll.

Should The Federal Government Be Doing More To Prevent Prescription Drug Shortages Like The One We Are Experiencing At Present?

Yes                                                                             29 (97%)

No                                                                                  1 (3%)

I Have No Idea                                                              0 (0%)

Total No. Of Votes: 30

A very clear cut vote suggesting more needs to be done!

Any insights on the poll are welcome, as a comment, as usual!

A very good voting turnout. 

0 of 30 who answered the poll admitted to not being sure about the answer to the question!

Again, many, many thanks to all those who voted! 

David.

It Is Hard Not To Be Amazed At The Way Nvidia Is Taking Over The World!

This appeared last week:

Nvidia forecast shatters estimates as AI boom stays strong

Ian King

May 23, 2024 – 7.19am

San Francisco | Nvidia, the chipmaker at the centre of an artificial intelligence boom, gave another bullish sales forecast, showing that spending on AI computing remains strong.

Second-quarter revenue will be about $US28 billion ($42.3 billion), the company said. Analysts on average had predicted $US26.8 billion, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Results in the fiscal first quarter, which ran through April, also beat projections.

“The next industrial revolution has begun,” chief executive Jensen Huang said in a statement, echoing one of his favourite themes. “AI will bring significant productivity gains to nearly every industry and help companies be more cost- and energy-efficient, while expanding revenue opportunities.”

The upbeat outlook reinforces Nvidia’s status as the biggest beneficiary of AI spending. The company’s so-called AI accelerators – chips that help data centres develop chatbots and other cutting-edge tools – have become a hot commodity in the past two years, sending its sales soaring. Nvidia’s market valuation has skyrocketed as well, topping $US2.3 trillion.

The shares rose about 4 per cent in extended trading on Wednesday (Thursday AEST). They had already gained 92 per cent this year through the close, fuelled by investor hopes that the company would continue to shatter expectations.

The Santa Clara, California-based company also announced a 10-for-1 stock split and boosted its quarterly dividend by 150 per cent to 10 US¢ a share.

“We are poised for our next wave of growth,” Huang said.

Nvidia, co-founded by Huang in 1993, started as a provider of graphics cards for computer gamers. His recognition that the company’s chips were well-suited to developing artificial intelligence software helped open a new market – and gave him a jump on competitors.

The release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in 2022 then sparked a race between major technology companies to build their own AI infrastructure. The scramble made Nvidia’s H100 accelerators a must-have product. They sell for tens of thousands of dollars per chip and are often in scarce supply.

But much of this new revenue has come from a small handful of customers. A group of four companies – Amazon, Meta Platforms, Microsoft and Alphabet’s Google – are Nvidia’s largest buyers and account for about 40 per cent of sales.

Huang, 61, is trying to spread his bets by producing complete computers, software and services – aimed at helping more corporations and government agencies deploy their own AI systems.

In the fiscal first quarter, Nvidia’s revenue more than tripled to $US26 billion. Excluding certain items, profit was $US6.12 a share. Analysts had predicted sales of about $US24.7 billion and earnings of $US5.65 a share.

Nvidia’s data-centre division – now by far its largest source of sales – generated $US22.6 billion of revenue. Gaming chips provided $US2.6 billion. Analysts had given targets of $US21 billion for the data-centre unit and $US2.6 billion for gaming.

Nvidia emphasised on Wednesday that it wants to sell its technology to a wider market – moving beyond the giant cloud-computing providers known as hyperscalers. Huang said that AI is moving to consumer internet companies, carmakers and healthcare customers. Countries also are developing their own systems – a trend referred to as sovereign AI.

These opportunities are “creating multiple multibillion-dollar vertical markets” beyond cloud service providers, he said.

Still, the hyperscalers remained a critical growth driver for Nvidia last quarter. They generated about 45 per cent of the company’s data-centre revenue. That suggests Nvidia is in the early stages of diversifying the business.

The company’s new chip platform, called Blackwell, is now in full production, Huang said. And it lays the groundwork for generative AI that can handle trillions of parameters. “We are poised for our next wave of growth,” he said.

Here is the link:

https://www.afr.com/technology/nvidia-forecast-shatters-estimates-as-ai-boom-stays-strong-20240523-p5jfwj

The only question is to ask “how long can it last”?

History is littered with huge successes that somehow always seem to eventually slip down the slippery pole! (Think Ford, Kodak, IBM and so it goes!)

