Category: Public Media

Source: Radio New Zealand

New Zealand is facing a shortage in neurologists, despite advances in the life-saving treatments available.

A new study from the University of Otago in Wellington shows neurologists will struggle to keep up with the increase in demand for the diagnosis and treatment of conditions such as multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer’s disease and stroke.

Professor Anna Ranta from the Faculty of Medicine’s Department of Medicine led the study, examining capacity, trends over time and future projections to assist with health sector planning. The findings have been published in the British specialist medical journal, BMJ Neurology Open.

Ranta said while the workforce had increased over the past 10 years, the number of neurologists per head of population in New Zealand ranked well below other high-income countries.

The study, supported by funding from the Australian and New Zealand Association of Neurologists, found there were 83 neurologists working in New Zealand across the public and private sectors in 2024.

But not all of them worked full time – there were actually 67.3 full-time equivalents, including 8.3 full-time equivalent specialist paediatric neurologists.

That was one per 74,000 people. For comparison, the study noted, Australia had one neurologist per 41,000 people.

Ranta said a recent Australian workforce model estimated that to achieve best practice management requirements, one neurologist per 28,000 people would be required.

“If current training, recruitment, retention and practice patterns persist, projections indicate there will be a gradual worsening in the New Zealand neurology workforce over time.”

She said the lack of resourcing meant only about one in five patients with chronic neurologic disease were regularly reviewed by a neurologist.

“We should expect about six times as many follow-up appointments as first specialist assessments,” she said. “However, Health NZ reports an overall ratio of 1:1 first assessments to follow ups.”

And not everyone who would benefit from seeing a neurologist was getting the opportunity to do so.

In May last year, RNZ reported a Palmerston North woman who rushed to the city’s hospital after suffering a seizure was surprised to find there was no neurologist on duty – instead, a general doctor took instructions from a specialist in Wellington.

The study noted New Zealand currently only had the capacity to train only four to five new neurologists a year, with neurology specialist training taking three years.

At the same time, the need for neurology services was increasing, as new and sometimes more complex treatments became available.

“Multiple sclerosis treatment options have become more complex, requiring more specialist input, and new Alzheimer’s treatments are on the horizon,” Ranta said.

“Rarer diseases, such as spinal muscular atrophy, now have treatment options, and there are many more treatments for neurogenetic diseases imminent.”

That also included reperfusion therapies for treating a stroke, which could enable doctors to clear blocked arteries and restore the blood flow to the brain quickly.

“There has also been an increase in tertiary hospitals routinely providing telemedicine or telephone expert decision making support to smaller hospitals and in the number of patients transferred for reperfusion therapy.”

Despite these advances, there had been minimal additional investment in the neurology workforce.

“New Zealand requires strong funding, recruitment and training initiatives if we want to be ready for the projected increase in neurological burden of disease now and over the next decade.”

Health New Zealand has been approached for comment.

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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand

Source: Radio New Zealand

Catastrophes like the recent sewage spill in Wellington will happen again due to a lack of skilled water operators, a water engineer says.

Millions of litres of untreated wastewater have been discharged daily into the south coast of Wellington since the Moa Point plant failed this month.

Ownership of the plant is set to change hands from the Wellington City Council to the new water entity, Tiaki Wai.

But water engineer, Iain Rabbits, who has been working in the industry for 35 years, told Nine to Noon wastewater failures, including the 2016 spill in Havelock North, come down to a lack of experienced workers and inadequate support for staff on the ground.

He said the industry’s capability issues have been known about for years.

Rabbits said he did not know the specifics about what went wrong at Moa Point but he had done many investigations into issues at water plants in the past and they usually all had the same issues.

“It usually comes down to lack of staff, knowledge, experience, no support for guys on the ground,” Rabbits said.

“Lack of investment and lack of transparency through to the governance level.”

The issues would continue until the issues of culpability and capacity was addressed, he said.

“I did a survey at the Water Industry Operations Group last year and about 20 percent of our operators are on call continuously, or every other week, which is just not sustainable. We just don’t have enough people.”

“That’s because we haven’t been training them, and when we do train them, we don’t train the sufficiently.”

Rabbits said the water industry differed greatly from the electrical industry in that an electrical apprentice goes through years of training with a supervisor, whereas in water, “we tend to give people a manual – if they’re lucky – and say ‘don’t kill anybody’ and off you go”.

“It’s like getting a plane full of passengers, sitting them in the pilot’s seat, saying ‘here’s the manual, you fly the plane’. It’s crazy.”

These days, treatment plants had much tighter standards and were highly technical, requiring careful monitoring, and have instrumentation and automation that need maintaining.

“But the operators need to understand what the automation is doing, otherwise when something goes wrong, they’ve got no idea how to fix it.”

Rabbits told Nine to Noon he was “absolutely surprised” by the Moa Point failure.

“To flood a whole plant with anything takes a really good effort to do that, I think.

“Whether that’s a failure of maintenance, a failure of operation or a failure of experience or no support for the operators, whatever it is, to get to that point is quite serious.”