We can be confident history will repeat in time I am certain!

David.

The Pace Of The Progress Of, And Investment In, AI And Chatbots Is Becoming Dizzying!

This appeared a day or so ago:

American chatbots: oversexed, overhyped and over here

In just two weeks, Microsoft, OpenAI and Google have each previewed AI chatbots that critics say are as dangerous as they are impressive.

John Davidson Columnist

May 24, 2024 – 1.16pm

On Monday morning in Seattle, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella introduced the world to a new type of PC that will help Windows computers cash in on the artificial intelligence craze and deal with the threat posed by Apple – both at the same time.

The new laptop computers, known as Copilot+ PCs, feature a complete overhaul of silicon chips typically found in a Windows laptop, replacing Intel-style processors with ones more like those in mobile phones, so the PCs can finally match the battery life of the world’s biggest selling laptop, Apple’s MacBook Air.

And, as part of that silicon upgrade, the Copilot+ PCs will come packed with high-powered AI processors and more than 40 different AI models, Microsoft officials said, to help Windows users with tasks ranging from making swords and escaping zombies in the game Minecraft to changing the settings on the PC.

Showcasing what these new on-device AI models would be capable of, Microsoft’s chief marketing officer Yusuf Mehdi revealed a new feature called Recall, that Copilot+ PC owners will be able to use to find anything they have ever seen or done on the computer, “as if you have photographic memory”.

The software frequently takes “snapshot” images of what’s on the user’s screen, saves them on the computer’s storage drive, and allows the AI to sift through them using image and text recognition whenever a user goes looking for something.

In a demo, Microsoft showed Recall calling up a PowerPoint slide with purple handwriting on it, when a Windows user asked the Copilot chatbot to find a chart with purple writing she remembered seeing. The software sifted through Discord chats to find images with purple dresses. It let the user scroll through the history of everything that had been on her computer screen, going back a week, to find something shared in a video call.

Mehdi promised the snapshots would never leave the owner’s Copilot+ PC to be processed in the cloud – the new “neural processing” chips in the computers would do all the image recognition and natural language processing themselves – and that no AI model would ever be trained on what it saw on users’ screens. All the same, by week’s end, Recall was getting heavily criticised for its potential privacy and security risks.

Privacy advocates worried that abusive partners who know their partner’s password could log on and scroll through snapshots of every web page viewed on the PC.

Workplace security experts said they were concerned the snapshots could reveal passwords if they happened to be taken at the same time a user was typing them in and the password entry software didn’t follow standard on-screen cloaking measures (which show passwords as a series of asterisks).

Likewise, confidential documents could get hoovered up into Recall’s database, just by calling them up onto Copilot+ PC screen, security experts said. The UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office has asked Microsoft to explain itself.

But Microsoft isn’t the only major technology company that’s just shown off new AI capabilities that critics warn come with inherent risks.

A week before the Copilot+ PC launch, Microsoft’s AI partner OpenAI revealed a new “multi-modal” ChatGPT chatbot, based on a new AI model known as GPT-4o that’s capable of using not just text for its inputs and outputs, but also audio and video.

“The new voice [and video] mode is the best computer interface I’ve ever used. It feels like AI from the movies, and it’s still a bit surprising to me that it’s real,” said OpenAI cofounder and CEO, Sam Altman, at the time.

The new chatbot also surprised critics, who complained it was overly flirtatious in the OpenAI demo. And it surprised the actor Scarlett Johansson, who said she had been in talks to allow OpenAI to use her voice for the chatbot, but had never agreed to it, and was “shocked, angered and in disbelief” that the chatbot had “a voice that sounded so eerily similar to mine”.

(The new chatbot model, minus Johansson’s voice, will be one of the 40-plus new AI models appearing in Copilot+ PCs, and it’s the one Windows users can share their screen with to help escape the zombies, Microsoft said.)

A day after GPT-4o was launched, Google showed off a new multi-modal chatbot of its own, for now named Project Astra, which can take in vastly more information than OpenAI’s chatbot can, and reason over it to answer questions with up-to-the-minute information.

Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai said the company’s goal was to allow its chatbots to absorb “infinite context” whenever they’re answering a question, overcoming a limitation in current chatbots that means they often reply with months-old information that was gathered when the AI model was trained, rather than when the question was asked.

The new stuff is “impressive”, says Professor Anton Van Den Hengel, a former director of applied science at Amazon and the director of The University of Adelaide’s Centre for Augmented Reasoning.

A chatbot with infinite context could, for instance, help a cardiologist diagnose heart disease using “the absolute latest cardiology research”, he says.

Meanwhile, the move to multi-modal chatbots will help popularise AI in ways that were not possible with the text-only chatbots. Enabling voice and video chats is going to lead to an explosion of new user-generated AI applications that will match the explosion of user-generated video that occurred when YouTube appeared, he predicts.

But there’s a problem.

Chatbots from American companies such as Google, OpenAI, Microsoft and Meta are typically trained on 100 times more American data than they are on Australian data, he says, and using them will tend to homogenise Australian culture around American values.

The Australian public service is now looking into using Microsoft’s Copilot chatbot as part of its workflow, and emails, documents and even government policies written with Copilot “will embody the American training data (Copilot) has been built from” more than it embodies Australian data, Professor Van Den Hengel warns.

“We have to decide collectively whether we’re going to have our own cultural and digital identity, or whether we’re just going to be homogenised. At the moment, it’s pretty clear which way we’re headed,” he says.

Dr Dana McKay, acting dean of Interaction Technology and Information at RMIT, has similar mixed feelings about the new generation of chatbots.

Adding voice and video prompts and replies to the chatbots will make them “incredibly inclusive”, she says, and will open up not just AI but computing as a whole to a range of people who now find computers inaccessible.

Multi-modality is great news for people with low literacy or visual impairment or even dyslexia, she says, and could even lead to new forms of creativity as people figure out how to combine text prompts with visual ones.

But the extremely high cost of training such chatbots is a problem, she says. Not only will it tend to force American values on the world because it’s generally only US-based big tech that can afford to train them, it also risks replacing the old digital divide, accessibility, with a new one: affordability.

There’s a real possibility that people who can afford to access the best chatbots will get to pay with money, while people who can’t afford it will have to pay for it by sacrificing their privacy and turning their personal information into training data.

“This could actually increase the divide between the haves and the have-nots,” Dr McKay says.

Here is the link:

https://www.afr.com/technology/american-chatbots-oversexed-overhyped-and-over-here-20240524-p5jg9t

Sounds to me like we are seeing a new version of American Cultural Imperialism and that we are going to have to work a whole lot harder to preserve of Australian distinctiveness and cultural identity against this US onslaught It was forever thus but seems to be accelerating.

To date I am not aware of having been faced with a chatbot as an interlocutor but I am sure the time is coming and fast.

What experiences – good and bad – have you had, so far, with the technology?

David.

This Attack Just Seems To Get More And More Ugly The More We Learn!

This appeared late last week.

MediSecure patient data up for sale on Russian hacking forum

May 24, 2024 — 5.38pm

A hacker claiming to have Australian patient data from the MediSecure data breach has put the information up for sale on a Russian hacking forum for $US50,000 ($75,735)

MediSecure, which provides electronic prescription services to healthcare professionals, last week announced it had been the victim of a large-scale ransomware attack which the Australian Federal Police are now investigating.

A week later, a member of a Russian hacking forum has claimed to be in possession of 6.5 terabytes of data, with personal information, including insurance numbers, names and addresses of thousands of Australians, up for grabs.

“For sale: Database of an Australian medical prescriptions company MedSecure [sic],” the post reads.

“Includes information on citizens, insurance numbers, phone numbers, addresses, full names, supplier information, contractor information, emails, user+passwords for MedSecure website, prescription information (who was prescribed what), IP addresses of visitors to the site and etc.”

The forum member said they would only sell the information to one buyer.

Australia’s national cybersecurity coordinator, Lieutenant General Michelle McGuinness, is working with federal government agencies and states and territories to respond to the incident. The Australian information commissioner is also investigating whether MediSecure complied with federal laws requiring companies to notify authorities when they become aware of a data breach.

Cybersecurity analyst group CyberKnow said their research indicated the forum post was likely legitimate.

“The threat actor created their account on May 15, 2024, and may well have created it for the sole purpose of attempting to sell the stolen MediSecure data. They have not posted anything else to the forum,” CyberKnow said in a statement.

“A good takeaway for Australians from this incident is to appreciate that the cyberthreat landscape is diverse, and groups and actors can impact businesses regardless of their capability, organisation or structure.”