Training operators was going to be a major way of solving issues found at treatment plants, he said.

As far as he was aware, there was no legal requirement for anyone operating a plant to have a qualification of any kind.

A water operator assessment was available, he said, but staff needed to learn from working alongside senior operators and those with a lot of experience.

Wellington Water chief executive Pat Dougherty earlier told RNZ there had been under-investment over a long period at the Moa Point plant.

“I worry that there may have been some early warning signs that there were troubles with the discharge and we missed those. But everything needs to be on the table,” he said.

He said there have been a couple of incidents over the last few months that he suspects may have been early indicators.

Wellington Water chairman Nick Leggett has since resigned from his position.

Leggett said leadership carried responsibility, and stepping aside would allow Wellington Water to focus on fixing the problems and restoring public trust.

An independent government review has also been announced and would examine the causes of the failure. Leggett said he would fully cooperate with that process.

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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand

Source: Radio New Zealand

The SPCA is calling for an overhaul of dog control laws and for the government to reinstate funding for the desexing of menacing and roaming dogs.

The agency said it had been campaigning for a review of the Dog Control Act 1996, for more than 10 years.

Mihiata Te Rore, 62, was killed by a pack of three dogs at a property in Northland’s Kaihu on Tuesday- the third fatal attack in the region in the last four years, and the fourth nationwide.

Kaipara District Council’s animal management said it had received four complaints about the dogs since November last year, and visited the property twice in February – though staff were unable to talk to the owner or uplift the dogs.

When asked if the government would consider reforming the Dog Control Act, Local Government Minister Simon Watts said in a statement: “I have sought advice on all the options available in addition to the work that is already being completed.

“To date my focus has been on non-legislative options that can assist councils more quickly, and that work will continue.”

Asked for specific examples of non-legislative options, the minister said it included improving the quality and consistency of national dog-related data.

Watts said officials were also working with the local government sector to refresh and improve dog control enforcement guidelines and updated guidelines were expected to be issued later this year.

SPCA senior science officer Alison Vaughan told Morning Report the Dog Control Act was “hopelessly out of date” and there needed to be a substantive, urgent, evidence-based review, and an overhaul.

Vaughan said there was a lack of consistency in how local governments responded to dog attacks, and that needed to change.

“What we really need right now is leadership from central government so we can get standardised national guidelines, so we can get more funding to address desexing of menacing and roaming dogs, because right now this population is continuing to grow.”

Asked about thoughts on minister Shane Jones’ comments on Morning Report that his father’s generation would shoot dangerous dogs, Vaughan said there needed to be solutions to address the underlying issues.

“We do know from overseas examples that indiscriminate culling of roaming dogs doesn’t find a sustainable solution, so it may reduce numbers temporarily, but if we don’t address the irresponsible breeding and roaming, we will see population quickly rebound.”

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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand

Source: Radio New Zealand

– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand

Source: Radio New Zealand

– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand

Source: Radio New Zealand

Explainer – Depending on your tolerance, it’s the iconic sound of a Kiwi summer or a drill buzzing into your ears.

The seasonal serenade of cicadas kicks off as the weather warms and typically peaks sometime in February – but how and why do these insects make such a loud noise?

Here’s a primer on how New Zealand’s annual cicada season works.

Why do they make so much noise, anyway?

It all boils down to, they want some love.

Cicadas emerge from the ground – typically from December to March or so – to spend the rest of their brief lives trying to mate. The males make their distinctive buzz as they’re desperately seeking some sweet, sweet cicada loving.

“I love it,” said Julia Kasper, Te Papa’s lead curator of invertebrates. “It’s beautiful, it’s the sound of summer and still very exotic.”

“That’s basically the noise of a wedding. In summer all the adults are emerging from nymphs that live in the soil.”

Cicadas actually spend most of their lives underground. The New Zealand varieties typically live as nymphs for two to three years before shedding their final shells and emerging as adults.

In some parts of the world, what are called periodical cicadas can spend as long as 17 years underground, such as in the eastern United States where trillions of them can burst forth in a single season.

“It’s the males that sing, calling for the females, trying to be the loudest, the coolest, the best and getting, you know, the prettiest girl, and the girls are moving towards the males,” Kasper said.

Of course, not everyone adores the cicada’s call.

“Some people love the sound,” said Professor Grant Searchfield, head of the department of audiology at the University of Auckland.

“(For them it’s) ‘the sound of summer’ so it’s not bothersome at all, but some people may find the sound annoying or are more sensitive to sound.”

A cicada’s song can hit between more than 80 decibels, studies have found.

That’s within the range of “dangerous” sounds as defined by the American Academy of Audiology, which lists power tools, concerts and sporting events as hitting the same benchmarks, where damage can be caused with repeated exposure.

Airplanes can hit more than 120db during takeoff, while gun shots can reach over 150db – well within the range of causing hearing damage.

How does such a small insect make such a huge sound?