MediSecure was contacted for comment, as was the office of federal Cybersecurity Minister Clare O’Neil.

“The cybersecurity incident relates to data held by MediSecure’s systems up until November 2023,” the company said last Saturday.
‘Continual challenges’

Earlier this week, Australian Privacy Commissioner Carly Kind said the MediSecure hack had again highlighted deficiencies in how organisations collect and protect customer data.

“While this situation is ongoing, any major data breach reinforces the reality of today’s world: there are increasing cyberthreats and continual challenges to digital defences,” she said on Tuesday.

“Protecting individuals’ personal information should be a top priority for all organisations, which should continually review and improve their practices and take control where they can. Only collect information that is necessary for you to carry out your business. Know what information you hold. And if that information is not necessary to your business, delete it.

“The coverage of Australia’s privacy legislation lags behind the advancing skills of malicious cyberactors. Reform of the Privacy Act is urgent to ensure all Australian organisations build the highest levels of security into their operations”, Kind said.

Here is the link:

https://www.smh.com.au/technology/medisecure-patient-data-up-for-sale-on-russian-hacking-forum-20240524-p5jggb.html

This hack / attack really seems to have gone to the next level. I really wonder what the Government / Authorities can actually do to contain the damage – especially when the data is held in a foreign and hardly friendly jurisdiction, by an actor seeking profit.

It will be interesting to see what is done, if anything, and how effective the powers that be can be!

We wait and watch…

David.

Is This All Just AI Hype Or Should We Really Be Worried?

This appeared a few days ago.

Artificial intelligence (AI)

Big tech has distracted world from existential risk of AI, says top scientist

Alex Hern UK technology editor

Sat 25 May 2024 15.00 AEST

Big tech has succeeded in distracting the world from the existential risk to humanity that artificial intelligence still poses, a leading scientist and AI campaigner has warned.

Speaking with the Guardian at the AI Summit in Seoul, South Korea, Max Tegmark said the shift in focus from the extinction of life to a broader conception of safety of artificial intelligence risked an unacceptable delay in imposing strict regulation on the creators of the most powerful programs.

“In 1942, Enrico Fermi built the first ever reactor with a self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction under a Chicago football field,” Tegmark, who trained as a physicist, said. “When the top physicists at the time found out about that, they really freaked out, because they realised that the single biggest hurdle remaining to building a nuclear bomb had just been overcome. They realised that it was just a few years away – and in fact, it was three years, with the Trinity test in 1945.

“AI models that can pass the Turing test [where someone cannot tell in conversation that they are not speaking to another human] are the same warning for the kind of AI that you can lose control over. That’s why you get people like Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio – and even a lot of tech CEOs, at least in private – freaking out now.”

Tegmark’s non-profit Future of Life Institute led the call last year for a six-month “pause” in advanced AI research on the back of those fears. The launch of OpenAI’s GPT-4 model in March that year was the canary in the coalmine, he said, and proved that the risk was unacceptably close.

Despite thousands of signatures, from experts including Hinton and Bengio, two of the three “godfathers” of AI who pioneered the approach to machine learning that underpins the field today, no pause was agreed.

Instead, the AI summits, of which Seoul is the second following Bletchley Park in the UK last November, have led the fledgling field of AI regulation. “We wanted that letter to legitimise the conversation, and are quite delighted with how that worked out. Once people saw that people like Bengio are worried, they thought, ‘It’s OK for me to worry about it.’ Even the guy in my gas station said to me, after that, that he’s worried about AI replacing us.

“But now, we need to move from just talking the talk to walking the walk.”

Since the initial announcement of what became the Bletchley Park summit, however, the focus of international AI regulation has shifted away from existential risk.

In Seoul, only one of the three “high-level” groups addressed safety directly, and it looked at the “full spectrum” of risks, “from privacy breaches to job market disruptions and potential catastrophic outcomes”. Tegmark argues that the playing-down of the most severe risks is not healthy – and is not accidental.

“That’s exactly what I predicted would happen from industry lobbying,” he said. “In 1955, the first journal articles came out saying smoking causes lung cancer, and you’d think that pretty quickly there would be some regulation. But no, it took until 1980, because there was this huge push to by industry to distract. I feel that’s what’s happening now.

“Of course AI causes current harms as well: there’s bias, it harms marginalised groups … But like [the UK science and technology secretary] Michelle Donelan herself said, it’s not like we can’t deal with both. It’s a bit like saying, ‘Let’s not pay any attention to climate change because there’s going to be a hurricane this year, so we should just focus on the hurricane.’”

Tegmark’s critics have made the same argument of his own claims: that the industry wants everyone to speak about hypothetical risks in the future to distract from concrete harms in the present, an accusation that he dismisses. “Even if you think about it on its own merits, it’s pretty galaxy-brained: it would be quite 4D chess for someone like [OpenAI boss] Sam Altman, in order to avoid regulation, to tell everybody that it could be lights out for everyone and then try to persuade people like us to sound the alarm.”

Instead, he argues, the muted support from some tech leaders is because “I think they all feel that they’re stuck in an impossible situation where, even if they want to stop, they can’t. If a CEO of a tobacco company wakes up one morning and feels what they’re doing is not right, what’s going to happen? They’re going to replace the CEO. So the only way you can get safety first is if the government puts in place safety standards for everybody.”

Here is the link:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/may/25/big-tech-existential-risk-ai-scientist-max-tegmark-regulations?utm_term=66518da53f09b710595e9f334fb93a19

I have to say I am not sure that we need to be as worried as the author about our collective future(s), bur, on the other hand, there are surely some real risks out there! What is hard for me is to work out is, being aware of the oncoming locomotive, knowing exactly what to do to mitigate the outcome(s)

The future is uncertain, as it is always, but we really just need to push forward and hope for the best, despite the current complexities that beset us….

That said I am hopeful we will ‘muddle through’!

There is a very long history of dire threats resolving themselves over time. I suspect this will just be another…. I hope so!

What do you think?

David.

It Would Be Interesting To Know Just How Dependent Australia Is On Overseas Supply For Critical Medicines.

This appeared today:

‘Havoc’ for patients as hundreds of medicines in short supply

By Mary Ward and Amber Schultz

May 26, 2024 — 5.01am

Hundreds of key medicines are in short supply in Australia as experts warn the problem is putting lives and livelihoods at risk.

The Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) lists more than 420 medicines as being in shortage, 20 of which are at critical levels, including blood thinners, antibiotics and hormone replacement therapy medication.

Royal College of Australian General Practitioners president Dr Nicole Higgins said Australia had faced an ongoing medicine shortage since COVID-19 but the problem was getting worse.

“Some critical medication shortages impact people’s immediate health, and others impact their ability to function,” she said.

As an example, Higgins said the shortage of five-milligram doses of blood thinners meant people had to use smaller tablets to get the same dose, and this could increase bleeding, side effects and complications.

“What shortages mean for patients is that at best, it’s inconvenient, at worst, it can be very dangerous,” she said.

Federal Health Minister Mark Butler referred questions to the TGA, which said managing medicine supply was a priority for the Australian government.

“The number of shortages appearing on the TGA’s Medicine Shortage Reports Database has been relatively consistent since the introduction of mandatory reporting in January 2019. The TGA receives an average of 120 notifications of new medicine shortages every month, with 12 of these having a critical impact rating,” a spokesperson said.

“Medicine shortages can arise for many reasons, ranging from shortages of raw materials, natural disasters, logistical difficulties, batches of the medicine not meeting applicable specifications, or increased demand.”

Pharmaceutical Society of Australia spokesperson and Melbourne pharmacist Peter Guthrey said the shortages were challenging for pharmacists, who must send women back to their GP for scripts for alternative hormone treatments in stock at their pharmacy, resulting in additional gap fees and time.

“A number of women have expressed frustration that there hasn’t been a resolution to this issue by now, and that they believe a similar issue affected medicines predominantly for men wouldn’t be allowed to go on unresolved for so long,” he said.

David Heffernan, president of the NSW branch of the Pharmacy Guild, said shortages resulted from supply chain issues that had been evident even before the pandemic.

“When one brand of drug goes out, that means there’s double the use of the other,” he said.

Australian Medical Association vice president Dr Danielle McMullen said the shortages had been “frustrating”, obliging doctors and patients to devise workarounds. Altered management strategies then had an impact on the time and energy that patients spend running around different pharmacies.

From July 2023, the Medicines Supply Security Guarantee was introduced, requiring manufacturers to hold a minimum of four or six months’ stock in Australia for key medicines. McMullen said there needed to be greater enforcement of these stockpiling requirements.

Among the 423 medicines currently in shortage in Australia are several treatments used by menopausal women to manage symptoms such as hot flushes and night sweats.

Menopause hormonal therapy (MHT) – also known as hormone replacement therapy (HRT) – refers to a range of patches, creams, tablets and devices to replace oestrogen, which declines with age.

The treatments, particularly in patch form, have soared in popularity in the past five years after a 2019 Lancet paper largely dispelled previous concerns about breast cancer risk.

Of the nine brands of HRT patches available in Australia, eight are in short supply and the other is not available on the Pharmaceutical Benefit Scheme (PBS).

Over several years, there have been occasional shortages of the patches. However, Vicki Doherty, executive director of the Australian Menopause Society, said the current shortage was the longest run to date in Australia.

She said it was particularly frustrating that the predicted dates for a return to normal supply – provided by the medicines’ sponsors to the TGA – had been repeatedly pushed back. For most MHT brands, return to normal supply is estimated between mid-June and the start of August.

“I have heard stories of women going to multiple pharmacies, getting very frustrated and upset,” Doherty said. “Our member doctors are telling us they’re spending their whole lunchbreak trying to find suppliers for their patients.”

Doherty believes the MHT shortages are the result of a “perfect storm”, the combination of increased demand thanks to studies showing the efficacy of MHT, the discontinuation of popular brands including Climara and the supply chain and market issues.

“It can create havoc for women, this really does impact their quality of life,” she said.

The TGA was unable to provide data on MHT prescriptions made in Australia.

Submissions to a coming federal senate inquiry on menopause from several healthcare organisations, published last month, raised concerns about the availability and cost of MHT.

The submissions supported MHT as an effective treatment for menopause symptoms. Most menopause treatments developed in the past 15 years are not subsidised in Australia and cost women $50 a month, while treatments listed on the PBS cost about $25 a month.

Here is the link:

https://www.smh.com.au/healthcare/havoc-for-patients-as-hundreds-of-medicines-in-short-supply-20240523-p5jfzt.html

I know I will be seen as a ‘old male white dude’ for wondering but I found it rather odd that with lots of different categories of seriously life-saving drugs apparently in short supply the second half of the article was devoted to hormonal medications which are some-what more optional – and certainly not life-saving in the short term!

Be that as it may be – we, as a nation, need to work to break our dependence on importation of major critical medicines – by fostering a more robust local pharmaceutical manufacturing industry – and making sure we can manufacture the basic WHO list of essential medications on shore – for national security reasons at least.

The WHO list is found here:

https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/WHO-MHP-HPS-EML-2023.02

WHO Model List of Essential Medicines - 23rd list, 2023

26 July 2023 – 67 Pages

Download (904.9 kB)

Overview

Essential medicines are those that satisfy the priority health care needs of a population. They are selected with due regard to disease prevalence and public health relevance, evidence of efficacy and safety and comparative cost-effectiveness. They are intended to be available in functioning health systems at all times, in appropriate dosage forms, of assured quality and at prices individuals and health systems can afford.

The WHO Model List of Essential Medicines and Model List of Essential Medicines for Children are updated and published every two years, intended as a guide for countries or regional authorities to adopt or adapt in accordance with local priorities and treatment guidelines for the development and updating of national essential medicines lists. Selection of a limited number of essential medicines as essential, taking into consideration national disease burden and clinical need can lead to improved access through streamlined procurement and distribution of quality-assured medicines, support more rational or appropriate prescribing and use and lower costs for both health care systems and for patients.

---- End Quote

It would be fascinating to know how much of this list can presently be make locally – does anyone know? I reckon we should nationally aim for self-sufficiency in the 'essentials list;!

Any input welcome!

David.

AusHealthIT Poll Number 748 – Results – 26 May, 2024.

Here are the results of the poll.

Given That MediSecure Seems To Have Largely Ceased e-Prescription Services Provision Does The Reported Data Breach Matter All That Much?

Yes, It Still Matters                                                      32 (97%)

No                                                                                  1 (3%)

I Have No Idea                                                              0 (0%)

Total No. Of Votes: 33

A very clear cut vote suggesting all data breaches are a serious worry!

Any insights on the poll are welcome, as a comment, as usual!

A very good voting turnout. 

0 of 33 who answered the poll admitted to not being sure about the answer to the question!

Again, many, many thanks to all those who voted! 

David.