These plucky insects come with a built-in amplifier, a special organ called a tymbal.

“It’s amazing and we still know so little about it,” Kasper said.

The “tymbal organ sits in their thorax and it’s basically a drum,” Kasper said. “You can see it from the outside, it’s almost like it looks a bit like a window in their side.”

Many insects make noise by rubbing body parts together, such as crickets, but in the cicada’s case, the tymbal itself contracts and expands, pulling a ribbed membrane back and forth so quickly it can sound to humans like a continuous sound.

“It’s so complex it’s unbelievable,” Kasper said, noting that studies that use video to slow the movement down reveal how intricate the cicada’s song is – and humans may not even be capable of hearing some of the sounds.

Our ears may not always discern it, but every species of cicada also has a different song.

How many cicadas are there in New Zealand? Are they unique to here?

Cicadas are found all around the world, but there are at least 42 distinct species in New Zealand. There’s even a species endemic to Norfolk Island. The most common is the Amphipsalta zelandica, or the chorus cicada.

There’s one species that lives high up in the mountains of the South Island which is the only alpine cicada in the world. It can even freeze and go dormant, Kasper said.

Can some years be louder than others?

How big each year’s cicada eruption is depends on many factors.

“Every year is kind of different,” Kasper said. “The rainfall and the dryness and the humidity. Cicadas need moisture and warmth.

“If it’s too dry they can’t get out of the soil to emerge, and if there’s too heavy rain they’re probably washed off and drowned. It needs to be the right mixture.”

That means every year peak cicada noise might be at a different time.

Are they the loudest insects in the world?

Certain cicadas sure are.

If you’re getting sick of hearing them out on the deck this February, take a moment to be happy you’re not living in the habitat of the African cicada, Brevisana brevis, which can hit 106.7 decibels and has been officially named the world’s loudest insect by Guinness World Records.

Can cicadas actually damage your hearing?

“Potentially, but unlikely in reality,” Searchfield said.

“If the cicadas were close enough to the ear, and you couldn’t get rid of them – they were there for hours – it’s possible. But a cicada that close would normally be flicked away.”

“It is unlikely but not impossible that cicadas could cause hearing loss,” he said, but generally the sound is more irritating to some than dangerous.

Still, try to avoid sticking a cicada directly into your ear this time of year, although that’s really pretty good advice any time.

I’m not a fan. Is there anything to do to make them be quieter?

“I never thought of that question because they’re so lovely,” Kasper said.

Still, “I guess you could make your garden very bird-attractive because birds feed on them,” she suggested.

Searchfield said people should avoid turning to earplugs, as they can make you more sensitive to the sound.

“Close the doors and windows, and if you have air conditioning, turn it up – there are sound conditioners, used to drown out noisy city sounds, that could be used,” he said. “I’d suggest trying to think of them as your friendly reminder that the sun’s out.”

But as they say, if you’re particularly bothered by the cicada serenade, all things must pass and the season will end by March or so as the last heartsick male cicadas give up the ghost.

“They only live for two weeks or so (once they come up), they’re only there to mate, and that’s why they sing,” Kasper said.

Until next year, that is, when the buzzy sound of summer will kick off again.

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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand

Source: Radio New Zealand

Seventy-eight people lost their lives to drowning in 2025, slightly more than the year before but below the 10-year average.

Water Safety NZ’s latest Drowning Prevention Report, released Thursday, said drowning remained “New Zealand’s leading recreational killer”. More than half of those who drowned were alone, it said – 55 percent.

“When you are by yourself and unexpectedly get into trouble in the water, the margin for survival disappears,” Water Safety chief executive Glen Scanlon said.

“Changing adult behaviour remains one of the biggest challenges in drowning prevention, particularly among adult males.”

In the past decade, about three-quarters of all drowning deaths where the person was by themselves were men.

Northland, Auckland, Waikato and Bay of Plenty accounted for 51 of the 78 deaths.

The total figure of 78 was four higher than 2024’s toll, but eight fewer than the 10-year average of 1.67 deaths per 100,000. In the 1980s it was as high as five per 100,000.

Water Safety NZ said this improvement was at risk, with ACC ending funding for water-safety training for children.

“Our long-term goal is to make sure at least 60 percent of all school-aged children have access to quality water safety programmes,” Scanlon said, wth Water Safety NZ investigating alternative funding for courses.

“About 150,000 children miss out now. Protecting our next generation of New Zealanders with water safety skills and knowledge is fundamental to preventing drowning.”

The report said while youth drowning rates were dropping, there were increases for older men and Asian New Zealanders.

“Māori and Pasifika communities continue to be over-represented in the statistics,” Water Safety NZ said.

About 12 lives a year would be saved, it said, if lifejackets were made mandatory on all watercrafts as a bill that would do that makes its way through Parliament.

“New Zealand’s drowning rate is improving, but preventable deaths remain unacceptably high,” Scanlon said.

“With legislation, education and behaviour change aligned, our country has a rare opportunity to significantly reduce future loss of life.”

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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand